As many of you — perhaps most of you — know I was at ConFinement this weekend. We drove like insane people, a long, long time, without stopping, mostly because none of us could afford to take the time off for driving for two days.

I almost forgot to take books. With all the death and issues I completely forgot to get new copies of the newly issued books, or new-cover versions of the old things, including new hard covers.

So at the last minute I remembered and filled a box with far more books than I thought would ever sell, considering how old they are. I did sweeten the pot by putting them at half price, since they are old.

Anyway I didn’t have arrangements for a booth minder — in future, though not Liberty con this year, because since we aren’t absolutely sure our other stuff will allow us to go, so I didn’t book a table or booth. Next year, younger DIL (well, she’ll be by then) will figure it out — so I just put books on a table on the honor system, and had people come find me to pay. Yeah, real classy. Anyway, I only brought back four books everything else –50 or so — sold.

Other than that, it was a small con, but it was very friendly.

I stayed out very late talking to people. I met Devon Eriksen, who says he’s not a cat, and I need to read his book. I mean… shakes head… cats writing books.

Anyway, from the blog, and I will miss people, I saw Ben Olsen and his wife, Dorothy Dimock and her husband, the one who wrote the great baking book I advertised here a little while ago. I also met Turquoise Thyme, who is so sweet in person and had fun talking shop with my husband. And I met Nancy Edwards from Facebook. I thought I remembered her being older than myself, but I swear she’s forty and just faking it. And I got to see David Bock and his lovely wife again and–

Anyway, what is there to tell? I ate junk food. I stayed up too late discussing things like whether there were ancient civilizations or at least if we could lie and say it did in a convincing way so books can be written. And what books were fun, and–

I couldn’t make it to the Dave Drake Memorial Shoot, because I was doing a reading. Bad timing on my part, but at any rate, I need to get better at shooting before the next con, right? I just need to make range time. It’s been WEIRD.

It was great. That’s the short and long of it. Small, but intense, and full of highly engaged fans. I recommend it.

In fact, as difficult as leaving the house or being around more than 2 people at once, I am going to try to make it to Confinement next year again. Which is the highest compliment I can give any con.

I mean, I love Liberty con, but we really need a wide scattering of new cons, don’t we?

The good side of all this, is that the persistent depression from what this year has been so far seems to be gone.

The bad side is that I’m still exhausted, so this report is the least coherent thing I’ve ever written. Probably.

But…. well, I had fun. Would you consider coming out and hanging out next year? Even if you have to send me to bed at 2 am, because none of you are really up to carrying me to bed. It would take a carrying party and who wants to do that?

I don’t know if MadMike has scheduled next year’s yet, but you can ask him. I’d love to see more of you.

Anyway, we can hang out and talk and have totally unhealthy snacks (No, the con had very good food, like chill and sandwich makings. I just have a fatal attraction to unnaturally yellow cheese puffs, okay?) and talk and–

Just plan on it. It will be fun.

*Note that this post is a re-run of a post first published in 12/8/2016. But it fits in well with our run of recent posts, and I thought it bore repeating*- SAH

Flavors of History – Alma Boykin

In the beginning there was vanilla, and it was . . .

OK, correction. In the beginning there was olive oil on flat bread with goat cheese, better known as Herodotus. He really does deserve the title of the Father of History, in the sense that he did research, interviewed people who had traveled, and made clear what he knew to be fact, what he had been told was fact, and what he suspected was conjecture. As far as Western history goes, he is the first general historian, and we might say the first social historian, since he wrote about unusual people way over there and what they did. He could also count as an anthropologist, back before the two sides parted company. In China, I’d count Sima Chin as the first historian who was not simply compiling king lists or writing on oracle bones. He is a political historian and intellectual historian, writing about monarchs and the good and bad things they did and if they accorded with his preferred philosophy. No, he wasn’t “objective” but back then historians weren’t supposed to be.

The next major Western historian was Thucydides, a military and political historian. In fact, political and military history dominated the field for quite a while, if you focus outside the Christian Church. People who could write tended to be churchmen and/or affiliated with royal or princely courts. The most important things going on involved ruling, challenges to ruling, inheritance, and how good the patron was. As a result, we tend to find pious descriptions of saintly monarchs (Alfred the Great) interspersed with descriptions of battles and marriages and offspring, or accounts of how horrible the previous monarch was and how G-d, in His mercy and grace, allowed the current claimant to the throne to overcome the bad monarch and replace him. Buried within the accounts, we find nuggets of what moderns consider history.

During the early middle ages (say, 1100s – 1300s or so) we find a lot more national histories written. These are descriptions of the long history of the Bohemians, or Magyars, or Britons (although the English and Welsh started early with Gerald of Wales and the Venerable Bede tracing things back to the Trojan War). The goal was to show how long a nation had been in the land, and how noble and dignified their ancestry was, thus locking in their claims to territory and respect from other, less worthy peoples and rulers. This is when the Magyars staked their claim to Pannonia based on descent from wandering ancestors related to the Huns and farther back, to the sons of a princess and an eagle. The Bohemians didn’t go quite that far, settling on a princess in the 600s or so (pre-Magyar and German) and a plowman. The Kieven Primary Chronicle dates to this period, skipping the mythology for the most part.

Until the 19^th Century history focused on what we call today political and military history, with some diplomatic history wrapped in, and historical biography. When people grumble about “history is just dead kings and battles” they are thinking of this sort of writing. But the people writing histories were not interested in “objective” history. They were recording events in order to support a certain side, or to justify certain actions, or to explain why their side won (or lost). And the most important things to the literate people who were not businessmen and women, or clergy, were politics and wars. Politics and wars shaped everything in the world of the nobility and upper classes, international trade and diplomacy, and even some religious matters, so that’s what you wrote about. And that’s what interested the people who had enough extra money to hire scribes to write family histories and accounts of events. A few individuals wrote diaries and detailed accounts of events that they participated in, like Samuel Pepys (most famously), a latter-day version of the old monastic chronicles, but they were not writing history per se and did not claim to be.

Then along came the professional historians, first Gibbon, and then most importantly Leopold Von Ranke, who ordered his students to go into the archives and government documents and write down things as they really happened, no favoritism or glossing. And political history, diplomatic history, and nibbles of economic history appeared in the form of trade histories. The American diplomat George Perkins Marsh wrote the first environmental history in the 1890s, with the book Man and Nature where he compared the descriptions of the Classical world with what he observed as an ambassador, and described what he thought had happened and why. After WWI people began turning away from the older kinds of history, looking below the level of monarchs and ministries, to see what had been going on in departments, counties, parishes, and villages. The French in particular started combing through local records, digging up anything they could find and trying to make sense of it. Called the Annals’ School because of the title of the journal where the first of their work appeared, the French also began looking at the longue durre, the extended stretch of history of places and peoples.

After WWII, with the surge of new people coming into the universities and more access to archives and new tools to analyze things, history either exploded or shattered, depending on how you view things. Political and military history still led the field in terms of respect and number of practitioners, as the box on my office floor containing the full paperback set of Samuel Elliott Morrison’s history of the US Navy in WWII can attest. Governments still funded historical writing. But economic history emerged as an official specialty, and environmental history, women’s history, Marxist and labour history that looked back at the working classes, and peasants and slaves and serfs to tell their story (E. P. Thompson most famously), religious history that didn’t focus on the development of theology or advance a pro-denominational thesis, corporate history and industrial histories, much better histories of non-Western places with South Asia, China, Japan, and so on developing their own standards and patterns and conventions, geographically focused histories such as American West or Borderlands, and new takes on older writings. Medicine developed its own history that lapped into social and political history. Military history shifted from how battles were won and lost into the daily experiences of soldiers, and of civilians around the soldiers, to histories of logistics and supply, how warfare affected society and shaped culture (see Victor Davis Hanson’s early work), and war-on-the ground like John Keegan’s Face of Battle.

Historians also began nibbling, then gulping, the tools of other fields. We crunched numbers and developed Cliometrics, history based on statistical analysis that could be amazingly useful when it worked and miserable to read when it didn’t. We pestered the archaeologists and the Dark Ages turned into Late Antiquity as more and more continuity appeared in the historical and archaeological record, plagues, invasions, and the climatic downturn in the 500s-600s notwithstanding. We harassed geographers (OK, we’ve been doing that since Herodotus), plagued engineers, annoyed ecologists and foresters and naturalists, irked physicists and chemists, “borrowed” from archaeology and linguistics and hydrology and anyone else who forgot to lock up their journals and research notes, and came up with some wonderful results. And some not so wonderful results.

Today, late 2016, you can find a historian looking under pretty much any rock you mention. Music historians, art historians, historians of ideas, environmental historians, historians of sex (not as exciting as it sounds), historians who write about people and animals, historians of water, or fire (Stephen Pyne and yes, that is his real name. He was predestined to go into fire science and pyrohistory). Is this good or bad? It can lead to some pretty dead-end research, because the PhD requirement is to either find something new, or refute something old. Classics and political history especially have grown some pretty esoteric-to-questionable branches, in my opinion. But it also means that anything is fair game for anyone, and you can find works about all sorts of fascinating and odd and intriguing and “that is so cool!” things and peoples and places.

Of course, I’m the poster bad example for someone who could not focus in graduate school and who still refuses to specialize to the extent required by academic standards. So you might not want to follow my lead.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

https://amzn.to/49EUhHIFROM HOLLY CHISM: Bar Tabs: A Modern Gods Story

Brief back stories on the characters from the Modern Gods universe.

FROM SCOTT MCCRAE: Finding Bradigan’s Mountain

A brand new Mountain Man adventure from Scott McCrea!

Mountain man Richard Bradigan goes on a deadly cross-country trek to save the girl he loves from his old nemesis, the sadistic Colonel Sauvage. With him are the outrageous Bon Chance Legrand, dime novelist Fred Stryker, and disgraced soldier Captain Burr. But time starts running out for the searchers when they are pursued by some of the most dangerous badmen to ever come out of the West.

One thing is guaranteed – it will all end in blood. But who will live and who will die?

A Mountain Man’s Revenge is the pulse-pounding conclusion to the exciting Finding Bradigan’s Mountain trilogy.

https://amzn.to/3wLpAShFROM CARL MICHAEL CURTIS: Stigmata Invicta

On a backwater planet in an otherwise barren solar system, an underground church thrives. For generations, the tyrannical world government has tried to stomp it out. But now, an elderly nun has brought hope to her suffering people when she begins experiencing a genuine stigmata. Her bishop requests her be rescued and taken far away. The Knights 15 13 send a spec ops team to do just that.

But these missions never go easily.

Discovered and assaulted from the land to the atmosphere, the Knights 15 13 rush to save the nun from the clutches of their enemy. An enemy who has much more sinister plans in mind. They don’t want to just kill her. They want to force her to help them kill everyone.

https://amzn.to/48CSmCaFROM BECKY JONES: Academic Magic

Zoe O’Brien has found her dream job at a small liberal arts college teaching the history of Medieval witchcraft and magic. Academic life is exactly what she expected it to be…until the squirrels stop by to talk with her and her department chair and best friend turn out to be mages.

Zoe discovers a world of magic and power she never knew existed. She and other faculty mages race to stop a coven from raising a demon on the winter solstice while simultaneously grading piles of final exams and reading the tortured prose of undergraduate term papers. Can Zoe master her new-found powers in time?

Karen Myers: Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 4)

Book 4 of The Hounds of Annwn.

DISTURBING THE FAMILY SECRETS COULD BRING RUIN TO EVERYTHING HE’S WORKED SO HARD TO BUILD.

George Talbot Traherne, the human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is preparing for the birth of his child by exploring the family papers about his parents and their deaths. When his improved relationship with his patron, the antlered god Cernunnos, is jeopardized by an unexpected opposition, he finds he must choose between loyalty to family and loyalty to a god.

He discovers he doesn’t know either of them as well as he thought he did. His search for answers takes him to the human world with unsuitable companions.

How will he keep a rock-wight safe from detection, or even teach her the rules of the road? And what will he awaken in the process, bringing disaster back to his family on his own doorstep? What if his loyalty is misplaced? What will be the price of his mistakes?

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Baying of the Hounds

In the world we know, Nikola Tesla’s Wardencliffe experiment proved a costly failure and was ultimately torn down for scrap. But what if things had gone differently and he pressed his work to completion? In a world similar to but unlike our own, Tesla completes his transmission tower. But when he turns it on, he discovers his calculations were incomplete. Some unknown factor has created a connection with another world with physical laws unlike our own. The commingling of curved and angular space has led to catastrophe. Now his greatest rival, Thomas Alva Edison, compels him to repair the damage. To do so, Tesla must make his way through a ruined city to the locus of the damage. And through his mind echoes the baying of unseen hounds. A short story originally published in the anthology Steampunk Cthulhu.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Other Princess

This time, they invited the last fairy to the christening.

Elise, uncursed at her christening, received strange gifts about castles and roses. With such good fortune, what more does she need? She grows up forever in the shadow of her lovely, cursed, tragic cousin.

Even when the curse falls, and Princess Isabelle lies in enchanted sleep, life must go on for Princess Elise. Despite the curse, the kingdom can not sleep itself, and neither can she.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: HELP

“We’re just like Rome in the Decadence.” “We’re decadent, and we’re going to fall.” “It’s all scripted, we can’t escape it.”

What if I told you that you sound like a true believer in “climate models?” Or perhaps that cute little model about how Covid-19 would kill millions! Millions!

First of all you can’t hit me, because I’m on this side of the screen, and you’re not. AND furthermore, every night I pray G-d to give me one superpower. Just one. The ability to reach through the screen and bitchslap the heck out of idiots. He still hasn’t given me that, so I doubt he’s given it to you. For one, wanting to bitchslap people isn’t very holy — I’m told — so no miracles for you. Ahem. Now that we’ve established that very important point, let’s move on to the main point.

Yeah, yeah, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But it’s not an inescapable model or an exact repetition. It just tells you how humans are supposed to react to “situation x.” Not “factor a b and c are in play. So x will happen.”
Yes, many science fiction authors have forecast the emergence of such ability. Psycho-historical equations make a great story, of course, which is why the mind is attracted to it.

The problem, same as with climate forecast are all the factors. You can’t tally all the factors that went into something that involves more than one person. Let along something that involves more than one person, and which you only have access to via reports from people who were there. Or, more likely people who knew people who were there. And all the people involved in the transmission of knowledge are people who were raised in a culture so different from yours that you can’t guess their bias fully. You can get some idea, but you can’t guess all of it.

What does bias matter for reporting what happened? Oh, hell.

Having transferred between cultures and acculturated, I can tell you bias makes you see different things when looking at an event. Yes,okay so it’s a given, for instance that Portugal is a far more “patriarchal” society than the US. That doesn’t mean that women and men are the same, but the rules are different. It means that even an odd duck “liberated” woman — which I was by virtue of never caring about people’s expectations for me except for not giving scandal to strangers and by not upsetting people without a good reason — like me was running different software in the head.

When I was traveling to the US to marry Dan, in the airport, there was a family with mom, dad, and four teens. All boys. At the time I thought the other utterly ridiculous. Why? Well, her hairstyle was about 20 years too young for her. She just had straight hair, worn long. And she was ordering everyone around and telling them what to do. It seemed stupid to me. Would my evaluation be the same now? Well, there isn’t the back brain assumption that married women will either confine their hair or wear it short. So her hair would probably not bother me. As for ordering everyone, my guess is I’d see a middle aged woman exasperated by clueless young males. Heck, I’ve probably been that woman a number of times. “Have you gone to the bathroom? Remember you don’t want to all rush the bathroom on the plane.” “Did you have breakfast? No? Maybe you want to go and get a sandwich, before we board.” “Pull your pants up, I can see your underwear. Do you have a belt? Put that one.” etc. etc. etc.

What you report changes. My first one would be “Geesh, this woman was harassing everyone, and she was nuts because she had a far too young hairstyle.” My second would have been “This poor woman, was trying to keep the kids from doing stupid stuff, and it was a full time job. Even if she was fussy.”

Now, the difference between Portuguese culture and American culture is almost non-existent, compared to the difference of head software between us and the average Roman.

On top of that, people see different things. No? Find a cop. Ask him about witness reports. Oh, ask Lawdog for instance. I’ll wait. Yeah. Now ask him about witness reports collected a year later, or collected by hearsay.

This is what we’re dealing with in history, adding in the fact that the person who wrote down “history” had an ax to grind. Usually a very personal ax.

I am familiar with a lot of it from when I write historical novels. One of the things that amuses me immensely is reading someone else working the same time period I do. Say Tudor England, or Dumas musketeers. The names are the same, but the actual place is completely different. And it’s not that their research is wrong — because I don’t read those. I fling them against the wall with force — but that what they focus on, or how they interpret the reporter’s bias is completely different. Take Kit Marlowe — please. I’m tired of having him haunt my stories — I can write him as an ugly customer, or a triple agent spy, or a confused, lost young men, caught in a web that he doesn’t fully understand. And that’s not counting writing him as gay, or straight or bisexual. (And — speaks sternly to back brain — I’m not writing Kit Marlowe erotica. No. Drop that idea right now. I am serious. Don’t make me get the chancla or doom. Ain’t nobody got time for that.)

Then there’s propaganda. Rome and in particular “decadent Rome” has been the object of propaganda since it was still very non-decadent by our lights, to when it had been fallen for hundreds of years.

You’ll hear other Romans screaming the equivalent of ‘get off my lawn’ almost from the inception of Rome, because kids those days refused to live in a hut and grind acorns for their bread, or didn’t beat their wives into submission as is right or proper, or insisted on bathing, which as we all know weakens the blood. Those dang kids. Decadent.

Now, are there a ton of “vices” humans indulge in as soon as they’re a little above extreme subsistence conditions? Yeah. Look, we’re apes, okay? Sometimes really creative apes.

Give us a surplus of food, and we over indulge. Funny mind-altering substances and some of us will indulge. (The fact I hate to be out of control of my own mind makes me a very odd duck, so I won’t, but trust me, I’m the exception.) Nice clothes, and we’ll probably own many more than we need. Or comely whatever partners of whatever sex — or yes. Shut up Marlowe! — and a great portion of us will screw their way to glory or at least exhaustion.

Few of us indulge in too much work, too stern a discipline or too exacting a diet. Although it’s been known to happen.

So, given that America is the most prosperous nation the world has ever known, you’re darn tooting we will be compared to “decadent Rome” the most prosperous nation the world had ever known (for its time) before us.

But does that mean our fate will be the same? Well… probably not. Humans might be the same, but the software in the heads is utterly different, technology is different, and the way America relates to the world has nothing to do with how Rome related to the world.

If you assume it will be the same, you’re ignoring all other factors. You’re also being oddly Marxist, because he viewed human differences, etc. as meaning nothing. We’re all widgets, in widget landia, and running this program. Of course, to get his “program” he relied on a highly simplified version of history that abstracted “factors” and treated them as immutable.

Cue “this is not how any of this works.” Not even vaguely. Which is why all his predictions have turned out wrong.

So, should we study history at all? Oh, hell yes. For one because it helps you understand what your culture assumes and why.

But unlike Marxist-history, which is what I learned in Europe, which is all about “the factors of the time, leading to” and individuals don’t matter, because another individual would do the same, we should study both the ethos of the time: technology, commerce, beliefs, and the biographies of influential people. Both because it helps us understand how they were and if typical of their time or not, and to understand “the individual as a factor in what actually happened.”

Imagine the leader of the continental armies was Benedict Arnold, and tell me the revolution would turn out the same, and we’d have the same USA, save for the capital being called Arnold? Uh uh. Sorry, no. (Though starting a short with someone flying to Arnold DC.. well… And I could probably sell “very similar but different’ in a short story. In a novel, it would all apart. The personalities were too different, the trajectory too different.)

So right now? Yeah, we know we’re in trouble. And I think, though I’m open to other opinions, that the best model for what we’re going through is not “Decadent” (For one, because in our case that was USSR propaganda. Yes, we have tons of vices, but we’re not terminal on any of them. No, we’re not. See how we resist vices imposed from above.) but “Occupied land.” We were overtaken not by another nation, but by a small minority indoctrinated to hate us. To the extent this minority is international, you can see our struggle mirrored all over the world.

I’ll add that all over the world, Marxism and it’s offshoot of internationalist insanity is on the run, and having to cheat and go violent to stay in power. This if one looks on history for a guide, would seem to indicate it’s doomed. How soon? What form will their fall take? What does it mean for us?

I don’t know. I have feelings more than clear ideas. But I do know it won’t be “like the fall of Rome.” Because that model has nothing to do with anything. (And for that matter we don’t know really why Rome “fell”.)

I do know the last time a “conceptual model of society” — absolute monarchy — was on the ropes this way, it took more than 200 years to fall, and a lot of the falls were bloody messes.

OTOH, history seems to move faster now, (probably because communications do) and Marxism is nowhere near as deep set or as close to the basics of human nature as absolute monarchy was. (Though it shares with monarchy the belief in anointed ones. Just different annoying.)

The one thing I know from history is that once the philosophical underpinning of the order, whatever the order is, is fatally damaged in the minds of those living under it, fall will come.

How soon, when and how….? Well, that depends on many many factors, some of which will be unknown unknowns.

What will come after? I don’t know. I have a feeling it will be better. But it’s a gut-feeling, based on factors I probably can’t fully articulate.

I can also tell you that getting there will probably hurt. Though a miracle could occur.

Go ahead and study history. And even feel free to apply it as a predictive model.

But at best remember what we have of the past is a pretty, pretty picture with all the messiness brushed away. In the present? All we have is mess. Comparing the two is imperfect at best, insane at worst.

So when you apply the predictive model, use our different tech, and our different software as factors.

Will you be able to predict the future? No. But it might give you a rough guide. However, stay ready to incorporate things that aren’t exactly as you expected they would be, and to change your model on the fly.

Part of the issue with the climate models, or Marxist models of history, for that matter, is that instead of changing the model to accord with reality, they try to wish reality away, so that the results will be as foretold by their system.

Don’t be those guys. Always incorporate the new systems as they appear.

By all the factors I can tabulate we win, they lose. The only question is how soon, and what the butcher’s bill. And those, I can’t answer. I have ideas. They’re probably wrong.

There are too many factors, and it’s too complicated. The best we can do is work for what is best and endure.

Till we come out the other side.

The future is not scripted. Go do your best to fight for a good one.

I’d like to pick up on Holly’s guest post of yesterday.

When I was reading it occurred to me that the problem of art is the problem of traditional publishing, it’s the problem of any centralized power and information.

We are social apes. Naturally and instinctively we tune in to the group we live or work with. It’s normal. We have all been members of groups that skewed slowly off normal — in minor and harmless ways, normally — and which made adjusting to the rest of the world more difficult after. (The gentlemen who said “Yeah, this comment section” can go to the corner for half an hour without books, thank you.) I mean even my writers’ group gave me a wicked addiction to popcorn, since that’s what we always ate when critiquing.

The problem comes with concentrating functions of society. When it’s something free-market (ish) based, it just means the entire field will fail. But when it’s government supported and/or subsidized it just tilts away from what the people would do with their own money, and gets more expensive and utterly offensive and useless.

So, take what Holly said about art. Public art, paid for with government money, might be good art (maybe) but it’s good art for people who are immersed in art and art education. Which means for the normal human being, it’s either stupid, useless or outright ugly.

In the same way, though in a free-er (look, the centralization of publishing itself was part the result of technology, and part the fact that the government puts its thumb where it has no business being. Tor power tools is one of the least egregious though most recent thumbs on the scale.) market, publishing, particularly genre publishing having relocated to NYC and being a small, incestuous field, where everyone knows everyone else, and where everyone goes to the same parties and the same restaurants, it started mostly catering to itself.

What do I mean by this? Well…

Take cozy mysteries. They were incredibly popular, but then for … reasons all the publishers started talking about how cozies weren’t real mystery. And it should be absolutely forbidden to have amateurs solving mystery, because the professionals were best qualified. Etc., etc., etc. And then they stopped accepting cozies.

You see, two things made this easy. The fact that everyone else who worked with them thought cozies were stupid, and the fact that they could stop just accepting them is because by that time for various reasons the publishing houses could determine if a book swam or sank. So curtail cozy distribution and publicity, have it not sell and then go “see, cozies don’t sell. Nobody wants it.” And stopped accepting it.

I don’t know what happened there, if it was just a happy coincidence with someone publishing this one off craft mystery and its doing really well or if the bottom line crashed so badly they tried to accept cozies without accepting cozies. “We know cozies don’t sell, but how about with crafts?” And then those sold, and suddenly were everywhere.

Same happened in science fiction with space opera and then with all of science fiction in favor of fantasy. Baen was about the only hold out on that. Because, of course, if the only science fiction you allow is hard sf you’re only going to hit a small group of connoisseurs, while Planet Stories was wildly popular. (Yes, yes, there’s a post on science fiction, possibly, eventually for Mad Genius Club.)

Same with “clean” romances. The editors were tired of them, so they didn’t want that and–

Fortunately with indie publishing all the “but we don’t like it” are making a come back.

But the same type of thinking, the same “but our in group doesn’t like it” is now dooming Hollywood. They’re essentially making movies for themselves.

It’s not even malicious. It’s that they’re tired of the things that the public perennially loves. Because they see a lot of it and it gets boring. And they forget the public hasn’t seen it every day for years. And they forget that whatever they think is virtue signaling woke in their circles is not hot at all in ours, but boring because we get it from every institutions and often our jobs.

And upper education. And educator “certification” is insane bs, that concentrates and distorts teachers into an in-group. Which in turn hardens a lot of insane ideas into what the entire group thinks, and tries to push on the kids (or adults) they teach.

And this is why government is in the mess it is in. Exact same reason. Even when they’re not raging commies, government employees as a group are obsessed with problems that aren’t problems: Income inequality, climate doomerism, etc etc. TO THEM these are vital. And they don’t understand the rest of the world is not really interested in any of this and in fact that most of these are only a problem in their minds.

Again, this is a reason for government being as distributed as possible. And where everyone, including bureaucrats are routinely changed. It should be normal for the president to fire everyone int he bureaucracy and hire his guys. Yes, yes, that means a period of confusion where no one knows “how things are done.” Too bad so sad. Perhaps “the way things are done” has tilted so far away from normality that it should change. And perhaps resetting to normal humans on the regular would stop us having government only interested in its own obsessions and at war with its people.

What is art? by Holly Frost

I was chatting with our lovely hostess the other day, and made a comment informed by having spent my entire life training and working in artistic endeavors, that Art is something that someone enjoys.

“Guest Post” she replied.

Ok, then.

My background: I was enrolled in music lessons at two, dance probably at three, visual arts as soon as my mother could manage it. Music is my first field, and writing my second. I do not remember a time when I could not read music or English, and the oldest dated score in my own hand is from when I was two. (Visual art and dance I lack the talent for, but I’m a fair technician in visual art.)

Is a banana taped to a wall Art? Sure. It’s simply Art for a very few, who enjoy that sort of thing. (My suspicion is that it’s either an in-joke I don’t get or the enjoyment of a sense of self-superiority.) Is Thomas Kinkade Art? Sure. It’s Art for the masses, and you can tell that a lot of folks enjoy it because they put their money there.

Is 4’33” Art? Yes. It’s Art that reflects on what the nature of music is. The audience is small, and it’s not something one adds to a playlist, it’s something that must be experienced live in concert, and if you are not a musician yourself I would hesitate to recommend it. Some of my favorite music, Phillip Glass’ string quartets, George Crumb’s Black Angels, PDQ Bach, is difficult for someone who is not a musician. I explained PDQ Bach thus to a student yesterday: it’s like puns. If someone is not fluent in a language, puns are confusing. Only when one is fluent are the puns amusing. You might appreciate the surface qualities of the speech as a language student, but you cannot get the full meaning with the puns until you are fully fluent. Meanwhile, John Williams’ movie scores require no music education to enjoy.

But a definition does not a guest post make, and I think it worth talking about the distortion of Art in our country. Much public Art, that is, Art which is funded by taxpayer dollars, is not Art which is widely enjoyed. Indeed, most of it seems to me to be the opposite of enjoyed. Someone commented recently that you can tell the Art funded by the government because it is ugly. This is not universally true:

One reason that has been revealed by declassification in the last several years is that the US Government decided to take Art in an anti-Soviet direction by means of public funding. If the Soviet government funded handsome men and pretty women in pastoral landscapes, then the US government would fund whatever was as opposite of that as possible. This reactionism led to a good deal of Art that is very limited in appeal. It is very poor public policy to buy Art that the majority of the public does not enjoy.

Ah, I hear you, “The government should not fund any Art!” Stop a moment and think on that. Should the federal courthouse have a painting in it? Perhaps the iconic blindfolded Justice with her scales would be appropriate? Or John Adams defending the British soldiers of the Boston Massacre? I would argue that there is a limited place for Art funding by our government, very limited, and it ought to be only for Art that appeals to the majority of the population at the time it is funded, as we are a Republic. (Monarchies of course buy Art that appeals to the Monarch, see Versailles.) Surely the Veterans’ Home ought to have music for the residents, and art on the walls, chosen by them and paid for by us.

The problem with current government Art funding is that it is elitist and overreaching. The money goes not to Art that most people enjoy, but to Art that people with a deep education in Art enjoy. This is inappropriate. That the government buys so much Art distorts the market, and makes the main goal of many Artists be to receive government grants, rather than to appeal to the population. There are millions of people who will hang a Thomas Kinkade on the their walls, and a bare handful that will hang a banana.

Then, of course, there’s the Art that serves as money laundering, and we’ll leave that to our friendly Freds to deal with, and hope that they can and do. I guarantee you someone’s enjoying that all the way to the bank, though!

On the bright side, you can probably find someone free of government funding peddling Art that you enjoy at any farmer’s market or Ren Faire these days. Buy a sketch or painting, a quilt or a pot, toss some money in the dancers’ or musicians’ tip bucket, grab a business card. We live in an era when our materials are fairly cheap, so you’re mainly paying for training and labor. You can have all the Art you enjoy exactly as you want it, or at least as much as your household and budget will tolerate.

A word about prices: When you pay for Art, you’re paying for the hours of production that go into it, and a portion of the training the artist went through to be able to produce it. It’s a five by seven painting, or an hour performance–you’re still competing with other places for the artist’s time and labor–if I can make more working fast food why would I play your event? (And actually, for me? it’s teaching music, so you can figure out pretty close how many hours of prep you’re paying for if you ask my hourly lesson rates and my hourly performance rates.) I have an entire lecture on not undercharging because “it’s for a good cause” and admitting you’re donating, and getting the receipts for all my lovely self-employed unwitting philanthropists, but we can cover that one another time if you like.

So Art? Art is what people enjoy. Great Art is what people enjoy and protect for the future to enjoy. The more people enjoy Art, the more likely it is to be considered worthy of protection efforts and preserved for the future. Remember, the works of Johann Sebastian Bach are only known today because of Felix Mendelssohn’s enjoyment of them. Go forth and enjoy Art.

There is a trope that the right in America is Masculine, and the left is Feminine. This is not precisely true. There’s plenty of women on the right, and they’re the most feminine women where it counts: Married women with children.

But in general, it kind of is true. Or at least the argument of the right tend to appeal to a more “masculine” stereotype mindset, and the ones on the left, to a more “feminized” stereotype mind set. There’s more socializing, more mind games, and an approach to life that’s designed to make everyone “behave” the way they want you to. There’s also a lot of social signaling, and women, being hypergamic, tend to do that more.

Mind you, of course, a more feminized approach refers to the stereotype, and there are men and women on the same side. However on the whole, overtime, this image was true.

Was? Oh, yeah. Starting with the fall of the USSR and then definitely with Trump’s election, and the widespread rejection of the left’s long term projects, it’s more like…. our left is America’s crazy ex girlfriend.

She refuses to let you leave. I mean the way the elections are rigged? Not to mention the way they keep telling us we deeply care about climate change or whatever her obsession is. It’s like she’s telling you that you just can’t break up with her. And when you change the keys, she jimmies the locks to get back in.

She eats our food, tears up our stuff, runs up our phone bill talking trash about us to everyone else. She lets homeless men in to sleep on our furniture, poop on our carpet, kill our pets and set random fires.

Every time we try to get rid of her, she tells us we really love her, and if we say no we don’t, we’re breakup-conspirators and she threatens to get us locked up.

She steals from our wallet too, in ever increasing quantities. And keeps calling our boss and getting us fired.

The question is, how do we serve her an eviction notice?

I will do a real post later. I meant to clean the house all weekend, because we have company, so of course I COULDN’T. It’s not just writing. I’m haunted by a spirit of the contrary. Or gremlins. Whichever.

So, going to clean. Post later. One of the cats WENT somewhere. From the smell, accident. But it smells.

So, later.

Book promo

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Out of Contact (Chronicles of the Fall Book 6)

Radmir Gagarin is not an Exec, he just does the job of one. Working for the richest man in the Alliance, Lord Diomid Devi, is not easy, even though he’s retired. And it gets a lot harder when the Plague strikes the World Lord Diomid purchased as his personal retirement home. And then the invasion . . .

As the Three Part Alliance crumbles, it’s every world for itself, and even a man so rich he can buy an entire parallel Earth to retire on, can find himself in a lot of trouble!

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER, AUDIO BOOK! April

April is an exceptional young lady and something of a snoop. After a chance encounter with a spy, she finds herself involved with political intrigues that stretch her abilities. There is a terrible danger she, and her friends and family, will lose the only home she has ever known, and be forced to live on the slum ball Earth below. It’s more than an almost fourteen year old should have to deal with. Fortunately she has a lot of smart friends and allies. It’s a good thing because things get very rough and dicey. They challenge the political status quo, and with a small population the only advantage they have in war is a thin technological edge. The entire “April” series is building towards a merge with the future series that starts with “Family Law”.

FROM SHANE GRIES: Ashes of Empire: Last World Volume 2

When the royal government of the Interstellar Commonwealth was overthrown, the Imperial Family fled into the forgotten depths of space, seeking a colony that had been abandoned thousands of years ago. After a hasty jump and then five years of grueling sublight travel, the battered fleet enters the system to find a thriving pre-space flight human culture. A culture that remembered nothing of their origins.

Once contact is established, the refugee spacefarers embroil themselves in the politics of the warring nations, using their superior technology to play one side against the other. Imperial Marines in power armor go up against semi-automatic rifles and tanks, winning and losing their lives in a long term plan to turn the world into their new empire. Meanwhile, far above in orbit, the deadly games of the court continue with political intrigue, backstabbing and deadly rebellion.

FROM JAMES TOTTEN: The Old Heads and Drone Drivers: Breaching Ain’t Easy (Breaching Ain’t Easy! Book 3)

War is hell and getting worse. Russian leaders want payback for losing Poland. New weapons bring new opportunities. Retired Soldiers get called back to serve. Major Brown is right in the middle of it managing the madness. Look out for the dad bods, they have the skills to kill!

FROM MARK BOSSINGHAM: Chasing Naomi (ALLIE SPACE OPERA Book 1)

July 1969. Clive, Iowa, Earth. Sixteen-year-old Allie has a big decision to make: Watch the lunar landing with her mom in their run-down double-wide trailer or boost to the stars aboard a grumpy, sentient deep space exploration vehicle (DSEV-424) buried in her backyard for 5,000 years.

Accompanied by Gem, a dead space captain, now a glitchy hologram, Allie stops on the moon and surprises Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin aboard the Eagle lunar lander. (Neil never mentioned the encounter to Houston).

With Gem as her guide, Allie survives her first space battle and drops Gem off at a military regrow center in the middle of a spaceport casino. The teen’s adventure lifts off at a military space academy, where she faces danger, makes friends, battles enemies, and discovers her own surprising abilities.

Along with Rin, Sky, and Gem, Allie sets out on a mission to locate and defeat a rogue fleet led by Naomi, a mad-as-a-hatter warship, all while navigating the complexities of growing up and finding her place in the galaxy.

FROM DAVID COLLINS: Carbon Copy: An AI Doppelgänger Story

Kaylee Green was an Illegal Alien, only not someone who crossed the Rio-Grande to reach the USA. Instead, she had traveled 45.7 light-years to get away from her pursuers.

She is now a recent college graduate and has lived happily with her boyfriend for four years.

Then the police show up asking about a severed hand from a six-year-old cold case. They want to know why her fingerprints and DNA both match the hand.

Her carefully crafted false identity was rapidly falling apart. She wondered what else could go wrong?

The answer was that visitors from 45.7 light-years away were about to arrive.

FROM TOM VEAL: I Went to the Fantasy Fair

In Angland, matter obeys mind. Upon demand, raindrops swerve to avoid drenching pedestrians, walls change from opaque to transparent and back, coaches push themselves forward, quill pens take dictation, and sky-ships sail among the clouds. All that is quite ordinary and dull. Imaginative souls conceive of wondrous mechanical devices: steam locomotives, flying machines, jet engines, radios and a hundred more.

Aethelstan Tiefring has no particular interest in “technofantasy”. He has made his career as a renowned art-wright by directing pigments to recreate the images that he sees in his mind’s eye. Then his beloved wife succumbs to a mysterious sickness, her body vanishes from its casket, and he is stricken with overpowering melancholy.

His recovery begins when a glorious sunrise inspires him to resume painting and, on the same day, he receives an invitation to cross the Sea of Atlas to deliver a series of lectures to Atlantis’s foremost art institute.

He sets out for the New World, traveling in a sky-ship guided by golden swans and accompanied by his beautiful, flirtatious daughter. Lyonessa Tiefring has just turned down a shameful offer from the nephew of a powerful nobleman. She does not know that the disappointed suitor’s vengeance pursues her.

The journey will take father and daughter farther than they can imagine: to Atlantis, to the gathering of technofantasy enthusiasts at the Fantasy Fair, and then through death to a universe governed by entirely different natural laws.

FROM SCOTT MCCREA: Finding Bradigan’s Mountain: A Mountain Man’s Revenge (Bradigan: Mountain Man Book 3)

A brand new Mountain Man adventure from Scott McCrea!

Mountain man Richard Bradigan goes on a deadly cross-country trek to save the girl he loves from his old nemesis, the sadistic Colonel Sauvage. With him are the outrageous Bon Chance Legrand, dime novelist Fred Stryker, and disgraced soldier Captain Burr. But time starts running out for the searchers when they are pursued by some of the most dangerous badmen to ever come out of the West.

One thing is guaranteed – it will all end in blood. But who will live and who will die?

A Mountain Man’s Revenge is the pulse-pounding conclusion to the exciting Finding Bradigan’s Mountain trilogy.

The Critics Say:

“Well done, Mr. McCrea.” – Western author Jeremy Perry

“It’s easy to read; fast paced; packed with action; and full of characters you’re soon rootin’ for, as well as those you can’t wait to meet a grizzly end. It’s great fun to read.” – Western author Andrew Weston

“Scott McCrea’s prose is tight and smooth, and delivers a fair number of smiles.” — Evan Lewis, Davy Crockett’s Almanack

“Recommended!” — Jeff Arnold’s West

“Looking forward to the next one!” — Toby Roan, Fifty Westerns From the Fifties Blog

FROM HOLLY CHISM: The Dragon’s in the Details

Six stories of dragons hiding in today’s world:
A Friend, Indeed–A little girl meets the best friend she could ask for when she finds a dragon sleeping in her wagon.
Tempest–What do you do when you find a dragon in your favorite teacup?
Clowder–These are absolutely not cats, no matter what they look like, and will take offense at your mistake.
Back Yard Birds and Other Things–If the dragon defends your chickens, you invite it to stay.
Houdini–When the pet supplier sends the wrong kind of dragon, the pet store’s got a problem.
Hoard–Not every dragon cares for gold, gems, or cash.

FROM DALE COZORT: Snapshot-42 Book One – Stalingrad Run

At the height of World War II, an apparent time anomaly cuts Europe and part of the Middle East off from the rest of the world. Trapped in Northern Iran, with no way to contact the world he knew, United States Army Engineer Jim Edwards is forced to flee from both the Germans and the Soviets. His only companions are a mysterious Russian woman who may be trying to assassinate Stalin, and a man who calls himself “Loki”. Is he any more trustworthy than the Norse trickster god he’s named after?

In a desperate bid to get to Great Britain, Jim finds himself in a treacherous race across Nazi-occupied Europe. His mission? To prevent the Nazis from overrunning Europe, then sending their war machines against an alternate United States that’s still armed with black powder muskets. The freedom of mankind’s future may depend on his success.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: The Sound of One Child Crying

Who is the child Reza can hear crying every time she goes to the new addition to the Royal Library? Her boss insists there is no child, that it is nothing more than her uncanny sensitivity to the unseen world making a nuisance of itself.

Worse, searching for answers gets her angry rebukes about respect for the dead. The further Reza goes, the more certain she becomes that someone is hiding an ugly secret.

It’s a secret that traces back two generations, to a dark period in this land’s history. A time most people would prefer to forget, not caring that denial doesn’t make a problem go away.

The truth may set you free, but not without a price. And Reza fears that death itself might turn out to be an easier price than the one demanded of her.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: WORD