According To Hoyt

When my parents got married, the priest who married them gave them as a wedding gift the book he had written (and I think self-published.  It had that look.)  It was called Impious Men, and in it he had collected all the more salacious bits about historical horrors: Roman Emperors, other rulers who slept with horses or bathed in the blood of virgins, the craziest bits of the Aztecs, perhaps.  I don’t know because I never finished the thing.  I read a bit here and a bit there, in the sort of mood one watches a trainwreck.

You see, I discovered it when I was in my teens, while looking for something among mom’s emergency reserve food storage (which got tapped into quite often when price controls unexpectedly failed to work and bring abundance, and store shelves were bare.)

I think I was looking for canned fish, because I was alone in the house with my brother and had to cook something for dinner.  Anyway, in the middle of all of it, towards the back, hidden under the reserve toilet paper, was this book. This was a weird place for even mom to store a book, so I’m going to assume she had the same reaction to the stupid thing that I had.

This was an age at which I read EVERYTHING, including the instructions on medicine I never intended to take. But I left that book unfinished.  It was just — bizarre.

I think the man was very serious, and trying to catalogue these actions by these men.  I’m sure the ending moral was something about how these men lacked a moral compass.  Oh, h*ll yeah, they lacked a moral compass, but there was more to it than that.

Look, I am not a good person.  I’m going to admit if I were Empress of the known world tomorrow there are some people (I have a little list) who would be sent to a deserted, heavily guarded isle, and never allowed near civilization again.  Other than that, I suspect the worst I would do would be to become incredibly lazy and spend night and day surfing the net for cryptozoology or whatever.  I might also give people very odd gifts.  You know, my older son totally needs a pet elephant.

But the stuff this man catalogued was just… incredible.  Incredible in the original sense.  In my early teens, I read it going “Good heavens, I’m sure this is exaggerated, the equivalent of Rome’s tabloids.”

It might have been.  Some historians think so.

But as the sewer of wikileaks runs out into the open, and as people whisper of pedophilia, and rituals that whether they are occult or not, are definitely disgusting and bizarrely boring at the same time, I keep thinking “maybe that stuff in antiquity was true too.”

It’s hard for normal people to believe.  The mind cannot accept a world where ever greater defiance of other people’s taboos, ever greater depraved lunacy, brings nothing but ennui.

And yet I completely understand how the left got where it is.  Having conquered the media/industrial complex, they are always painted in the best colors.  Even Hillary’s corrupt and possibly treasonous handling of secret information (no matter what they tell us, 40% of this nation had or has secret clearance.  We know how anyone else in her position would be treated.  Prison is the beginning of it.  We certainly wouldn’t be giving them a chance at the presidency.  Except most of the people don’t know anything about what she did or how awful it was, about the horrors of wikileaks (and stop kidding us there too.  No, the Russians did NOT change every email) about the kakistocracy of the Clinton foundation.  They know nothing, because the MSM is now fully and openly partisan. They keep talking about how qualified Hillary is, but nothing about how criminal Hillary is.

And that is the problem.

Humans are social apes.  We are human within the confines of society.  As in ape bands, we do things to establish our dominance and that we’re special.  For those of us with no morals whatsoever these can be very bad.  For those of us who are raised or who accepted an ethos of “defiance over rules” and “Morality is for the little people” it can be worse.

We call this nostalgie de la boue (A desire for the mud.)

Sure you can trace a straight line from the romantics wishing to go back to a simpler life, or to idolize the middle ages over their own time, to our present pedophile, treasonous, bodily secretion eating lunatics.  But the difference is the romantics were kept in check.  there were people who despised them and ridiculed them.

Now the ID is enthroned, and these people, truly, have run out of room to establish that they’re all that.  (This is perhaps complicated by the fact that when it comes to handling anything real they are extremely incompetent and must know so, right?  I mean, they must know they’re not that good.)  So all that is left to them is to continue breaking more and more and worse and worse taboos, to continue pushing the envelope, to continue breaking other people’s morals (they have none) in a show of their dominance.

And the problem is that they don’t really enjoy any of it.  They’re doing this partly because they can, partly because they think that’s what everyone else would do in their position, and partly because they don’t know what else to do with themselves.  But the hammer doesn’t fall, some of us — the few who know — are disgusted and despise them, and the vast majority of people know nothing of this.

Our would be elites are vastly unhappy people, aping both daring and pleasure, and consumed by enui and meaninglessness.  They’re not alone.  I was recently re-reading the Black Count and the things they mention almost in passing, such as that the court of Louis XV engaged in orgies in the dark, where you did whatever, with whatever sex.  And yet they were all bored and filled with self-loathing.

That is the lot of those for whom the sum entire of their lives is following their increasingly more bizarre appetites.  Humans are a scavenger species.  We are made to strive. Their liberal privilege means they can’t strive.  No matter how bad they are they’ll be acclaimed as good.  Like the Roman emperors, they can’t get anything but adulation.

Whatever happens on Tuesday, look for this to get worse.  As long as the MSM has control of the public opinion, look for the dive into the mud to get worse and worse.

But historically there is a limit to how deep that dive gets.  Historically it all ends in “Aristo, Aristo a la lantern.”

In the end their “pleasures” for all the harm they can cause to innocents, are just the repetition of other similar “pleasures” which leave no trace behind except horror and disgust.  The world moves on.  They’re not world altering or life-changing, except where they kill millions of people through intention or incompetence.

In the end they’re nothing but dead men walking.

In the end we win, they lose.

 

Sunday Vignettes! – Luke, Mary Catelli, ‘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:

will

Some Books Promo – Free Range Oyster

Book book books book, book. Book book book-book book. Books books book. Books!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster

Books, books, books. Book.

Alma Boykin

Alexander, Soldier’s Son

Some spirits can cross running water. And salt water as well.

Compared to the Horn of Africa, Denver traffic seemed tame. Until Sgt. Alexander Zolnerovich saw the Little House on Chicken Feet digging up worms in the I-25 median.

Alexander, Soldier’s Son contains all the previously published stories about Alexi, Babushka, Ivan the Purrable, and their allies and enemies. It also has the new story “The Firebird’s Feather.”

Susannah Ailene Martin

The Lifeguard

A headstrong young boy goes to summer camp with his best friend and plans on having the time of his life, but then he meets a lifeguard who seems determined to ruin his fun.

Max Florschutz

Colony

A corporate investigator who doesn’t trust his employer.

A mercenary gun-for-hire with a talent for violence and a willingness to shoot first.

And a white-hat hacker who doesn’t know when to quit.

Three independent contractors brought together for one unusual job. Five years ago, master programmer Carlos Rodriguez retired. Now his old employer wants him back.

Quietly.

It’d be a lot easier if he hadn’t left Earth.

The Future Some Assembly Required — A Blast from the Past from May 2013

*First, I must be clairvoyant on how the economy would go.  Maybe I should hang a shingle. Second, yeah, I’m fobbing you off with a BPF.  Yesterday I ended up losing the say to cleaning carpets.  Greebo has developed this trick of biting the head off catnip mice, then rolling on the catnip all over the carpet, and it REALLY had to be cleaned.  Also, one of the cats (Euclid) is the pukamatic and the other two are sheddomatics.  I meant to do a quick clean, but I HAD to shampoo the downstairs carpets.  Three times to get all the staining out.  This meant I lost the day to write, and I’m BEYOND late.  I’m thinking lovingly of monk’s cells and such, where all I’d have to do is write.
Anyway, then as now, yes, we’re facing horrors as presidents, but who told you the government should make life easier for you?  It’s a constant battle to keep the damn thing small and relatively powerless.  And mostly — like a bad cat — it gets in the way.  (Okay, a saber tooth cat, but never mind.)  Work around, work under, work over.  The future is yours to build.

A further note: I KNOW I have some guest posts, but I can’t find them.  I had to switch to Thunderbird and its search function sucks. So…*

The Future Some Assembly Required — A Blast from the Past from May 2013

We come back to how things are changing, how the future is changing, how work is changing.  Part of this is stupid government tricks, of course.  Yes, 30 hours work week has long been a socialist dream.  Besides drinking their own ink – i.e. believing their own propaganda – the rats in their heads about wealth tend to spread to everything else.  Since wealth is finite, then work is finite.  (Well, think about it.)  At least work on decently planned and properly efficient and NEEDED goods.  (Why would you want luxury goods?  Do you want to be better than other people?  You want to have a lollipop?  Did you bring enough to share with the entire country? I don’t think you’re properly committed to socialism, tovarish.)

Since work is finite, the only way to deal with unemployment is to put things in the law that make it impossible to work more than 30 hours.  In places like France they simply pass legislation making it impossible to work more than thirty hours – which is another reason it’s an American socialist dream.  You see, they’ve gone to France on vacation, and they’ve seen people lounging about with time to enjoy life.  What they don’t see is the outdated appliances, the outdated houses and the narrow lives of common people, because they also normally stay in the best hotels and hang out in the rich areas – but Americans are so… ungovernable, that if if you just did that to them, they would work seventy hours, just to spite you.  So instead you hide the 30 hour a week poison pill in the Health Care legislation.  Employers who would be bankrupted by it, are then forced to dial back everyone’s hours to 30 a week (at least on paper.  Look, I worked exempt positions before. Your hours are not what you put on the time sheet.  Your hours are what it takes to get the job done.)  In the bureaucrat’s mind (not in the real world) this means that the employer will have to hire a new employee for every three on the payroll.  More jobs created.  Everyone is up.  Up everyone’s chocolate ration to two grams a week.

As I mentioned in Drinking Their Own Ink (I really need to tag these d*mn posts.) what actually happens is that everyone lies about it.  People report thirty hours and go on working the normal forty or fifty or sixty.  (Remember the reason the employer is cutting down people’s hours on paper is that he’s already so close to the bone he can’t afford the mandated boondoogle of minimum insurance which includes hypnotherapy and weight loss or whatever they consider minimum.  Perhaps little Asian girls who run on your back for back pain.  Who knows?  It’s a government scam plan.  You will pay for treatment for Brucitis Of The Cleaning Lady Knee even if you’ve never been in the same zip code as a cleaning lady.)

So, everything changes on paper, but not in reality.  Except that analysts, bureaucrats and those of us who work with words, look at the figures on paper, confuse it with reality and announce that due to efficiencies and robotics and stuff we no longer need to work as long.  Then the big government types start talking about this vast underclass who will never find jobs again, and which includes everyone but the top two percent or whatever, and who will need structures to support them the rest of their useless lives.  How can you be against that?  Do you want the useless to starve?

(Rolls eyes.  Rolls eyes so hard that she should use a cup to contain them.)

I confess I would be far more impressed with this if I weren’t following the politics and the laws and seeing the pressures bringing it about, which have nothing to do with technology.  I also confess that I MIGHT still fall for it if I didn’t happen to have a good enough memory to remember Carter’s administration.  (Yes, I was in my cradle.  Shuddup.)

The exact same things were said then, and the science fiction magazines were full of stories about how most people would be unemployed forever, because… because… because… CHEESE!  Okay, they didn’t say cheese.  That would have made way more sense. They said that back then – seventies, remember – our tech was just too darn efficient, and so all these low-level employees weren’t needed and therefore we were headed to a world where the majority would be unemployed like forevah.  The kindly state had to take care of them or they would die – die I tell you, die!

Then came Reagan and near-full-employment and they forgot they’d ever said all that stuff and slinked off without even the decency of a “Never mind.”

Now it’s back.

Ignore them.  Ignoring people who think that a vast majority of people “NEEDS” to be taken care of by an incompetent, massive, bungling bureaucracy is always a good idea.  Look, these jokers aren’t even good at taking care of the few desperately needy people.  You think they can take care of a majority of people in a way that doesn’t lead to massive atrocities?  PFUI.  Most people – even the truly needy – dependent on the government have to exert themselves NOT to be destroyed by clerical error.

No, robotics didn’t become that all-better in the last four years.  Would that they had.

To some extent automated factories were already much, much better.  Eric Flint last week was talking about the hell of assembly line work, but the truth is that the only places that remains are places where it has to by union rule.  Back in 88 I knew someone who ran a plastics factory.  It was just him (and I don’t think he’d ever finished high school) and a bunch of automated machinery.  He poured the mixture in and he pushed buttons and voila, plastic spoons and forks and stuff just came flying out the other end.

This was sort of held back or perhaps dialed back by the commerce with China, where it’s cheaper to have five year olds carve the plastic forks from a plastic block (I’m joking, I’m joking.)  But the tech is there and has always been.

The robots, they shall always be with us.

So… what about work?  How will we deal with the vast army of unemployed people roaming the country side going “braiiiins.”

We won’t because as with zombies, they won’t exist.  At least they won’t exist if our government stops making it a crime to start/run/make a profit at a business.  And even if they continue their war on what you DID build, they still won’t exist.  They’ll just be unemployed on paper, collecting welfare, but inexplicably very busy and perhaps driving Mercedes.  (See Portugal and Greece for what people do when making a living becomes illegal.  And that’s Portugal and Greece, not the US. If you ask in Portugal and Greece, I bet you that they’d say their reason for living is their – hyper extended – family.  In the US people are likely as not to mention work.  Even those who mention family tend to mean their nuclear family, and then after that work.)

What this law has the potential of doing is making us all contractors.  Which means what is happening to writers is heading everyone else’s way fast.

Yesterday some of you in comments got rather lost in the weeds of “specialization versus generalist.”  But, truly, that’s not what’s at stake.

Look, I’m a contractor anyway, so it’s a little different, but being a writer working for a house (or many houses) is sort of a limbo thing, since not only do you license your copyright to them, but they expect you to do all sorts of other things which makes you sort of a contractployee.  What I mean is, the way things used to be, with the few gatekeepers and a lot of writers trying to sell, they could require you do all sorts of things beyond writing the book.  I’m always highly amused by the people who say they’re now going traditional because “that way all I have to do is write.”  Sure it is, if you want the book to tank so badly it leaves a dent.

Among the things I routinely did for my publishing houses were: paying someone to edit, so that if they missed something I’d catch it; paying someone to go over their edits to make sure nothing got changed in a weird way (and with Berkley this was a constant battle); working at publicity, including making publicity materials; paying someone (agent.  Yeah, that worked) to verify the contracts and make sure that everything was right, and to negotiate for me for less than appalling covers (that worked too!)

So, I was already running a little empire of sub contractors.  All that is happening now is that I’m adding another layer.  I might, for instance have to pay someone to put the books in paper, since I can’t seem to figure it out (though I might experiment with my How To Write Interesting Books and maybe I can.)

As an indie publisher it’s the same thing, only I’m doing it on my own and adding artists.  That’s it.  But I also get a much bigger cut of the money, so it works out better.

The only other thing is that you have to look for work, and see the opportunities for work.  And that’s the BIG, major difference.  Look, not all work will ever be automated because work like wealth is infinite.  If everyone automated everything we all do tomorrow, people would come up with new things they need.

Let’s not even go to buggy whips and candle makers.  What about the typing pool?  Every company used to have it, even in the eighties when I started working.  Where has it gone?  Are all those typists roaming the streets flexing their fingers in despondency?

No.  Some are now computer design specialists.  Some are serving coffee at Starbucks.  Some are doing other things that, like those two, were not major employment categories in the eighties.

Open your eyes.  Then (to quote Pratchett) open your eyes again.  See what you’ve been ignoring.  Don’t count on anyone to look after you.  You do not belong to the Government, no matter what the government thinks.  And if you did, yeah, they’d have to feed you but only to their standards, not yours.  And they could choose to stop at any time.

I’m giving you the same guidance I give my kids, who, though they’re both in STEM degrees, cannot – of course – be sure of being able to do anything with them, because – beyond stupid government tricks – the tech is changing so fast:

Look for things people might pay you for.  Then do them.  Get good at doing them.  In the future there might be no jobs, no “employment” as we have grown to think of it.  But there will be work.  And people will still pay for work that benefits them or makes their life easier.  Now, you might end up working four contract jobs in ten hour increments and taking the income from those multiple streams to make a full living.  I’m here to tell you it’s doable. (At least if you add the Jim Baen dictum “Don’t work for buttheads”.)

The future is wide open.  You just have to make it yourself..

Heinlein said if you must travel in time, do it forward, never to the past, because in general (with interludes) the future is better than the past.

I realized last night that one of the most unsatisfactory aspects of this election is that both main candidates are trying to run to the past.

Hillary’s whole plan “More government paying for things and more redistribution” is, as the left’s program has been for years, an attempt to return to the thirties when collective action was the future.

I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again that part of the dem fascination with nationalized health misses WHEN nationalized health was implemented in most other countries.  In the thirties and forties, it was possible to provide “universal health” without having such demands that it requires the enslaving of most of the population to provide for that “right.”  Also, the spare quality of government provided health would be about the same or better than the patchwork private solutions.  At the level of healthcare we are used to experiencing, there is simply no way to provide it by government fiat without enslaving not just doctors and nurses, but medicine researchers, medical apparatus creators, and most of the population to pay for this drain.  Medicine today and the medicine that the dems see when they say “single payer” are not even comparable, much less the same art.

Then take their crazy fascination with unions.  Unions were important, not to say vital, when most of the work force was non-English-Speaking and just learning to be citizens, not subjects.  In the great industrial cities, crooked and skimming though unions were (it’s a human collective thing) they were better than being taken advantage of.  Now, most of their “gains” were not the result of of “shoulder to shoulder.”  As with feminism, most of the gains of unionism were the result of science — in this case in the form of labor saving that allowed the same gains in less time.  But at any rate, they kept demands alive until they were possible.

The problem now is that their demands have reached the “blue sky” level and do in fact impair the functioning of any entity they take over.  The post office does a lot of things for its own comfort, for instance (have I mentioned I DESPISE the bank-of-mailboxes thing?) and it’s losing badly to private package carriers.  Would be out of business I suspect, if it didn’t have a monopoly on first class mail.  (And if Amazon weren’t throwing business their way.)

The “future” Hillary envisions is all “collectives” and “collective action” as the vast masses of widgets assemble to petition the great industrialists and the ever-benevolent government.  One gets the feeling — and considering everything the feeling is probably right — that the cyber revolution hasn’t processed.  She doesn’t get that technology is now running the opposite way of mass production and mass action.

As for Trump, having listened to his speech, I was shocked at how much he wants to go back to the imaginary fifties.  Take his beef with Amazon — and before you say it wasn’t prompted by their owning the Washington post, he himself brought it up in his speech as why Amazon needed to be taken down a peg.  Considering this was in the context of Hillary supporters and he never brought up either facebook or twitter, it just shows his mind is in the past — he wants to smash Amazon with punitive taxes, so that “department stores stop struggling.  They’re struggling and it’s very bad.”

Or he could lighten the tax burden of department stores, of course, but that is never part of the plan, is it?

He also wants to bring back manufacture, by means of taxes and tariffs.

One gets the idea that the end point of his vision is some sort of Smallville, with department stores, and Sunday drives.  Given his head he’ll probably come up with a plan to revitalize driving on vacation and bring back all the small picturesque motels.  (And given the way his mind works this will be by taxing airlines, big hotels and airbnb.)

He either doesn’t understand that all the taxes and tariffs will also take Americans back to fifties levels of wealth (and if you think that was great you don’t know anyone who actually lived in the fifties.  I didn’t, but I’ve read bios and seen pictures) and bring innovation to a halt.

Look, I get it.  Intellectually I get it.  The human race is now and has always been in a fight between those who want to create and innovate and those who want to go back to the past when things were comfortable.

Chances are when fire was invented the old timers talked about the wonderful benefits of chewing raw mammoth the young were missing out on, and how that was why they all had such weak chins.

But the one thing we know about human development/invention is that it’s unstoppable.  You can manage to stop it and regress it for a while, in a small area, at great human cost, but it won’t still be quite the same.  And it will cost in lives.  For instance, I’m sure the real Korean middle ages were a better place to live than North Korea.

You can’t go back again.  Even when the future scares you.

The future scares a lot of people.  I think Obama’s promise to undo everything Reagan did (he’s getting there) had to do with bringing back the “safe” cold war world he’d grown up with.  Safe has many meanings, and in his mind I think the bipolar world with the smug underlying certainty that the USSR would win (remember on whose side his parents were) was “home.”  Which now I think about it, explains a lot of his ilk’s blind, unreasoning hatred of Reagan.  He took away their safety.

I was talking last week to a Libertarian gentleman who both welcomes the new media and is afraid of the upheaval it is creating in his own life, as a journalist.  I love the opportunities opened by indie publishing, but I won’t lie and say I’m not just a little scared that I won’t be able to make a living, if it all goes tits up and I have to go indie-only.  Though honestly, to be a writer is to live with insecurity, any way.

Most of us right now are caught in this.  To me the changes in publishing loom so large, that everything else seems opaque.  Even my husband’s job is a puzzle to me, let alone other people’s.  BUT whenever I sit down to talk to someone, everything from teaching to dentistry is changing and changing very fast, as technology has hit a turning point.

And I think most people are both excited by the new things in their field, and wishing they could go back to a place of safety.  “I want all of indie, but I want the houses to be healthy enough to know that I can continue publishing traditional forever” for instance.  Or “I want the new media, but the paper I work for should remain healthy.”

But that’s now how the tech change works.  Could we have Amazon and department stores?  Maybe, for a while.  We certainly need competitors to Amazon.that do things the way Amazon does.  And I’m not going to lie and say not having local sources is a way of shopping that is secure in emergencies, but here’s the thing: just as boutique indie bookstores and craft shops and local-grown shops and coming up, I suspect we’ll see others.  NOT department stores, but smaller, specialized stores, with knowledgeable retail people, whose slightly higher prices are more than compensated for by having the type of support Amazon can’t give.

But department stores?  that’s like saying the government needs to bring back Borders and shore up Barnes and Noble. (Don’t give them ideas.) These same stores who were the devil to the left, became an object of nostalgia, once they were replaced by something even more futuristic.

I understand the feeling and the longing.  It’s not that the human world was ever fully stable, tech wise, but it used to be more stable.  Change took longer.  The left probably thought they could bellyache about chain bookstores forever.  They’re none of them involved in real commerce or invention.

When my dad gave me a typewriter when I was 14, and went out of his way and spent more than he should to make it a GOOD one in the belief I’d spend my entire life working on it, he had reason to think that it was true.  The fact I’m typing on a gadget he couldn’t imagine tells you how fast tech has changed.

Perhaps the curious “time machine set to the past” effect of this presidential campaign is the result of us running really old people for the presidency.  But I don’t think so.  I think it’s because things are changing so fast that people chose these two horrors under the idea they’d take us back somewhere safe.

They won’t.  Or at least I’m fairly sure one of them can’t command enough physical force to do to us what was done to North Korea and make us a sort of dysfunctional time capsule.

Because technology is moving forward.  And the way it is now, we’re moving away from mass media and mass production and mass everything and towards a future in which the individual is the measure of everything.

Which is why in the end we win, they lose.

We just have to get us past the shakes, first.

 

When I came of age, back in pre-history, we sure were handed a messed up world.

It was 1980 and all the science fiction authors were predicting nuclear holocaust if we didn’t disarm and submit to the Russians immediately.  This was rather president Carter’s position, I gather, but he softened it somewhat for public consumption.

Being a cold-warrior was a bad thing, in my day.  You see, we came just after the boomers.

Now we’re being aggregated to the boomers which is loony because in 1968, that iconic year, I was learning to write.  Also, btw, the boom had stopped by my time, and classrooms were half full.  Part of what made the boomer generation transformational was no what they were or believed or that a larger number of them were assholes (this is not true.  Same proportion were assholes) but that they came of age at a time when people EARNESTLY believed every generation would be bigger than the previous one.  Read some Heinlein books of the fifties, to get that sense.  So “the youth” was outrageously catered to, instead of being, as always in the past, kept in its place.  Which meant that some of the stupid notions every generation has were enshrined and propagandized AT the boomers by people who wanted to sound “young and hip” and be on the winning side.  The prototypical boomer is a media creation.

But we weren’t even that.  When I was coming of age, we were called all the things the millenials are now (which is why I have great sympathy with them) including slackers, care for nobody, egotists. The twist is that we were also supposedly greedy.  HOW we were supposed to be greedy when we were most of us out of work is a mystery, but it was the fact we walked out of the sit-ins, cut our hair, and tried to find jobs (which by and large were taken by boomers.  Not their fault. They were a massive bulge in the population snake.)

So. When we came of age, we expected to be obliterated by a bomb any minute.  When I told my brother that Portugal, so small, so insignificant, was likely to escape, he reminded me that contaminated sea coasts would kill us.  (I think he was wrong.)

We were, metaphorically speaking, waiting for the hammer to fall.  Those of us who were politically aware knew that the Soviet Union was a mess internally, but we expected it, externally, to project power and have a grip — perhaps the winning grip — on world politics for the rest of our lives.

Pre-Reagan endless unemployment seemed the future.  ALL the future.  As well as ever increasing misery because there just wasn’t enough for all those people being born.  We were going to be increasingly shouting “Make room, make room” just to be able to have a square of ground to sleep on.

Those of us slowly coming to Mr. Heinlein’s view that the founding fathers had a point and that government should be by and for the people were faced with pundits and smart people utterly convinced — even when they opposed it — that history’s arrow pointed the other way.

At best we were all going to to live in a gray world, controlled by bureaucrats.  At worst, we were going to be atoms.  Add to that that we didn’t have jobs (when I was in my twenties and trying to break in, my husband was working 16 to 18 hour days, and sometimes we came to the end of the month wondering how to eat) and there didn’t seem to be much future for us.

The liberty minded among us who aspired to a life in the arts felt like free-marketeers in the soviet union.  If we wanted to survive, we were going to to have to keep quiet the rest of our lives.  The consensus reality was that “mixed” economy, with a heavy dose of planning was the way to go.

Other great ideas of the late seventies though the people here will have to correct me if they were only pervasive in Europe: Price controls. Yes, even in nominally free countries, it was considered sane for the government to tell you how much a bread roll should cost.  Salary controls.  Yes, even in nominally free countries, it seemed sane for the government to tell you how much your employer should pay you. Oil was going to end.  Tomorrow, if not the day after. But we couldn’t have nuclear.  So add a third way of dying: freezing, ofstarvation, in the dark.

Yesterday we got someone very young in the comments (well, I HOPE he was very young) telling us that Trump is the result of his and his like “rage” at the world they’ve inherited, and how we, older people, haven’t done anything to make it the utopia they deserve.

IF I were a little more mendacious, I’d answer with: Well, we collapsed the soviet union for you; planned economies are no longer automatically considered better; you have the internet; things — including overseas travel — are exponentially cheaper and you are, ultimately, much richer than I was at your age, even at the same economic level.  You’re welcome.

The temptation is great, but I’m not that mendacious. I keep my lies to fiction, where they belong.  None of those things were my doing.  I was, as most people were, trying to establish myself in my career, make a living, raise children.

I wasn’t even a public voice for good.  Oh, sure, I worked for Reagan’s campaign, which was probably illegal.  I worked on various elections since.  I write books.  But there wasn’t a hell of a lot I could do to hand my kids utopia on a plate.  If I could I would have, but see, the other side gets a say.

I remember — barely, I know, being ancient — being young, and thinking it was all some vast conspiracy AGAINST ME PERSONALLY.  All those rich people, all those fat cats, and yep, all those boomers, were hiding the stash.  And then I’d stop myself and think about it soberly in the same way I controlled paranoia for years.  When I entered a room and thought everyone there hated me, I went to “Oh, no.  Most of them don’t even know me.”

In the same way the young people who feel betrayed by conservatives and libertarians past need to take a deep breath.  Kid, we didn’t even know you.  We were just people doing the best we could, with no visibility into the future, same as you are.  And no one handed us a perfect world.  And we won’t hand one to their children.  And they won’t hand one to THEIR children, world without end.

Each generation has to fight for its freedom against those who want power, even those who THINK they want it for ‘your own good.’.  There will always be those, no matter how many times we discredit them, no matter how many graves we fill.  They just come back under new names.

Would anyone believe that with the wall done and the cold war over, our kids would believe communism was “fair” and national socialism the new hotness?  No?  I wouldn’t either.

But if you look at it logically, we were soft when communism fell: partly because they had infiltrated our universities and partly because the generation then in control, my grandparents’ generation, had seen that after WWII when you destroyed nations you had to rebuild them, and had come to have doubts about it.

So they were soft, the universities remained infested, and now we’re here, fighting the grandchildren of red-diaper babies, and battling the idea of a closed pie and tribal racialism, and hierarchies of victimhood anew.

Take heart though.  Everything we’re battling is sort of a scaled down version of the past.  Even Putin’s bluster has only a minuscule bite compared to what the USSR could have pulled.

Part of the fun in this is that my generation can’t take credit, but we really can’t take the blame.  Most of us who have a voice have had it too short a time; those of us aspiring to command positions (not me) are still too young.  Our parents’ generation and the boomers are in control now.  Will be in control for — given improved longevity — another twenty years.

Which brings us to the young: Bide your time.  You’re sort of like the heir to the throne chomping at the bit to get it, because you have all these neat ideas.

I remember being like that.

If all of us over 30 disappeared tomorrow in a puff of smoke, you’d find out how disastrous your ideas are.  You’d find it out face first into reality.  And the dead would fill graves without end.

So be glad you won’t have that kind of control.  Work on being yourself, on establishing your career, on having and raising kids.  Somewhere along the line your theories will fail and you won’t even notice.  And when you get where I am, not quite yet with any power, mind, you’ll realize that the best you can hope is that you can do your poor best to hand your kids a SLIGHTLY better world.

Rage has no place in this process.  Very satisfying, no doubt. Cathartic.  BUT every time that kind of rage has been unleashed into the world things went badly: French Revolution; Russian Revolution most revolutions in South America and Africa, the abattoir-wars of the 20th century.

You can’t sweep away the past by wishing it.  Cultures and structures have persistence, as the various people trying to replace facebook or twitter have found.  And those are recent structures.  And you can’t create utopia, because the other side always gets a vote.  And sometimes (when the other side aren’t dyed in the wool communists at least) it’s even a good thing, because it might point out your blind spots.

The crown will come to you in time.  And you’ll find out how little you can actually do, with all your power.

Until then bide your time and try to study the history of politics and yeah, the history of… history.  Read some biographies, too, to understand what the assumptions are, and how they have changed.

I will grant you that if we’d known what the future held we could have done much better for you.  We didn’t.  No one does.  All we can do is do the best we can with the assumptions of our time.

Remember that Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of haste.  It is also a tragedy of youth.  The two often go together.  And if given their head, it all ends in a suicide pact.

So, go wisely and slow, they stumble fast.

The world is not a conspiracy against you.  We don’t even know you!  And you’re not the great transformational figure you think you are.  Which is great, because those come with a butcher’s bill.

Say thank you to my grandparent’s generation for defeating the soviet union, and give my generation some elbow room, once we have any power, to get you space colonies.

And don’t expect utopia.  It was never in the cards.

“Last night I dreamed again of Manderley” is one of those iconic lines of English literature.  Even if you’ve never heard of Manderley, it evokes a feeling of longing for something lost.  The narrator goes on to describe how even in her dream Manderley is in ruins, and then to establish once and for all that there is no hope of return.

Rebecca is one of my favorite books.  I think I first read it when I was twelve or thirteen.  It is a foregone conclusion that I liked it, I suppose, since the main male character is based on the Athos archetype, with whom I’d fallen in love sometime before.

Years ago, when — I think — I’d just given birth to second son, I found a “sequel.”  I think, us being broke at the time, I borrowed from the library.  Thank G-d. It was a hot mess of feminism and stupidity, including the fact that in the end the main character feels threatened by her beloved husband, because, hey, he killed his first wife.

This completely misses the point of the very flawed main male character.  Yes, he was misguided enough to kill for his ancestral honor, but that is not a “woman killer.”  The tragedy of the character is that he was presented with the only circumstance in which he would kill, driven to it, and even though it destroyed him, he had to do it.  Because the alternative was unbearable.

To reduce it to “he killed women” was an act of unforgivable stupidity.  The fact that the author of the abomination also went on to kill the children of the male character’s sister and brother, or disfigure them or something equally horrible, just made me hate her with a stabby kind of hate, because clearly this author was one of the true devotees of grey goo.  No shred of happiness might escape.

Tonight I dreamed again of the USA…

And there is no happy description I can follow that with.  I haven’t actually voted yet.  There are reasons for this.  And however we end up, I’m not going into exile.  I am a citizen of the United States, and the captain goes down with her ship.

I’m a writer.  I can imagine dark.  I can imagine much darker. I can’t imagine happy.  Not after the next four years.  Not after the next eight.  Ask me again in twenty and I think we’ll be much, much better and if I’m around in forty, I’ll collect on my bet that in the end we win, they lose.

We’re just going to eat live slugs in the meantime.

And I find that in the end I’m my father’s daughter.  I will not abandon the country I love, no matter how bad it gets.  We just love different countries.

The question is if the USA will leave me.  And it will, almost for sure.  For a time at least.

Having decided I needed to vote against Hillary: no, it’s not her corruption.  (What? You think it wasn’t there, before?  Or that I was so stupid as not to know it?  Or that the Clinton’s long time friend and crony, Donald Trump, doesn’t have some of that on him? Probably a lot of that on him.)  It’s the press.  The moment the sluice gates opened.  The moment it became obvious that she has, at the very least, committed serious security breaches, if not sold our secrets to the highest bidder, the press started a drumbeat of “Donald Trump’s tax returns for 1990 MIGHT have used a shady dodge to avoid taxes.”

Oh, yes, yes, that is comparable to the festering mess of corruption and horror that is the Clinton foundation, or the Pay for Play schemes Hillary ran as secretary of state, or–

It was that, the chorus of coordinated deflection, the drumbeat of covering up for a woman who, frankly, has nothing to recommend her, that pushed me over.

I’m going to vote against Hillary Clinton in the only effective way I can.

In the same way that for months now, I’ve refused to say I’d vote for Trump because every time I considered he might be marginally less bad, I got assaulted by alt.right loonies, the latest of which came to my facebook page, and, without my ever saying anything about whom I was voting for, started calling me names and saying I was drunk.

In that same way I can see that Hillary not only has the power of the press, she has the power of a 1984 apparatus, which will smear and cover and attack for her, until people on the street who aren’t political addicts don’t know the truth.

There might have been a time it was safe to elect someone like that.  That time ended September 2001, and it’s definitely not now.  With Russia determined on expansionism, with China rattling sabers, and with the rest of the world doubled over and coughing their lungs out with the pneumonia our chill gave them, it is not a time for us to lack at least somewhat accurate ideas as to what is going on.  A Praetorian guard of Presstitutes is very useful, and being Hillary means never having to say you’re sorry.  Or indeed having to confront error.

Which is why she’s too dangerous, and I have to vote against her.

Even though I can’t bring myself to vote FOR Trump, having decided to use a vote for Trump to bring down Hillary, I brought myself to listen to his speeches.

First, I think I’ve spotted a “tell” of the sort that you learn about politicians.  You know Obama’s “Make no mistake” which means he’s about to tell a whopper?  I think Trump’s is “Believe me.”

Second, his understanding of economics, smeared microns thin might cover the head of a pin.  His intent to take down Amazon is horrifying to this part-indie writer.  Particularly when he’s doing it because they own the Washington Post and the Washington Post dissed him.  His “Mexico will pay for the wall, believe me” borders on the deranged or delusional.  And his promise to slap tariffs on goods, which will immediately become too expensive for Americans to buy, means he doesn’t understand how things work.

On the other hand, Hillary is promising free college, free health care, and other positive liberties which POSITIVELY require the enslavement of half the population.  And the Press and the apparatus of entertainment and “culture” stands ready to aid and abet her in this mission which has no other end but the destruction of Western civilization.  (Though she’s doing it to line her own pockets.)

With Trump, at least, we stand a chance (mind you, not guaranteed) that people will oppose his more ridiculous power grabs; that he won’t get it all his own way.

I’m fully aware that he is supported by a bunch of loonies who give a bad name to Republicans, and who in fact, are everything we’ve always told everyone conservatives weren’t.

I’m also aware he’s not conservative in any way, shape or form.  All his instincts are statist.  I wish I could say I decided to use him as a weapon against Hillary because I’ve become convinced he’ll listen to his advisors and do a halfway decent job.

This isn’t true.  The only reason I’m willing to do this is that the media has proven themselves yet more craven and corrupt than even I expected.

Donald Trump will destroy the Republican Party.  Hillary Clinton will destroy the country.  I wasn’t even ever a Republican, and though I hate to lose the one organized (the Libertarians aren’t) focus of resistance to the left, there is no contest between which one to save.

Having made the decision (I haven’t actually voted yet, and won’t till the last minute, because I think that lessens the chance they’ll know the accurate number of votes they need to manufacture) I thought I’d keep it to myself, possibly forever.  Maybe even get so drunk that I keep it FROM myself.

But then, over a very bad night, I realized that this makes my act of self-debasement futile.  For it to mean anything; for it to actually stop the Clinton criminal machine from taking over the US, I need to explain and hopefully bring a few more along.

So I am doing that.

Now does it mean I’m going to disown you if you vote libertarian, constitutionalist, write in your cat’s name (be careful on that.  In some states a write in means it’s a “spoiled ballot” and they won’t count down ticket either.  Find out before you do it) or even vote for Hillary and all her empty promises, and all her false glamour?

No.

This year there are no good choices.  We each have to come to grips with our most basic values and based on those commit an act that can’t fail to injure anyone with a dose of moral principles.

Unless you’re gleefully voting for one of these scary clowns in order to injure the country and your countrymen, you’re still my friend, and we should definitely make a date to get drunk together, because there isn’t enough booze in the world to wash away this.

It’s impossible to tell if it will make any difference.  It’s impossible to tell what the polls are actually saying, or if there is a vast contingent of Sarahs there, who cross over at the last minute.

What is possible to tell is that whoever wins this, we have our work cut out for us.

These should never have been the choices.  Open primaries MUST die.  The power of the media must be vacated. Fraud must be destroyed.

This means we have to get serious about voting.  It has to stop being the freak show it is, with early voting, vote by mail, vote without ID, vote if you’re a pet with a legal address.

No other country in the world has this crazy system.  And though we’re known to make crazy systems work, this doesn’t.

Do you think it is simply coincidence that the democrats winning the elections come from the most corrupt places in the US.  Really, Arkansas and Chicago?  What’s next? Detroit?

Every time I post this some of you — the younger ones — tell me without early voting they’d never vote because they have jobs and wha wha wha.

That’s nice. Pre-motor voter we had a system where you could show you can’t get off work, or whatever, and they would allow you to vote early.  BUT you had to care enough to show sufficient hardship.

Yes, I know but “Fraud has not been proven.”  Successful fraud ISN’T.  Besides, look at what the press is doing for Hillary.  If fraud HAD been proven, who would report it.

I think it’s safe to assume, humans being humans, if fraud is possible, fraud will happen.

And boy oh boy is fraud possible.  It isn’t even difficult.  Particularly with vote by mail.  How hard is it to have a huge batch of vote by mail votes prepared, to replace, oh, half the vote?  Is it a coincidence that every state that votes by mail goes Democrat?  And that Republicans are forbidden from bringing legal action over election fraud?  I don’t know.  Hey, tell you what, there is this bridge in Brooklyn I can sell you cheap.

So, that needs to be cleaned up, or we’re all disenfranchised.

And then we need to get serious — really serious — about changing this culture and the dominance of the MSM.  No matter who wins.

It will be more difficult under Hillary, because she is not only incompetent (come on guys, her husband pushed Motor Voter without any ever splashing on him) she is also malevolent, and she doesn’t like the US.  Or western civilization.

Of the two crazy evil clowns, she’s the evil clown we can least afford.

Now excuse me, I’m going to take a shower with the wire stripping brush.

I come from a culture that firmly believes that on Halloween and All Hallows, the world is close together to “the other world.”  It is more or less assumed the other world is the world of the dead, but that’s not necessarily true, since anything supernatural or weird was also supposed to have come from “another place.”

It was on Halloween when I was six.  In Portugal we were not quite as crazy as in Mexico about the whole day of the dead thing.  There isn’t much about skeletons and that whole “death is cool” thing.  (Which always creeps me out a bit.)  Instead, you go to the cemetery (true) but you just light candles and talk about the people buried there.  (Or you used to.  I think that’s changed too.) Of course this being a small and enmeshed area, everyone ended up competing on the grave with the most candles and all that.

Also because it was a time a year when everyone in our area came to the same place (this covered for instance both where I grew up and where mom grew up, both quite different) there was a lot of talk and discussion of old times. Think of it as a massive quasi-family reunion.

I have issues with faces.  I still do.  Every time I’m about to see a friend I haven’t seen in years, I’m afraid of not recognizing them. I’ve gotten better over the years because mostly I DO recognize them.  Now casual acquaintances is a little different.  If I haven’t seen you in oh, three or four years, and we shared a moment at a con, you might want to lead with the moment.  Or not. Because at cons I tend to be overwhelmed and everything blends together.

When I was little, though, I had really serious problems.  Not recognizing my own parents problems, particularly if we were going to be in a crowd.  So every morning, I memorized the clothes mom was wearing, so if we went out in public, I would be able to find her.

Now in the cemetery everyone was wearing black clothes, and a woman who looked like my mom (size, hairdo, that type of thing) gave me her hand and started booking it towards the entrance, when mom and dad noticed, ran after and rescued me.

Now there are several “Normal world” explanations.  Several children had died in an epidemic in the area, and this woman had decided I was just like her lost daughter and I’d do. But in a small community (or area) it was impossible for her to think she’d get away with it.  Of course emotionally disturbed people might not think clearly, but think of how to explain it to your neighbors?  In a tightly connected community? Impossible.  Even if I had been a dead ringer for her daughter it would be impossible.

However, from what I remember — and yes, the incident made a huge impact on me, partly because of this — the adults acted like this woman intended to take me away and I’d never be able to come back/never be seen again.

Indulge me for a moment.  Perhaps I wasn’t mistaken that night, perhaps it was my mother… or a close enough analog of my mother.  Imagine she stepped out of her world accidentally, and saw her daughter who had died in the epidemic three years ago, standing there, staring at candles on her cousin’s grave.  And she thought she could change it all.  Somehow.

Of course it’s fanciful.  But the idea of crossing between worlds and where little things change perhaps, but the world is the same is a science fiction trope and it’s enshrined in the Mandela Effect.

If you follow that link, you’ll find that most of the time it’s trivial things that you could have forgotten/reformed in your memory.  I’m so not going to take in account spelling, since people might hear something and learn to spell it wrong.

I also have this theory that whether you remember a public figure’s death wrong has to do with whether you follow that particular field.  For instance, you could never get me to tell you when celebrities died.  I spend a lot of time coming across things and going “I wonder if he’s still alive” about a singer or actor, but it’s not of major significance to you.  I can however usually tell you when science fiction writers left this vale of tears (okay, not always) and also when political figures died.  I would never, for instance, suffer from the literal Mandela effect.

This is similar btw, to being a gateway writer.  If you aren’t paying attention to that particular universe, you’ll remember things wrong, but you remember them as always having been.  This is either because gateway writers attune to that universe, or because — of course — we have fallible memories around the edges.

But there are other incidents, at least in my life, that have the force of the Mandela effect.  For instance, I remember when we found Pete’s Kitchen on Colfax, the way I remembered it was that its number was 1974, which is associated with very “strong” events for both Dan and I.  But then suddenly it was 1962, the year of our birth.  And it had ALWAYS been that.  I don’t think it’s possible for me to confuse that, because who the heck forgets the year of their birth? I’d immediately have remembered it as such.

There’s other things, like titles of books changing.  Dates when movies came out moving around.  Or books, because I swear to you I read Have Spacesuit in Portuguese at 8, but apparently it didn’t exist there.

Sometimes I wonder if you know those ridiculous mistakes parents make?  Like when they confuse your actions with your siblings?  Or your favorite foods/places?  Sometimes those are things that you really couldn’t confuse, particularly for people like my brother and I almost a decade apart, and I wonder.

There were two other moments, when I felt like I’d ALMOST gone elsewhere.  One was when I had a really bad fever.  I was sitting in my office, and suddenly everything but my desk changed.  Instead of being in the half of my bedroom I used as an office for 15 years, I was in a circular tower, as you’d find in a Victorian.  There were stairs right beside the desk, and I could smell the ocean and hear seagulls.  And then it was back.  It was the moment of a blink.  But very clear.  Yes, I had a fever.

However, later, when I hadn’t a fever, some months after, I started heading down the stairs to go grab coffee.  It was early morning, the kids were at school and Dan was at work.  But I heard people talking in the living room and one of them was Dan’s voice, the other a girl I knew was my not-yet-in-school daughter, and one of my sons.  I don’t have a daughter.  The whole thing felt wrong.  The bottom of the stairs looked like always but also wrong.  I walked back to my office, then walked back, and the house was in silence, and I went down the stairs, and everything was as normal.

Yes, I know, writer.  Lost in a brown study.

Some years later, one of my sons came in shaken, from college.  He’d gone into his normal class, it was a test day.  his class has desks arranged in the normal way, and he was a little late, so everyone would be there.  But he stepped into the class, and the desks were in a square and it was empty.  Also “it looked/felt wrong.”  He stepped back out very quickly, then back in, and it was his class.

I told him of my experiences, and I’m not sure he was reassured.  I mean, I AM a writer.

But I wonder if there are indeed those things we play with: worlds, extending to infinity, as close together as the leaves of a book, as far away as another plane.  And if sometimes we do cross between close ones unawares.  You know, all those times when your aunt’s favorite sweater is no longer green but brown? And was always brown?

I understand all my experiences are debatable, and it might all be a widespread case of bad memory.  Maybe.  Part of me wants it to be all nonsense and missremembering.   After all, that world where my office was somehow by the sea had to be pretty far away, and I’d hate to wake up one morning and walk off into a world where I didn’t marry Dan.

But I understand that the universe doesn’t have to follow the rule of “what Sarah likes”.

So — have any of you guys had that experience from the mundane “but I remember it always being different” to almost walking into another place?

And what could it all mean, if you have?  Other than brain glitches or momentary memory slips?

 

 

Sunday Vignettes for your Monday by Mary Catelli, Luke and ‘nother Mike

*We at According to Hoyt are true rebels.  We’re so rebellious we don’t let the calendar dictate to us.  In fact, who is the calendar?  How many divisions has he got?

Okay, right, so I was out of it after partying like a Libertarian on Friday and dealing with household emergency on Saturday.  We were both so out of it we didn’t even waste the day by going to a museum, we just sat home and watched Predestination, because that’s how lame we were.

Anyway, Mary and the guys had sent me a prompt for vignettes, and I just rescued it from my inbox.  Here it is:*

Sunday Vignettes for your Monday by Mary Catelli, Luke and ‘nother Mike

(UPDATE: We all know Word Press Delenda est.  We just don’t know the full extent of it.  THAT is right here, in the fact that I had this text below the line, that WordPress decided I wanted to be invisible.  After poking the HTML  a few times, I hope it’s now visible.)

Sunday Vignettes!

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

child

*First I want to point out that 28 hours is “some.”  Second I want to say that we’ll have the Sunday vignettes on Monday, because that’s the kind of wild and crazy we are around here.

Sorry, yesterday I had a minor household emergency.  Really minor, not life or health threatening save for the part where I had to go up and down a very tall staircase about 15 times or more.  The upshot is that not only didn’t I get to SIT much less at the computer, but by the time it was all done at seven pm or so, the last thing I wanted to do was write ANYTHING.  Or think. Or talk.  Or…
So, here we are, but I promised, and I deliver (late, weirdly, etc, but I do.)

So… to continue torturing Grant.  Though in this chapter I think he mostly annoys other people.

FIRST AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, THIS IS NOT CANON.  THIS IS COMPLETELY UNSANCTIONED (okay, not completely.  Larry said I could do this for you guys without his ripping my head off and beating me to death with it) MHI FANFIC.
Good, now that we got that out of the way, why am I doing this?  Both Grant and Fado Negro (Portuguese Monster Hunters) have minuscule parts in Guardian, the MHI book I’m collaborating with Larry Correia on.  However, obviously the Portugal of Monster Hunter is not the real Portugal (Really, no arcane creatures come stumbling out of the undergrowth there.  If there were arcane creatures, the country would be chock-a-block in them, when you take in account the continuous human occupation since… well, forever.)  And this story gives me more of an opportunity to firm the world building.  (Yes, it would be MUCH easier to do this with a notebook and noting things down, but that’s not how my mind works, d*mn it.)
Okay, that’s the rational excuse.  The real reason is that d*mn Grant Jefferson won’t leave me alone.  (Always had a thing for men from Patrician New England families.  Ask my husband.)  So I’m torturing him.  Also Guardian won’t come out until I do this more or less at same time (I’ve sent the first chapter to Larry, and after I clear a bunch of minor cr*p in my way, I’ll be sending him probably the first ten chapters by the end of the week.  [Yay, Mr. Trashbags.  Oops, did I say that?])
Will this ever be a book?  Don’t know.  First Guardian will get delivered.  Then, this being finished, I throw it at Larry.  And then it’s his SOLE DECISION. (Which means, don’t you monkeys hassle him.)  It’s his world and his character.  I’m just grateful he lets me play in it in Guardian and here for your amusement.*

First chapter is here.

Second Chapter is here

Third Chapter is here

Fourth Chapter is here

Chapter 5 is here.

Chapter 6 is here.

Dark Fate 7

“I’m Silvia, by the way,” she said as she led me into a largish room.

“Grant,” I said.

The room was of a piece with the elevator and the rest of the building I’d glimpsed: it was probably cutting edge and state of the art back in the 19th century.  Five hundred square feet or so, of open, formless space, some people in the big cities in America would make this into a studio and fall in love with it.  There was inherent charm in the large tri-part elipse-shaped windows with the glass full of bubbles and irregularities, and the wood describing a fleur-de-lis shape amid the glass.  The ceilings were high, and I caught a glimpse of gold in the sculpted edges, and color in the center.

But what interested me most was the room itself, and the people in it.

The one wall with no windows was hung all over with weapons and guitars, mixed, seemingly with no distinction.  I had a flash of a group of MHI charging in to kill monsters carrying guitars and almost laughed.

There was a little kitchnette in a corner, of the sort that probably served the needs of college students or their like, and sofas were strewn irregularly about the room.  In the nearest three men sat and cleaned guns.  There was a confusion of pieces and cloths in front of them on a low, stained pine coffee table.  Behind them, on another sofa, a man and a girl held each other.  They looked like those couples you came across at any in any big city in the Southern parts of Europe, holding each other tight and making everyond who passed them feel uncomfortable.

My eyes flew over them to a woman who was sitting at a round bar-height table, absorbed in what seemed to be a rousing game of solitaire.  But she frowned down at the cards as though her life depended on it.  She was smoking.  So were a group of guys at the far back, sitting on a sofa turned away from me, watching a big screen television in which a soccer match was being shown between teams whose colors I didn’t recognize.

As we came into the room, Silvia pulled a pack of cigarettes from some hidden pocket, offered them to me, and when I refused, lit one.  The smoke was so thick in the room, I coughed, and thought perhaps they’d take a hint.

Instead, they obviously took it as a sign that I wanted their attention.  Everyone looked up.  The nearest man — they all looked thin and tan and dark to me.  Also small.  I wondered where Pitt had got his height — smiled at me, somehow conveying the impression that I was a pupil late for class, “Ah,” he said.  “The G Man.”

I wanted to correct them, but it didn’t seem to matter much, so I just said, as tersely and clearly as I could, not sure of how much English they spoke, “Special Agent Grant Jefferson of the Monster Control Bureau.”

“Yeah,” One of the other men said.  “We know.  They said you’d arrive this morning.  What took you so long?”

This morning I’d still been on the flight, and I had no idea who “they” were.  It had been my experience though, that my superiors could promise all kinds of things.  I said, “There was a minor thing with Red Caps at the airport, and then a thing in my hotel, with a lamia who was waiting for me in my room.”

This actually got me their attention, “In your actual room?” he said.  “They didn’t tell us that.  We were there for the cleanup, of course.  How did you defeat it? Some American super weapon?”

I licked the edge of my mouth, on the inside where a cut had left behind a little bump.  My teeth still felt loose from the battle with the lamia. “A floor lamp, actually.  Portuguese, as far as I know.”

He glared at me, and started to open his mouth, but Silvia let out a cloud of smoke and said, “At any rate, your … bureau? Agent Franks said you were one of the best agents in the field, and that you’d be able to get to the root of the current outbreak and find out what to do to stop the Mother.”

“Outbreak?” I said.  “The Mother?”

One of the three men chuckled.  “Yes, outbreak.  What you think this is normal level of activity?”

But Silvia launched into an explanation more or less at the same time, “We are fighting an outbreak of the mother,” she said.  “All the forces connected with maternity, mother, or femininity are coming up.  We don’t know why.  More importantly, we don’t know how to stop it.”

I tried to figure out what she meant by the mother.  The only thing I could think of, knowing this was a catholic country came flying out of my mouth, “The Virgin Mary?”

There was stunned silence, and someone  — I think the first guy — said something under his breath that definitely didn’t sound like a compliment.

“No, you idiot,” the second man said.  “The Mother.  The principle of … well… of female.  Those statues in pre-history?  That’s her.  Not a goddess or a spirit, but a … force, a feeling that has been worshiped, catered to and feared since humans were humans.  There is something going on that is messing with that feeling on a grand scale, and it is waking up lamias and sirens, defenders of the Earth, enchanted moors, female ghosts, Roman goddesses.  All of them.  It’s been one hell of a week.”

“We’ve lost twenty people,” Silvia said.  “Which is why we asked the Americans for help.  We expected them to send a group? A detachment or something, but they said you’d come and access it and teach us fighting techniques.”

I understood, suddenly, the air of disappointment and vague hostility around the room.  “I didn’t know anything about it,” I said, in a rush, trying to apologize.  I wonder if this principle of the feminine or whatever it was had something to do with what had happened to Julie.  But I wasn’t going to talk about Julie to them, not when I actually had no idea where she was or what was happening to her, a fact I didn’t like at all.  “I was on a plane to come here for… for personal reasons, and I didn’t know anything about it till my boss texted me after I got to my hotel.”

“Oh,” Silvia said.  “So you’re not prepared? You haven’t dealt with things like this before.”

“I have a lot of experience with monster outbreaks,” I said, wanting to reassure her, and feeling like I was losing ground, somehow.  “I will do my best to try to help you, and if needed, I’ll demand my superiors send more people.”

She stared at me for a while, then said, “Come with me.”

She led me all the way across the room, and I noticed a lot more people I hadn’t seen at first, including a girl sitting on a sofa, a motorcycle helmet beside her, knitting very fast.  She was the only woman wearing jeans and  a t-shirt, the only person not wearing formal black suit or skirt suit complete with white shirt and black tie.  I made a note to ask them about these clothes soon.  I couldn’t imagine less practical outfits to fight monsters in.

We passed a door to the left side which seemed to be laundry room.  One woman was ironing white shirts.

At the end of the room from the entrance door was another door that led to a room just as vast.  This room was full of beds.  Hospital beds.  They were all occupied and there were machines that beeped and urped and ticked around each bed.  There was a curtain halfway up the room, and on the other side, through the opening, I could glimpse more beds and more people laid up, only those appeared to be women.

“These are our casualties of the battle with the goddess,” she said.  “The ones who lived. The Hunters, that is.  The bystanders are treated at the psychology college and given some hypnosis so they’re not sure of what they saw.  But I don’t know how long we can hold that off, either.  We had an outbreak during a soccer match at the city stadium last week.  A guardian dragon appeared and started munching players and spectactors.  We got there barely in time, and thank all the saints, people think it was a soccer riot.  Then there was the thing at the airport.  We just keep getting public outbreaks and we’re down to a third of our normal force.”

On a nearby bed, a dark, thin man, wearing a helmet made of bandages was either asleep or dead.  His arm, hanging down, was also full of bandages, and a drip of blood fell off the tip of his right hand.

“I see,” I said.  “And I see how I might not be adequate.  But I really promise to do my best, and to call help if you need it.  I take it you’re a governmental monster control unit?”

“Not quite,” she said.  “King Manuel–”

At that moment the girl with the motorcycle helmet came up behind us, very fast.  We turned to face her.  “Silvia,” she said, as if I weren’t there.  “There have been fire works.  Two flares of smoke.  From Matosinhos.  I’m afraid it’s another siren.”

There will DEFINITELY be Dark Fate in a few hours.  I ended up having a night of debauch and insanity yesterday, having crashed Milehi con (yes, I know I could be invited for the asking, but I COMPLETELY forgot to fill in/answer the thingy, because of move, cat’s death, son’s move, member-of-family surgery.  Or in fact, because I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t push the novel out by force.)  So we didn’t have badges or panels,a nd I decided I wanted to go up to see L. Neil Smith receive the lifetime Prometheus.  Yes, I have political and philosophical disagreements with him, but let’s face it I have them with everyone, including at times myself.  My younger, male clone, son #2 and I are as close to political allies as it gets around here, and the arguments between us ONLY don’t blow the rafters because he clams up and glares. His fight has — generally — been in the right direction, that of removing the boot stomping on the human face, and as such I think he very much deserved to be honored.  So we went up because I wanted to see it and because I’d never met him, despite being in the same state, which in my profession means “right next door.”

We did meet and got invited to an impromptu celebration dinner, which a fan of Neil’s flew out to cook.  He’s a professional chef and the dinner was amazing, and it was generous and frankly very sweet to add us to the invitees.  Conversation went on (mostly not political) and we ended up staying up till two thirty, which to me is like staying up all night when we’re twenty.  We left there at one thirty, but we had to do shopping on the way home, and then I had to clean the war paint, which, yes, must go on whenever I’m out in public.  BUT if I could have managed it somehow, I’d have stayed on longer.  Only I couldn’t.  I’m a self-inflicted insomniac, in that I HATE falling asleep and not having control for a while, so when I can no longer stay awake it’s sort of like passing out for other people, and at my current avoir du pois, no one COULD carry me to the car, much less home.

It was a very pleasant and interesting dinner, and I’m very grateful to Neil and his wife for inviting us to it.  No, there are no pictures, because I’m what’s known as a dorcus massivus.  The massivus part particularly, which means I recoil from pictures.

Anyway — normally Friday or Thursday, depending on which day we’re free/there’s a lecture — we have our little dorky date night, something we found needed after the kids left because it turns out, uninterrupted, we just work.  Pretty much all the time.

A party was unexpected, and yes, very fun, and yes, very tiring because I’m not as young as I used to be, and youth is wasted and blah blah.

So.

Not fully awake yet, will do Dark Fate when I am.

I had a post from Stephanie Osborn, which I’d shamelessly have put up to avoid work (you know what I’m like) but that post is cursed.  This is the third iteration trying to get it, and each fails to open in a more bizarre way.  So… maybe I’ll ask her for a different one?  It’s one of those things that’s starting to scare me.

And now I go shower and try to write.

PS – Oh, yeah, I got to meet our very own KAries, and that too was a blessing, because I know she works two jobs, elsewhere, but she made the trip to see me for maybe ten minutes.  In this too, I am blessed beyond my deserving.