*I was going to do my own post NOT PRECISELY on Brexit, but life overtook me.  At any rate I want to give Francis’ as much exposure as possible.  He’s below, if you haven’t read it, and it’s the best post you will READ on Brexit.
Meanwhile, my husband having pointed out that the reason my auto-immune is worse could be either age or (and he cleared his throat) stress, I’m going to take some hours off.*

Your long wait is over at last; the Promo Post has returned! After a lengthy drought (and a couple communication snafus), I bring you a trove of entertainment. A quick reminder: inclusion in the promo post does not constitute a recommendation or endorsement by Our Beloved Hostess or myself. That said, a great many of the authors listed here are regulars in the comment section, so the odds are good and the goods are odd. Remember, if you like a book, please be sure to leave a positive review; if you don’t, make sure to provide the writer with constructive criticism. As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!

Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Lapsed editor, attrocious correspondent, wary admirer of the starveling cat

Alma Boykin

Shadows and Anguish

A Cat Among Dragons Book 8

Out of the embers wakes a fire. Out of the shadows comes an avenger.

After near death at the hands of her father’s enemies, Rada Ni Drako returns to her duties, her body healing and mind intact. Or is it? The new commanding officer of the 58th Regiment of Foot does not trust her and guards his own secrets. Her strongest allies now serve elsewhere. And new dangers threaten all that the Cat Among Dragons holds dear. From the coasts of Britain to the forests of Drakon IV and the depths of the Harz Mountains, Rada Ni Drako fights her shadows.

Everyone has a breaking point. Rada is about to discover hers.

Peter Grant

Brings the Lightning

The Ames Archives Book 1

When the Civil War ends, where can a former Confederate soldier go to escape the long memories of neighbors who supported the winning side? Where can Johnny Reb go when he can’t go home?

Walt Ames, a former cavalryman with the First Virginia, is headed West with little more than a rifle, a revolver, and a pocket full of looted Yankee gold. But in his way stand bushwhackers, bluecoats, con men, and the ever-restless Indians. And perhaps most dangerous of all, even more dangerous than the cruel and unforgiving land, is the temptation of the woman whose face he can’t forget.

Anthology

Interspecies

The Inlari Sagas Volume 1

Fifty years after first contact with the inlari, war ravaged the Earth, leaving New Zealand and Australia the victors and survivors, but at a devastating cost. As human and inlari factions compete against each other in the struggle for power and resources, some seek zealotry and dominance. Others strive for peace and unity—and with them, hope still lives.

Interspecies is a shared-universe anthology containing four stories of transformation, survival, and the eternal search for meaning and purpose in a turbulent world. Can inlari and humans alike bridge the gap created by their prejudices? Or will one species forever rule the other?

Enigma Front

A wave of possibilities rolls across the land and nothing remains the same IN ITS WAKE … Dinosaurs. Dragons. Clowns. From nineteenth-century China to the moons of Saturn, from the Renaissance to the aftermath of apocalypse, these eighteen stories share one theme–change, like you’ve never seen it before. NOW, EVERYTHING CHANGES! Read stories penned by Aurora, Hugo, and Nebula Award winners, as well as up-and-coming authors, in a single volume.

Includes the short story “Grasshoppers” by Christopher M. Chupik

JL Curtis

Rimworld: Stranded

A military Sci-Fi short story.

Senior Sergeant McDougal wasn’t a combat troop, he was a maintainer. He was good at it, proud of his status, and on his first planetary detachment as the lead maintenance troop for an outpost.

But, when he got stranded on Regulus Four, a Rimworld and one of the clusters that formed the DMZ between the Patrol and the Dragoons, his status didn’t mean a thing…

Improvising, adapting, and trying like hell not to panic, he did his best to fulfill the Patrol’s prime directive to destroy the portable stargate, and still get himself off the planet in one piece before the Dragoons got to him.

C.J. Carella

Decisively Engaged

Warp Marine Corps Book 1

(WARNING: Contains violence, strong language and adult content)

They picked a fight with the wrong species.

A NATION AT WAR: The United Stars of America. Born in the conflagration of unprovoked alien attack, the newest entrant to galactic politics took the few crumbs of hypertech gifted to it and ran with them, soon expanding over dozens of star systems and establishing a wide trade network, protected by its powerful Navy and the dreaded Warp Marines.

A FIGHT TO THE DEATH: A single Marine platoon, tasked with protecting an embassy on a hostile alien planet. An embassy – and the human enclave around it – that soon finds itself surrounded by armed mobs. Can the Marines and a ragtag band of civilian and Navy personnel survive long enough to be rescued?

SPECIAL INDEPENDENCE DAY SALE! To celebrate the launch of the second book of the Warp Marine Corps series, No Price to High, as well as Independence Day, Decisively Engaged will be for sale at $0.99 until July 4th.

No Price Too High

Warp Marine Corps Book 2

(Warning: Contains violence, strong language and adult content)

The battle for humanity’s survival continues.

Peter Fromm: After barely surviving the Battle of Kirosha, Captain Fromm and the rest of the 101st Marine Expeditionary Unit are sent forth to defend a vital star system. While the US Navy battles a vast alien armada in the skies above Parthenon, the Devil Dogs must fight a formidable, well-equipped army on the ground. Retreat is not an option.

Lisbeth Zhang: The former naval officer, once a rising star, faces the end of her career. She reluctantly accepts a new, secret posting, one that will turn her into an experimental subject in a covert weapons project that may save humanity – or spell its doom.

Heather McClintock: Being a CIA operative in a hostile galaxy is never easy. Out in the cold, with no support but her wits and skills, can she make a difference in the battles to come or just become another casualty?

Independence Day Sale! No Price Too High will debut at a promotional price of $0.99 until July 5th, when its regular price of $3.99 will go into effect.

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Rainbow’s Lodestone

Lodestone Tales Book 3

On a whim, the rainbow’s child falls to earth, where a cruel adversary takes advantage of her innocence. Bereft of her thunder-swept heavens, she dwindles. The sky calls to her, but she cannot answer. This transcendent short story of J.M. Ney-Grimm’s troll-ridden North-lands explores how inner freedom creates outer opportunities.

Earth trumps heaven until ancient music plays.

This edition of Rainbow’s Lodestone includes its sequel story Star-drake.

Karen Myers

Mistress of Animals

The Chained Adept Book 2

AN ERRANT CHILD WITH DISASTROUS POWERS AND NO ONE TO STAND IN HER WAY.

Penrys, the wizard with a chain and an unknown past, is drafted to find out what has happened to an entire clan of the nomadic Zannib. Nothing but their empty tents remain, abandoned on the autumn steppe with their herds.

This wasn’t a detour she’d planned on making, but there’s little choice. Winter is coming, and hundreds are missing.

The locals don’t trust her, but that’s nothing new. The question is, can she trust herself, when she discovers what her life might have been? Assuming, of course, that the price of so many dead was worth paying for it.

C Chancy

Count Taka and the Vampire Brides

Welcome, traveler, to wild Tramontana!

Here you will find snowclad mountains, roaring rivers, vast caves perhaps never seen before by mortal man! Here the strong Horses of Night roam the mountainsides – perhaps you can tame one to ride with your charms. Here the shepherds call to the long-fleeced sheep, the sheep to their sweet lambs – and you can find true telemea, the softest and freshest of cheese, in the gift shop, herb-flavored, a dozen special varieties-

Eh? You’re not here for the gift shop?

Ah, the cameras, of course! Forgive me, most of the photographers we see head straight for the ski lifts. Or the whitewater. Yet there’s so much more to Tramontana! The healthy farmers bringing in the hay, the soaring churches, the wild gypsy dancers – you must dance with the gypsies – and Raven Castle! Oh, there’s a place of history… and mystery.

It held the line against the Turks, they say, and the ancient lords rooted out all manner of uncanny beings… or bargained with them. Have you heard the rumors? That Count Herodes has ruled from that castle for over a hundred years? True, I tell you, all true!

&jellip;Monsters don’t exist, eh? Well, well, take your photographs, and we’ll see!

But you must visit the castle. The Blood Moon is coming, yes, and they say that’s when vampire lords can take a Bride! Other years have come and gone with no new lady in the castle, but this year… oh, you should hear Mistral sing the omens! A lass with your modesty and charms-

What’s that? Ah, temper, temper; location shots, yes, I see. Which way to the castle… there are maps in the gift shop, and tour schedules – but we can do better than that! Why, we’ll escort you there ourselves, no trouble at all, I insist–

Ooof. That’s a feisty one! Well, she’s packed off now. The other Brides should have some interesting weeks… Mihail? What do you mean, Kae’s not a girl’s name?

…Oops.

(Vampire with annoying relatives meets photographer with terrifying relatives. Hilarity Ensues.)

A Net of Dawn and Bones

Oyster Note: I’m including the author’s note rather than the blurb because I thought you lot would appreciate it. Click through the link for the blurb.

This book was written because I couldn’t find anything like it on the shelves.

…No, seriously. After the umpteenth time picking up yet another urban fantasy that looked promising but on closer skimming had the Designated Protagonist choosing the Sexier Evil, I kind of snapped.

Part of the fun of any story is putting yourself in the character’s shoes. But these shoes I not only didn’t want to slip into, I wanted to set them on fire. Where were the good guys? The honest cops? The ordinary people choosing to do the Right Thing, no matter how hard it was? Where was the belief that there is a Right Thing; that there is Good, and Evil, and you pick the side you’re going to fight for, even if the heavens fall?
In short – where were the heroes?

I assure you, if I were in on ground zero of a vampire versus werewolf blood war, my thoughts would not be centered on, omigod the two main supernatural guys are so darkly yummy in their hellspawn black leather. They would be, stake, silver – where are they and how fast can I reload?

So here they are: an honest cop, a half-demon, and an ancient heretic who just might be a saint. Out to kick butt, save lives, and hopefully save souls.

Welcome to Intrepid, North Carolina.

I’m hoping to stay awhile.

Brexit: How, Why and What Next? – Francis Turner

As the media all over the world is telling us, the UK voted fairly convincingly to leave the EU. With a turnout of 72% (higher than recent general elections) the final result was 51.9% leave and 48.1% remain. Most of the media and pretty much all politician everywhere, not to mention endless commenters on social media are saying something along the lines of “How could you do this to us?” and that is generally followed up by a sneer or two – it was the fault of old people, the working class, the stupid low information voters etc. Not to mention suggestions and claims that the Leave people were driven by racism.

Many of these people appear to be imitating the communist party leadership in the German Democratic Republic that Bertold Brecht mocked in his poem Die Lösung (The Solution). In fact you can easily update that poem to today by changing just a few words:

Nach dem Referendum des 23. Juni Ließ der Sekretär des Schriftstellerverbands In der Downingstraße Flugblätter verteilen Auf denen zu lesen war, daß das Volk Das Vertrauen der Regierung verscherzt habe Und es nur durch verdoppelte Arbeit zurückerobern könne. Wäre es da Nicht doch einfacher, die Regierung Löste das Volk auf und Wählte ein anderes?

After the referendum of the 23rd of June The Secretary of the Writers’ Union Had leaflets distributed in Downing Street Stating that the people Had forfeited the confidence of the government And could win it back only By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier In that case for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?

That attitude and the disconnect that it illustrates is probably why the cognoscenti are so shocked. I was back in the UK at the start of June and from what I saw then I changed my mind and went from hoping (without much faith) that Leave would win to expecting that it would – or that if it didn’t the margin to remain would be razor thin. In either case nothing like what conventional wisdom was predicting. It wasn’t that hard to figure out either, all you had to do was talk to people who didn’t live in London and didn’t read the Grauniad. They were heavily in the leave camp. From shop assistants and porters to academics in hard sciences the muttering was clear: the EU has been a disaster and all the claims that we can reform it have failed. Hence, at some point, you just have to quit.

A tale of two cultures

The UK has developed in very different ways to continental Europe, and within the UK the traditional attitudes to many many things are totally different to those across the English Channel. The usual point made is about the UK having common law whereas continental Europe being used to the Napoleaonic Code, but this is far from the only difference.

The UK and its former colonies (including 13 revolting former colonies :) ) are amongst the most generous when it comes to charitable giving and volunteering. The UK’s Charities Aid Foundation has created a “World Giving Index” for the last 6 years and the UK sits there at around #6 or so with the majority of the countries above it being former colonies. With the exception of the Dutch (who, curiously, also want a referendum about remaining in the EU) the rest of Europe is a long way down the list. In monetary terms some 75% of the UK population gives to charity every year whereas, again with the exception of the Dutch, everyone else is under 60% (and most are under 50%). Continental Europe on the other hand believes that the state should provide. The things that are not state funded in the UK include the coastal lifeboats (mostly provided by the RNLI) and light houses (Trinity House). For a nation which depends on maritime commerce to survive this might seem surprising but these are far from the only such things. Historically the UK was a leader in Friendly Societies, Cooperatives, Mutual Insurance and so on and in general the state’s aid (or possibly interference) in matters has been limited. Indeed until the proportion of government spending as part of GDP in the UK is generally lower than most EU nations, despite the fact that the UK has the (roughly) joint largest military and an almost fully nationalized and tax funded health service.

The point is that the traditional UK attitude was for self-organization to fix problems and not to expect the government to do it or organize it. To some extent this has been eroded as the state has muscled in, but particularly in the countryside, the traditions still hold. Moreover there is a very strong case to be made the this tradition of lighter government involvement, particularly since the 1980s privatizations under Mrs Thatcher, has helped the UK grow in ways that the rest of Western Europe hasn’t. This economic health mean that the UK has become a place other people want to live in.

Immigration

One of the major arguments of the campaign was about immigration. For the most part the Remain side were quite happy with the levels of immigration while the Leave side thought it was far too high. This does not mean, in any way, that the Leave side wanted to kick out all the (recent) immigrants. There are, perhaps, a few who feel that way but I suspect they are in no greater in number than the number of people who think the UK should simply have completely open borders and let anyone in that wants to come.

The UK is a small country. It has roughly same population as France compressed into a third the space and a significant proportion of the space is Northern Scotland which is very sparsely populated. Not only that but the UK has far lower unemployment rates (and higher labour participation rates) than most (all?) of Europe as well as a fairly generous welfare state. The result is that lots and lots of people want to live and work in the UK. This has been true for a while – the number of French citizens in London make it (IIRC) the 5th largest French city by population of French citizens, somewhere about the size of Nice – but the extension eastwards of the EU to Romania and Bulgaria, as well as the general influx of non European migrants into the EU, has lead to a large increase in recent immigrants. It is worth noting that non EU migrants seem to like the UK to such an extent that there is a large camp of them in Northern France who could go to any other part of the mainland of Europe but want to come to the UK instead. Why might that be?

Most people in the UK are fine with migrants up to a point and, while there have been issues with certain communities (Rochdale, Bradford…), people take pride in the developments of their immigrants such as the fact that Chicken Tikka Masala was invented in Birmingham. Going to a kebab shop or a curryhouse after a night out drinking is part of life in Britain. British people have had Indians, West Indians, Africans and so on as neighbours for decades. They’ve had Polish builders, Hungarian plumbers and Czech nannies for a good decade as well as numerous Italian and French (and Indian and Chinese) restaurants and so on for longer. And, in general, they are fine with continued immigration. What they want, however, is immigration at a rate of a few tens of thousands a year whereas what the last few years have shown is that immigration rates are ten times that (anywhere from 250,000 to 500,000 depending on statistics).

Immigration at a rate of 0.5% to 1% of the existing population (a population which is having babies and growing anyway) puts a huge strain on jobs, housing as well as health and education services. It isn’t particularly racist to wonder why one’s own children or friends/relatives are unable to find affordable housing when the population is growing faster than the housing stock, neither is it racist to wonder why doctor’s appointments and school places (in schools that are actual permanent buildings) are hard to come by.

In fact I would say that the sneering dismissal that came when people dared to mention those sorts of very practical issues was a major incentive for people to vote leave. When that is combined with the prospect of visa free travel for Turkey and the way that the government came over all shifty when it came to actual immigrant numbers it is hardly a surprise that people didn’t vote for a position that had no prospect of slowing the flow.

Project Fear vs Project Hope

The remain campaign, when they weren’t sneering, were doing their best to scare voters. It seemed every other day some group or other predicted doom and destruction if the UK voted leave. In many cases the gloom was so overwrought that it was a joke. The list of prognostications and prognosticators was endless and many were silly. Why would a hit show like Game of Thrones no longer be filmed in the UK if certain EU film subsidies and tax breaks were not offered? And if that were the case who, beyond a few fragile thespians, would actually care? Why (and indeed how) would the EU immediately block all trade to the UK? Why would British scientists no longer have any research funding? Why would it be impossible to collaborate with European companies and universities? And so on. Moreover why would the average voter believe these people when they were the same ones who came up with almost the same arguments to try and get the UK to join the Euro? The remain campaign offered no positive reason to stay in the EU, just one dire threat after another about the dangers of leaving. Oddly they seemed surprised at the enthusiasm gap that opened up in opinion polls that showed that voters for the Leave side were massively more enthusiastic than those on the remain side.

By contrast, however, the Leave campaign were optimistic and, critically I think, funny. The Leave campaign leaders, particularly Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, were generally witty and all of them managed to think fast enough on their feet to outwit their hostile interviewers (and yes, almost 100% of the interviews were hostile). After a while the fact that Vote Leave’s claims figures were also a bit iffy didn’t matter, everyone with a brain could see that the Remain figures were extracted from various bovine anal orifices, so the fact that Leave played slightly loose with the truth was ignored.

American readers may think this bears a resemblance to the Trump campaign and I suspect that this is no accident. The people running Vote Leave are not idiots and they are quite capable at looking at what works in other countries and replicating it. Just as Trump talks about making America great again, so too the Leave speakers were talking about the vibrant historical past of the UK and its rosy future when not under the boot of the EU. They were vague – they had to be, in part because they don’t agree on the post Brexit future – but they were all optimistic.

In the end it was a choice between a side that failed to acknowledge any problems with the way things are today and threatened the apocalypse if things went wrong and a side that said that “yes things aren’t so great now but we can fix them if we’re free to do our own thing”. On the whole message about freedom to choose won.

What next?

In the short term panic. Some of that panic may be justified for the people panicking. The EU bureaucracy as a whole can quite justifiably be in a huge funk because their jobs, their gravy train and their golden retirements are all on the line. In most cases however the panic is not at all justified. The UK will not abruptly leave the EU tomorrow. Even if the UK were to make an official leave request under article 50 of the Treaty of Lisbon there are two years before an actual exit must occur. Until the UK actually leaves it will still be paying Brussels large sums of money and getting some of that back in various subsidies and grants. Likewise no one will be forced to move – neither expat Brits abroad nor EU citizens in the UK. I anticipate that things will settle down in a few days as the majority of the world decides that this is not in fact the end of times and then things will be very very similar to the way they were last month.

In the medium term it will all depend on the treaty. We have almost no idea what a real treaty will look like because almost everyone who would be required to negotiate that treaty has been telling the UK that the world will end. However when they stop having a tantrum and start getting serious the likelihood is that there will be some sort of free trade agreement and a more restrictive set of rules for residency. We may see more British retirees staying in the UK instead of retiring in the sun, we will probably see rather fewer Eastern Europeans living in the UK. There may be inflation in the UK as prices of imports rise and quite possibly there will be a related export boom as prices of UK products become more attractive to the rest of the world. Likewise the UK may see a tourism boom. Beyond that probably not too much. Trade will continue and the UK will – after some adjustments – almost certainly continue to grow faster than the EU. The one thing I am pretty damn certain of is that the City of London will remain the primary market for European timezones. Some trading will undoubtedly move to Dublin and Frankfurt but I doubt it will be as much as the naysayers of Vote Remain predicted. Just as New York remains a major market in the US, despite tax laws that seem designed to induce businesses to flee and just as Silicon Valley remains the hub of VC funded IT despite all sorts of issues from tax to drought the infrastructure is so embedded in the UK that it can’t move. Indeed if the UK government is smart it will end up attracting more business by providing reductions in effective corporation tax and the like.

In the longer term it’s all going to depend on the stability of the EU and the policies of the UK government. All of which are the result of the bahaviour and actions of politicians, irrational beings at the best of times.

Larger Political Implications

The big question that everyone is asking is about the future of the EU. As someone who has wanted to the see the EU collapse for at least a decade I’m on the side of hoping that it does collapse, but I suspect that EU politics are such that it won’t die as soon as I hope. More likely we will see votes to leave by, at least, the more economically vibrant non Euro members (Denmark and Sweden) and some rather extreme politicians becoming more mainstream all across the continent. Eventually the EU will die because there is no desire amongst the populace at large for “ever closer union” and the Euro is a currency that will be studied by future economists as an example of what not to do. However its death throes are likely to be both protracted and messy.

Assuming the UK negotiates a reasonable free trade agreement and the UK government continues to be run by politicians with clue (yes those are fairly major assumptions) then the UK could well end up being the anchor to a revitalized EFTA that consists of itself plus most of the Nordic nations, plus Switzerland and acts as a default exit for those Eastern European nations that bought into the EU mostly to protect themselves from a resurgent Russia. Again assuming smart UK politicians, this new EFTA could well end up including other unaffiliated developed economies such as Japan, Australia and New Zealand as well as, say, India, Singapore and Malaysia. Played properly it will form the basis of a global FTA as it will end up merging with NAFTA and nurturing an African FTA. Some of this is certainly optimistic, but, although the economies of most African nations are tiny, they are growing faster than any other part of the world and a smart optimistic politician would seek to tie the UK to such a region. (Sarc) Who knows we might call the thing a Commonwealth (/Sarc)

On the negative side, it is quite possible that Scotland will decide to separate from the UK and rush to join the EU. There is a significant fraction of the English population that sees Scotland as a bunch of freeloaders who inflicted the “New Labour” government of Blair and Brown on the rest of the UK so that divorce may be quicker and nastier than Scots expect. I have no doubt that EU politicians will welcome them and that Scotland will end up regretting its choice. Depending on who is in power in London at the time, it is quite likely that Scotland will not be bailed out again (the union of 1707 was essentially because Scotland was utterly bankrupt) because of the aforementioned perceived grudge aganst the ungrateful freeloaders. If so the only way it will survive is to embrace all sorts of policies (fracking, free markets) that the SNP hates. Probably this will be a good thing since it might help Scotland regain the mindset that led it to provide so many influential writers and politicians to Great Britain (and thence the world) in the 18th and 19th centuries, but I imagine it will be painful.

Another big question is Ireland. The English oppressed Ireland mightily for some 900 years so it is understandable that the Irish Republic was keen to join the EEC/EU since it wasn’t dominated by England. Similarly the creation of Northern Ireland is something that any dispassionate external observer has to consider a mistake – indeed there’s probably a lot of lternate history where Ireland is grated home rule in the 1890s as an entire island. Hence given that Northern Ireland also voted to remain (though not as strongly as Scotland and with significant areas voting to leave) it is not impossible that another result of the referendum is Irish reunification as a part of the EU.

However despite their love of the EU because it isn’t England I’m not so sure the Irish really have much in common with continental Europe. If the UK and the Nordic countries were to form some kind of EFTA and the Euro collapses again it is quite possible Ireland would seek to join that.

All of this future depends heavily on voters electing moderately sane politicians and, sadly, although the UK will almost certainly avoid insane politicians because of the referendum, there is a strong possibility that the establishment in other countries will fail to learn the lessons and end up ceding their power to something nastier.

Political Extremism

The great and the good of the UK – that is the BBC, most elected politicians and journalists as well as the “intelligentsia” – did their best to paint the Leave campaign as a bunch of xenophobic “little Englanders”. They failed in large part because a large chunk of the ruling Conservative party MPs as well as some significant Labour party MPs were clearly not extremists. Had few or no mainstream politicians gone for Leave things would have been far worse as it would have been much simpler to paint the UK Independence Party (UKIP) as said xenophobes, even though a deeper inspection would probably have show that UKIP itself is a coalition and much of the coalition are not xenophobic. The result of this referendum is sure to cause some political earthquakes in the UK. I would not be surprised to see Labour become a party of just the Right on SJW forces combined with some nasty Islamic radicals, while UKIP hoovers up their former white working class base in England and Wales (the SNP already got their Scottish working class votes). However although the dynamics will change I don’t expect the UK to elect a truly extremist party to govern anything other than a local council and probably not even that.

It is my belief that the UK dodged a bullet here. In almost every other country in the EU, the anti-EU forces are fascist, nationalist or socialist (and some combine elements of all). Perhaps worse these parties have been successfully labeled as such, whether or not they actually are, and as a result they are attracting the would-be jackbooted thugs even if they didn’t want them. This will not end well. In Europe immigration and unemployment/economic growth are huge causes of discontent. The elites have done their best to label anyone who complains about either as an extremist and this is going to come back and bite them hard. Unless they actually address the issues, we will either see elections where the “extremist” parties win (see Germany/Italy in the 1930s) or we will see revolution and civil war (Spain in the 1930s) and by the time the extremists take to power the economies will be so screwed up that idiotic measures like protectionism will seem to make sense. Some European politicians made noises today about the need to listen to the people and some “extremist” parties aren’t yet so demonized that the extremists are in control, but there’s not much time before disaster is set in motion. In some countries it may be too late.

Thanks to President “l’escroc” Chirac and his successor Sarkozy failing to kill the unions and liberalize the labour laws I think France is hosed. While the current leader of the Front National (Marine Le Pen) is slightly less xenophobic than her predecessor (and father) her proposed economic policies, should she manage a Frexit, make Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders both seem sane and moderate. Should be become elected France will do its best to imitate those powerhouses of 1970s economic growth: Brazil and Argentina. On the other hand as the current president is discovering without a way to control the unions, labour reform of any sort is impossible, and without that France is stuck in a world of high unemployment.

The good news is that if the UK thrives in a post Brexit world, the chances are higher that most of Europe will figure out the problem and adjust themselves instead of insisting that the UK shoot itself in the foot too to make everything equal.

From someone I was a fan of, long before this blog started or I came out of the political closet.  He’s more qualified than I to comment on Brexit. And today there must be comment on Brexit.

Tomorrow I might extrapolate from this to the spirit of the times, the world turned upside down (or right side up, depends on your perspective) and perhaps an explanation on why Donald won’t run after he secured the nom.  He’s arguably more intelligent than Hillary (not hard, even before alcohol ate her brain) and he’s perhaps not a fan of defenestration as it applies to him.  It’s possible.  (Do the man a favor and put in someone who will run already.)

Anyway, I’ve already said enough that I’m going to have SO MANY political arguments during my visit to Portugal it’s not even funny.

So, I’m going to compound the trouble I’m in with this, stolen from the book of faces:

And now I’m going to write because this evening I MIGHT have to make scones.

 

Again this is late, and I’m sorry.  Yesterday Older Son came over and powered through moving boxes that were in the wrong place, while I powered through unpacking the ones that very quickly overwhelmed my bedroom.  By the time I did the instapundit night dj job, I was almost sleep posting.  Hopefully there weren’t any blunders too big.

So I slept a little late and haven’t had nearly enough coffee.

I was thinking as I woke up, that we’ve been eating out way too much.  After unpacking/moving all day, I’ll be so tired the thought of CHEWING makes me want to cry, much less the thought of cooking.  (Actually I still manage to chew, but there was a time I was so tired I had to have milk, because eating was too much work.)

When I get in that state, particularly if I also forgot to eat all day, I can be a pain and a half.  Add to that the tiredness of going out to eat every night — secret is I prefer my own cooking — and you get this:

“Where do you want to eat?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, we’ll go to Mexican Place.”

“NOT that.”

“Right then where?”

“I don’t know.”

“What about Chinese Place?”

“That would be fine.”

“But do you want to go there?”

“I don’t care.”

Repeat with anything you can think of.

I’ve heard exchanges of this type related as to why “people don’t really want freedom.  They want someone to choose for them.”

Right. Sometimes we do.  On things that don’t really matter.  Anyone who knows me well knows that “Sarah wants someone to choose for her” is the answer to “what is the sign that the apocalypse has come?”

BUT in certain things, at certain times, like when picking a restaurant while I’m dead tired, I want someone to say “We’re going to Pete’s, and that’s final.”  However, because I’ve trained my guys to leave me my decision space, we end up in an argument when I refuse to choose.  Same with every member of the family, btw, so it gets funny.

The truth is freedom — any type, even “just” where you want to eat tonight — is work.  Granted, the choice of a restaurant is less work than most, but you must still have some idea of menus, prices, and relative location of the place, which means really work at informing yourself.  And then you need to figure out what you’re in the mood for.

Does the fact that sometimes, on minor things, I don’t want to do the work mean I really prefer tyranny?

Oh, hell no.  I’ll be frank, I never want to do the work.  I’m very lazy except for writing.  BUT I also am aware that no one else choosing for me will choose “right.”

Look, remember being a kid and having your parents choose for you?  If you had anywhere near a normal childhood, those two people are the closest you’ll come in all the world, to someone with your best interests at heart.  And yet, how many times as a kid did they pick things you didn’t want?  And I’m not talking of the “broccoli is better for you than chocolate” type of thing.  I’m talking when your choice would be just as valid, like in buying outfits, but they picked one you hated, because THEY liked it?

Now make the people in charge of your decisions strangers with their own interests.  Do you see?

So what do you do when decisions are a pain?

You retain your freedom for all the decisions you can, and then you delegate.  Or in the case of restaurants, you write all the names down, close your eyes, point at one.

Do that in the case of judges and other political appointees you don’t have the time to research too.  (In my case I vote AGAINST retaining all judges unless one has obtruded on my attention as particularly good.  Too much time in power is a problem we have with our “elites” right now.)

But as much as I disdain the work, it must be done.  Once you surrender your sovereignty to get some peace, you’ve surrendered it all.  Yes, they’ll pick what restaurant you are going to go to, but also what you can say, what you can’t and how.

A lot of minorities — gay people come to mind — think an all powerful state could give them everything they want.  (At least their public representatives do.  Many gay people I know and I’m friends with are holding up both middle fingers RIGHT NOW.)  And they’re right.  An all powerful government COULD.

It also COULD take away everything they have.  Weirdly — and it is weird — I can’t name a single totalitarian government that has been good for minorities.  Communists in particular almost always attain power by courting minorities of all kinds, and then repress them ruthlessly when they attain power.  The “exception” is Africa, and it’s not an exception.  Black skin (well, varying shades of brown) is a MAJORITY in Africa.  So there communists don’t hunt down people with black skin.  Any other color, though, you’re out of luck.

I don’t know why, except that groups tend to behave like a lot of individuals, not a collective mind, and since that doesn’t fit the theory, communists must repress it.  Maybe.  Or maybe the only way to run a totalitarian state is by uniformity.

So when they think instead of doing the work of fighting for what they want in the forum of public opinion, they can surrender that part to the government, and short cut the process, what they are actually doing is surrendering ALL their decisions and all their rights to the hands of a third party.

Do some people want that?

Maybe.  Some people are so damaged that “not thinking” is a great good.  They live where I am after 12 hours of unpacking boxes.

But the majority of people?  No.  They don’t want to make decisions on what doesn’t matter to them.  And being busy cooking, cleaning, unpacking boxes, going to work and raising fat babies, they think a lot of things don’t matter because they didn’t take trouble to inform themselves.

This results in the two horrible candidates standing for president, but it’s not all.  No. The worst part is “people don’t want freedom.  They want someone to choose for them.”

Oh, h*ll no.  Except for our delegated power in our chosen representatives, most of us want to decide on what actually matters to us.  It’s what matters that varies.

Tell the most apathetic voter that you’re going to touch his precious — whatever that is — and it’s a lot like threatening to take me to a Mexican restaurant.  (I actually like food from Yucatan.  I despise tex-mex.)

Listen to what people are saying and the inferences made from your refusals to choose.

Sweet liberty is in your hands.

Keep it there.

*I’m sorry this is so disgracefully late.  I was a bad, bad, bad writer yesterday and had dinner with one of the occasional readers of this blog who happened to be in town (and who is a friend.)  AND THEN this morning had to unload the SUV and then unpack enough boxes to make coffee.  So by the time I sat down to write it was 10 am, and I got sidetracked.  And now I’m going to unpack boxes as I’m temporarily in possession of an older son to help me move things up and down stairs.*

Lately there has been a lot of flap in the respectable literary circles to which none of us would belong, even if they sent us a gold plated invitation about how you must not just writing only what you know, but you should write only what you ARE.

I’ve been on record many, many times that you should write what you don’t know, in the sense that you should write what you haven’t lived.  (Not can.  SHOULD.  It stretches your craft and allows you to experience something else rather than the space behind your eyes.)

Writing what you know should mean something different.  Once you’ve studied a subject or a set of circumstances, you know it and can then write about it.  This is in no way restrictive, and in this sense I FULLY agree with “write what you know”.  I.e. for instance, the person who wrote a regency mystery in which — in ENGLAND! — a nobleman could safely shoot someone in a main street in London and there was no outcry, only “well, he was a peasant” didn’t write what she knew, and made absolutely no effort to check her facts.  More shockingly, Penguin Putnam published that piece of dreck, once more proving the necessity of layers and layers of fact checkers, and demonstrating of fact checkers.  An indie publisher could never have corrected– oh, wait, never mind.

We’ll return to this particular piece of dreck later, for other reasons.  (No, not giving the name, partly because I don’t want to start a fandom fight, and partly because, d*mn it, I can’t remember it.  I deleted it from my kindle with a loud PFUI and have since forgotten both author and title.  This is good.  If I ever meet the author I won’t say “OMG, it’s you! How could you be so stupid?”)

However, by the side I entered publishing, there was already a string of crazy-cakes elderly aunts (particularly the men) screaming that you should only write what you’d LIVED.  Which suddenly and with enlightening force has revealed to me why their novels could cure insomnia.

Look, I’ve lived a relatively more adventurous life than most, by the definition of adventure where it is bad things happening to someone else far away.  A great part of it was through no fault of my own.  I’m a fruit of a place and a time and that whole “peaceful revolution” thing was vastly exaggerated.  Oh, sure, it was not the French revolution, or even the Russian or the Chinese.  But to consider it peaceful you’d need to avert your eyes from several incidents.  Which most of the press did, because these happened to people of no consequence.  And at any rate, you can’t have a revolution without the public getting shirty about it, on either side or — like me — against both sides (though I wasn’t above assuming one side or the other to piss off the other side.  I was a teen.) So there were… incidents.  And those could be the fodder of stories, except for a) my wretched memory.  I can’t even remember WHEN certain things happened.  I retain a memory of escaping through a small window to an alleyway because police were asking for ID at the door (I THINK I was out after the curfew.  I THINK it was nothing exciting.  Just hanging out with friends.  Sweeps were rare, but…) but I can’t for the life of me remember if I escaped through a bathroom window or a warehouse window, if the tip to the guy who showed me that route was extortionate, OR if he did it out of the kindness of his heart.  And I can’t remember WHEN.  All of which would help write a story about it.

Then there’s the various times I disrupted demonstrations in the school: Which year?  What was the price paid?  Don’t know.

Worse, all of these memories have become tangled in things I’ve read, things I’ve studied, and other, later incidents.

And while these were exciting, I don’t feel any particular impulse to write them.  Also, my LIFE wasn’t exciting.  Most of it was boredom, studying, working, and a lot of weekends spent in my bedroom reading, because, you know, I WAS a geek girl.

Since then my life has been anything but adventurous, and certainly not particularly fun to write.  I mean, I could write about my early married years, but even if I set it on terraformed Mars, it would still be a “slice of life” novel.  Now, if I introduced alien invasion…

But of course alien invasion never happened and I can’t tell you for sure how it could go.  For all I know I’m othering the Martians and disrespecting their culture.  (Hangs head in sorrow.)  At any rate, there will be a lot of crazy Marxists, telling me that I only wrote Martians instead of gays, or women, or the poor, or some race or other.  Marxists can’t help it.  They’re rather like the crazy people who follow you screaming things in the downtown of any big city.  Take my son at 13, for instance.  There was a crazy homeless guy in downtown Colorado Springs, who would follow my son around screaming that my son had run over his daughter.  Choice phrases included “You think it’s fun to drive your car and run over people.”  What had Robert done to bring this about?  He existed.  He didn’t even look old enough to drive a car.  But something about his existence piqued this man into deciding Robert was the man who’d killed his daughter.  I can’t even say if he ever had a daughter.  I can just say that when Marxists or crazy street people shout this stuff at you, you should understand the problem is theirs, not yours, and just pretend you didn’t hear.  (Though when I was sixteen and the guy followed me around downtown Porto shouting “you left me for a woman, you whore” this was rather easier said than done.  Never mind.)

However, if I introduce Martians, something I blatantly don’t know in the sense of haven’t lived, into the equation, then I can construct a tale few people have lived (and which might include escapes out of warehouse windows) and therefore interesting to read.

Because the whole point of reading fiction is to LIVE through things you wouldn’t otherwise experience, not to read about other people’s just like yours, humdrum lives.

While I was writing the above about Marxists inevitably saying the villain in your novel must be a placeholder for another race/gender/orientation/nationality, whatever, it occurred to me WHY they are so invested on people writing only what they lived and what they are.

It is entirely possible that flights of imagination are unknown to them.

This is not as strange as it might sound to those of us who whiled away our school days imagining various adventures.  There seem to be in the world a vast number of people — possibly a majority — who can’t really imagine anything wholly new, no matter how hard they try.

It has nothing to do with intelligence.  Even in gifted classes, you see this effect.  The teacher asks the students to write a story and what she gets is a rewrite of the last story read in class. OR you get a mishmash of the last two stories.  OR you get a recounting of the last movie they saw, with names changed.

People who write fanfic (have been known to do that) are several steps above that.  And people who write completely different stuff from anything existing are… apparently baffling.  Which is why — besides assuming that we’re bad people, without any proof but that we disagree with them politically — then tend to pour over our stories in increasingly far-fetched search for allegories and symbolism that mean we’re really, really, evil.

Bah.

I read because I want to experience being in someone else’s head.  I don’t require that the character match the author, I DO require that the author convince me.

To return to the unnamed dreck, this woman was supposedly portraying a tall gentleman, but all of the characters reactions were so wrong, that I kept reverting to seeing him as a small woman.  I finally settled on “Extremely effeminate small gentleman” and so was quite shocked when a woman comes out of the shadows and ravishes him.  (Yes, you read that right, and THAT was wrong, too.  Not that I have anything against a woman ravishing a man, but that the mechanics were …. subtly wrong.  It was not a woman ravishing a man, but a man ravishing a woman.)

By which I mean, by all means, write what you aren’t and haven’t lived, but make sure you know it enough to inhabit that space behind the eyes and then sell it to the readers.

And now you’re wondering why there is a writing blog at according to Hoyt instead of at Mad Genius Club.

There is a blog about this here, because this goes beyond writing.

It is, of course, possible that the people insisting the character MUST match the writer are in good faith, and that being devoid of that kind of imagination themselves they can’t imagine anyone else possessing it.  It is POSSIBLE, even if it is unlikely, since if you DO write what you are, then they accuse you of MarySuing, but that might just be the “crazy people compulsion to follow people on the road and scream at them” in another venue.

Assuming they are in good faith: WHY in h*ll are these people in the arts, much less are accorded any kind of respect and authority?  What has gone so badly broken in our society that their demands aren’t met with the guffaws they deserve?

Another point is: do they imagine everyone is locked in the categories they are born into, unable to understand or work with anyone else forever?  No wonder they so much desire for the government to arbitrate everyone’s life and tell everyone how to live in the most minute detail.

But then the important question is: WHO ARE these creatures that constitute the government?  Last I checked — the Lord be thanked — there were neither gods nor supermen living among us.  So ultimately the people governing us are just humans.  And even if they try — they do — to have humans of like hue and sexual preference and whatever represent each population, the more power they have the more they have to interact with people different from them.  If they are incapable of understanding everyone else, then injustice is inevitable, unless we confine government to very small units over very small groups.  Which might, of course, obviate any sort of common defense or other benefits of civilization.

OR they could tear down that wall in their minds and realize we are all humans and that the hue of our skins, the people we prefer to have sex with, or our socio-economic status are not even the most important things about each of us.

And that the only way to understand the space behind another’s eyes is to put yourself in their places, using sympathy, empathy and, yes, imagination.

 

Yesterday, late in the day (we had vent cleaners, a process that unexpectedly took something like 7 hours, and I was trying to prevent stupid cats from running out to tangle with coyotes and wild turkeys) I finally sat down to read my compadre’s Dave Freer’s blog post.

It was about many things — okay, it was mostly about manure, because you can take the monkey out of the jungle, but… — but in the middle of it he mentioned something about CNN’s CEO admitting they’re in trouble and saying they need to hire more center and center-right reporters.

I thought the Monkey was seeing things — you know, manure has dangerous fumes — so I checked it.  And son of a borg, he was right.

For a moment, for just a moment, I felt as though the ground shifted under my feet.  It wasn’t big or strong, mind, more like a couple of earthquakes I lived through that were so small they barely registered in the richter scale.

The thing is, as with a lot of those, there’s a good chance they’re foreshocks.

I should explain for those of you who arrived late — didn’t you read the schedule?  Is that popcorn?  Do you have enough for everyone? — why this is such a shocking event.

For as long as I’ve been alive — probably longer — the intellectual/publishing/arts/administrative/and lately most managerial establishments have been solidly left.  So solidly left that when a company was in trouble you could count on the roll left.  The process went something like this: get in serious trouble through alienating your audience, roll left, die.

The roll left didn’t save the institutions.  Maybe management was so stupid as to think it would save them.  But I doubt it.  If they got any statistics — it’s iffy.  Most fields that have fallen to the left treat statistics like magic incantations, and look at them as though they were thing that can augur success if treated right.  It’s a process akin to reading the future in the entrails of the sacred goose.  And in some of the fields in advanced stage of leftist necrosis like publishing, they prefer not to get them at all because they might show bad things — they knew they were competing with all the other media and all the other similar institutions for the eyeballs of 1/4 of the population.  (Particularly in the last fifteen years when the other eyeballs have got some place else to go.)

What the roll left did, though, was make sure all the managers and everyone with fiduciary capacity was on record as being “one of the good people” i.e. a member in good standing of the left wing.  Which meant that when their institutions died, they got other jobs.  I’ve followed a particularly lefty magazine editor through four magazines killed, and always falling upward into bigger jobs.

Because that’s how it worked.  For almost 100 years, the left has been safely in charge of the “heights of culture” and cultural institutions and safely indoctrinating anyone graduating from college in the soft sciences into believing that Marxism is as scientific as the poor deranged founder believed.  (Even though no one who has seen it in action up close and personal thinks it is more scientific than Elizabethan views of the cosmos.)

That meant the key to personal upward mobility in any of the soft fields, was to display your badge of leftism as loudly as possible and the more loudly you displayed it, the farther you got.  (Which by the way explains what has made most of our field unreadable.)

So imagine my shock when CNN can in public make noises about hiring center and right of center reporters.

We know they won’t be center and right of center.  I mean when you’re looking from the extreme left, the things that look like center are kind of funny.  (Remember when they thought that George W. Bush and Romney — ROMNEY — were far right?  Good times, good times.)  I mean, even Fox that imagined bastion of right wing isn’t right wing.  Well, right now, by backing Trump they’re kind of European right wing, but not American.  For that matter, by being American right-wing — ie “the government is not the boss of me.  I am the boss of me” — I am invisible to their radar and when they call me “right wing” they mean the European soil-and-blood right wing, which is almost hilarious.  In a bitter-laugh sort of way.

BUT the fact that they’d consider looking at any reporters to the right of Lenin — hey, Pat, have you applied? — and that they’d announce that in public is a seismic shift of global proportions.

So, what happened?

Part of it is time.  There seems to be a clock tolling the maximum time of socialist regimes upon this Earth.  If they go total balls to the wall communist that seems to be 70 years.  No one knows if the socialist insanity would have about the same maximum half life if it didn’t get help from the parts of the economy not yet taken over and from well meaning sympathizers (our government) in other countries.  However, throughout most of Europe the wheels are coming off the various degrees of socialist insanity.  (“No time to have another drink, the lights are going out.”)

Time is their enemy because of that leftist necrosis I mentioned, above.  Why?  Because leftism is a religious cult that often (though not always) runs counter to reality.

What do I mean by that?  Aren’t leftists — or to call them by their proper name, socialists of various stripes — as competent as other people?

Sure.  Sometimes more competent.  And in the beginning years of socialism, a lot of them were the brightest of their kind.  Which is why so many of those bright young things, in the turn of the twentieth century, got pushed up the ladder very quickly.

But those were the days when socialism was scientific.  Psychology, you see, would get quantified and become a hard science.  And then nothing would remain between government and the creation of a better race of men, one that would live in harmony with socialist principles in an Earth where we’d study war no more.

Mind you, the creation of that socialist race, that harmonic humanity that would live in joy in communal prosperity, would require killing vast numbers of people: as George Watson shows in The Lost Literature of Socialism, even such luminaries of both socialism and our field as H. G. Wells believed that attaining this socialist utopia required eugenic genocide and the destruction of everyone who didn’t fall in line with it.  (To give him credit, H. G. Wells didn’t want to do it along the lines of race. And speaking of it being better to read the artists without knowing the craziness they believed, H. G. Wells and Jack London were what I read when most people read picture books.  Ah, well.)

The problem is that psychology never became scientific, and meanwhile genetics did.  Sure, sure, we still have idiots who believe we can breed men like cattle, but they’re not anyone who has actually LOOKED at the genetics of humanity, which are far more complex than cattle genetics (possibly because it now seems possible, instead of homo sap overcoming the competing human species, it loved them to death.  I.e. it absorbed them genetically) and in which traits you’d never think of as linked ARE in fact linked.  And then there’s epigenetics.  Trust me.  I have friends who study this stuff, and I try to listen to them for as long as I can keep my head from hurting.  It’s not very long.

What this means in practical fact is that socialism hard or soft has broken over 100 million eggs and so far not an omelet in sight.

And so, as the “scientific” side of socialism started to visibly fail, it became important to hire not for competence or intelligence (as was done in the days when they were convinced that the future was inevitably theirs) but for one quality only: belief in the shibboleths of the left.  And the more those failed, the more the quality of people who believed in it changed.  Oh, they aren’t stupid.  Not exactly.  At least MOST OF THEM aren’t.  But they are those who are willing to believe or fake belief in a murderous/freedom depriving path to a supposed utopia that never comes.  Weirdly — coff — those attributes don’t relate well with functioning in a sane way in the real world.  (I know.  You could knock me down with a feather!)

Which means sooner or later socialist necrosis sets in.

But the problem with socialism is that it destroys the idea of freedom and personal responsibility, usually early, usually in the schools.  So in the absence of innovative technology and alternate channels, when socialism fails the society/field/profession just… dies.

Thank heavens for the sons of Martha, and their innovative technology and the internet and all that.

Which brings us to where we are.  This is not the beginning of the end — I think — of the left’s cultural dominance in Western society.  But it’s starting to look like hte end of the beginning.

Remember though there is a lot of money, a lot of power on their side now.  While portraying the right as on the side of the rich, they’ve been recruiting the rich and entrenching their privilege for almost 100 years.

It’s not going to be easy and simple.  But there are sudden cracks in the perfect lie presented by all the public outlets.  There are… dissonant notes in the music of the socialist pied piper who has been piping us to our death in soft, slow notes.

I don’t think those cracks will show to those not obsessed by politics for 20 years or so, but who knows?  I could be wrong. And sometimes, in a preference cascade, where falsification of preference has taken place (and at least in publishing the problem has been that you couldn’t tell them anything but what they wanted to hear and have a career.  So they were/still are completely unprepared for the indie revolution when it hit them), can be startlingly fast, a tsunami where things change in the blink of an eye.

It could happen here.  The thing to remember is that it’s unlikely to happen in favor of liberty.  Liberty is hard.  Self responsibility more so.  (Take guns.  Yesterday idiots accused me of being ammosexual.  To anyone who knows me, that’s insanity.  I hate shooting for the same reason I hate driving: because I’m not very coordinated and my eyes are funny and I’m afraid of flubbing.  But as with driving, if I want to live as a free human being, there is no alternative.  I must be responsible for my locomotion and my self-defense.  And that’s all.)

So in the confusion that follows a seismic movement, it’s easy for another form of socialism to sell itself.  Socialism, only now with more blood-and-soil!  The government is not your mommy.  It is now your daddy.  Surrender yourself to the government.

Arguably that form is even more short lived, though they DO tend to have snazzier uniforms.

It is important in the maelstrom building, to remember your principles, and to keep your head.  Schadenfreude will be rife (Really, did you bring enough popcorn for everyone?) but Schadenfreude is not a philosophical or political theory.

Remember the vision of the founders.  Hold on to that.  Statists of various stripes will come out of the woodwork to offer you the easy way out and the snake oil.

But in the end we win, they lose.  Things will just be really choppy on the way there.

Stay the course.

 

Sorry, guys, you know sometimes I wake up not all there.  This is a manifestation of that, since I woke up yesterday with this running through my head.  And as a day of opening boxes and dealing with vent cleaners looms, I decided to indulge myself.  Any of my colleagues borrowed for this exercise were borrowed unwittingly and it’s not really them, but the fan-space version of them.  I apologize in advance.  (Larry, don’t kill me!)  Most of the authors here are Baen or indie, because those are my friends and I stand a lower chance of their killing me.

Opening:

The camera pans to a man who could stand to lose 50 or a 100 pounds, wearing a checkered suit and a loud tie that clashes with it, and holding his microphone in a way that conveys not so much excitement as that he wishes for YOU to think he is excited.  “Hello and welcome to the annual Running of The Fans event, which takes place at a different comicon every year.
Before the doors open to the vast majority of casual fans, people who can prove they’re rabid fans of one of the authors attending get issued a special entrance pass.  Proofs of special favor include knowing the author’s children, having once bought the author’s grocery list OR having a lock of the author’s hair.  There was this one who had a lock–”

“Which is where,” a younger, skinnier version of the big man says, pushing into the camera, ahead of his older colleague “some people say the Oh, John Ringo, no, expression originated.”

“Wait,” says the older one.  “I thought that was because of Ghost, a very fine book if I say so myself.  Not that I have read it.”

“You haven’t?” says the other one.  They trade a look so pregnant that were it a woman there would be a shotgun marriage in the offing.  The younger one breaks it by clearing his throat, “We want to emphasize that every writer who takes part in this is here voluntarily.”

Older announcer, “We have to emphasize that because some years ago we got accused of cruelty to animals, by the SPCA.  It seems that writers fall under some of the classifications for feral and reclusive animals.”

“Indeed,” younger announcer says, pushing to the front again.  “Which is why we are saying they choose it voluntarily.  It is believed to be a test of will and endurance and and…”

“Insanity.”

The camera pans to a group of maybe a hundred writers, jostling and moving restlessly, although in the middle there’s a heated discussion going, probably about what writers discuss when they get together.  That’s right.  Taxes.

A voice from above says “Five minutes until the doors open to the fans.”

“Ah, what a pity,” the younger announcer says.  “We were hoping to give you some interviews with the authors, pre event.  But there won’t be time for that.  As you see, the authors seem to be in fine fettle.”

The announcers spend some time panning the faces of individual authors and discussing their accomplishments.

This is interrupted by a voice from the ceiling, “The fans are coming, the fans are coming.”

The double doors open on a throng at the end of the hall.  Some of the fans are in costume.  There is a minotaur in an Acme costume, for instance, several ladies in corsets and men wearing uniforms of all epochs, some of them imaginary.

The announcers shriek and run behind the barriers which are formed by booths filled with books.  For a while the melee is too confused to focus on, and the announcers are both talking at the same time.

After a while the younger announcer says.  “John Ringo is down.  I repeat he’s down, and they’ve taken his kilt.  But he’s still fighting valiantly.”

“Larry Correia,” says the older announcer, “Is still running, though he is QUITE literally covered in fans demanding his autograph.  Look at him move!  That’s why they call him The Mountain Who Writes.”

“If mountains moved, of course.”

“We have the first author to escape the melee, ladies and gentlemen.  David Drake seems to have evaded the fans by the expedient of pretending to be lost and asking for directions, then fading away.”

“I don’t believe that was an expedient.  He probably is lost.  We’ll eventually find him in Timbuktu, all the while trying to find the convention restroom. He’s legendary for such dislocations.  We believe there might be magic involved.”

On camera, a group of fans gets hit by a volley of books, and falls back, “Ah, that is Mad Mike, aka Michael Williamson.  They didn’t let him bring his guns, so he has MacGyvered a book-throwing weapon out of booth construction tubes, banners and chewing gum.”

“Let go of me, you daft buggers,” sounds from somewhere, and the camera finds Kate Paulk besieged by fans.  As she starts to sign books profferred by the bans, you can hear her mutter, “Ah, should have brought stakes.”

“Poor Kate Paulk.  After all David Weber caught carpal tunnel after such a mishap.”

“They also caught James Young, Sarah Hoyt — who tried to pretend to be Russian to escape–”

“No, that really is her accent.”

“At any rate,” says older announcer.  “It didn’t work.  And something very odd happened when they cornered Amanda Green.  It appears that a giant black cat leapt away from the fray, no one knows where.”

“Interesting.  I always thought that was just her books…”

“Then there is Sabrina Chase, who keeps crying out ‘they tempted me with science.’  Apparently someone asked her a science question, immobilizing her while her fans surrounded her.”

“The least said for the fates of Peter Grant and Pam Uphoff, the best.  I believe each of them has now signed 100 copies and there are still mountains of books to sign.”

“Dave Freer is the only author now still at large and not signing.  He’s barricaded in a booth and keeping rabid fans away with a barrage of coconuts.  Of course, sooner or later he’ll run out of ammunition.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, this has been the annual running of the fans, at a comicon somewhere in the US.  A blood sport only a few authors are brave enough to dare.”

 

Last day at comicon.  I’m going in for only 4 or 5 hours, (which means I’ll actually get home around 2 if that.  Traffic is interesting) because it’s our first week sort of in the new house, and there’s tons of little stuff to do.  (Mostly unpack, but also unpack, and also minor repairs and adaptations.)

Some things about comicon, first: despite claims these aren’t “our kind of people” by older, more established cons, the fact is that on that very first day, approaching the con (and circling.  And circling.  Slower than a slow walk.  No, seriously) there was a line around two blocks, and my son (who was looking for a place to drop me off) and I looked at it and said “our people.”

It wasn’t the costumes.  In fact, about half the costumes are for things my son recognizes but I don’t.  My affinity with dinos comes from the fact I’m one.  For fun, I read, write, and if push comes to shove, go build furniture or crochet of of course go look at dinos in a museum.  I DO NOT RPG, watch tv, play computer games, read comics…  Which means I miss a lot of the fandom.  My loss, but I yam what I yam.  (Okay, lie, I read comics, but it’s Disney and no one counts those.)

It was the way of standing, the way of moving, the way people look (yeah, some of us try very hard to pass and it would be nice if the hormone adjustment weren’t packing more pounds on me than… well, than I’ve ever had) but still, there’s often something… odd about us.  Or as Kate says, our bodies match our minds.  It’s also the way we dress.  Pratchett caught that mood exactly when he has the pigwitch wear forks in her hair.  I mean if chopsticks, why not forks.

And of course, this was our people, letting their hair down, not our people at the office on Wednesday, so they were letting the Odd flag fly.  Take one lady who came to our booth, wearing a dragon ear sleeve, dragon contact lenses, and a dress that was a wild assemblage of flying bits of cloth. I was kind of at the back, looking at her features.  She was pretty enough.  Regular features, good bones.  BUT in a sort of unremarkable sort of way.  And in front of those dragon eye lenses, she wore tortoise-shell glasses.  Wipe away the make up, put her in a suit and I bet she melts into the business meeting tomorrow.  She’s “That lady in research who always know the answer and is incredibly correct and polite” I bet.  Unless she’s among their kind and safe.

Now is everyone there a science ficiton reader?  More than I’d expect.  We’ll say that.  You get a lot of parents who are convinced SF/F is for kids and though they don’t read it themselves are walking around leading progeny and asking every booth “Do you have stuff for children.”   Some of them insist on buying my shifters.  I GUESS they could do worse?

Another point is that age, ethnicity or Spanish accent and halting construction of sentences do not denote a reader or non reader.  The last might sound like kettle calling the pot accented, but come on, I don’t have a problem building English sentences. OTOH he asked the right questions and spoke clearly about the past of the field, so he’s definitely a reader.  Heck, most engineers hesitate in their own language, why not in their second language.

Oh, and several of you — okay, several instapundit readers, but there’s overlap — came to see me yesterday and asked about putting fictional hits on some of my colleagues who have annoyed them.  My. What a murderous lot you are.

And now I’ll go.  There will be more about comicon, including the fact that the warning voice from the ceiling does this “The public is coming, the public is coming” for half an hour before they open to the public.  You know “The doors will open to the public in half an hour/twenty minutes/ten minutes” and then just “The public is coming.”

Next year I shall have a camera and a willing fan, and we will do a “running with the fans: version of running with the bulls in pamplona.  A lot of us writers running in front of a horde of fan who try to pry books/autographs from us.  It will be glorious!

I’m attending Denver Comicon this weekend, at the Wordfire booth, which has a deal with Baen to host Baen’s authors where Baen doesn’t have a booth.

Yesterday was relatively slow, because Friday always is.  Relatively slow is still orders of magnitude larger than the old sf/f cons.

Because all program directors are partly prankster gnomes, and because I was QUITE LITERALLY in between two house moves while the programming was being set, and skimmed the emails without reading, I ended up on the least desirable — first — panel of the con and that was it.  That’s fine.  It’s not a complaint.  I just need to work more with them next year.

However I was so out of it, I only realized early morning that my panel was on mental health in sf and f.  (I have a vague memory of having seen that before, then promptly spaced it.)

I have no idea why, still — except maybe the program director thought I was being nuts? — since I’m neither a clinical psychologist, nor a social worker, nor particularly interested in “when your mind goes wrong.”

I thought it was because of Darkship Renegades, where I wrote possibly my worst nightmare: having your mind “invaded” by “someone else” which has sort of happened to me twice.  Not “someone else” as in the book, but simply being temporarily impaired due to concussion (once) and hormonal imbalance (once).  It is fairly close to being taken over by another mind, in the sense that you remember being able to operate normally for you, you’re aware you’re not, but there’s nothing you can do about it.  It’s one of the most frustrating situations in the world.  Anyway, so I thought that’s why I landed on the panel, and maybe it was.

But as the panel progressed I figured out none of my characters is EXACTLY normal.   I mean, Thena is probably a psychopath (maybe) or at least presents as one.  Tom and Kyrie suffer from spectacularly weird childhoods, Zen is recovering from a very traumatic incident and at any rate was raised by wolves, the least said about Luce’s mental health the better, and that’s without getting into witchfinders, musketeer vampires, and other weirder creatures.

I disagree with the thrust of the panel in one thing: my colleagues were very much people of the “writing to change society” persuasion, while I’m writing for money persuasion.  Oh, sure for passion, too.  But mostly for money.  And while I don’t sit around looking at characters and going “which one will make me more money?” I also don’t sit around going “which character will communicate my message.”  Some things are not entirely under my control, and most of all I have to have a character who is alive in my head.  (Related: someone in the audience “Some cultures value mental illness, like hearing voices.”  My colleagues on the panel agreeing “That’s true, and I think it’s something that needs to change.”  Me “I could say a lot about this, but I’ll only say, half in jest, ‘Yeah, my royalty checks are not nearly large enough'”  — which got me puzzled glances.  Sigh.  I was born before or after my time.  One day I’ll figure out which.)

The thing my colleagues were right about is how affirming it is, if you have a disability or “just” are weird to see someone like you portrayed as a hero/main character.

Now, we’re all grown ups, and don’t NEED that particular affirmation, but I did get more emails of thanks for my Jane Austen fanfic in which Mr. Darcy is handicapped, from handicapped people whom the story made feel “sexy” for the first time in their lives, and I still get occasional notes saying “Thank you for making Nat and Luce fighting men, as I rarely have anyone I feel fairly represents me.”

But in a greater sense, the fact that characters are flawed — partly because it makes them more interesting — is a good thing.  Because when the main characters are flawed and still achieve great things, it gives everyone something to shoot for.

Look, none of us, achieving maturity, can say our psyche or our body is unflawed (unless we’re the most unself-reflecting person alive, which is in itself a flaw.)

I was recently surprised by someone who saw me at the height of this eczema flare up saying “I don’t know how you can live with/interact/go about your daily business with that.”  Well… I’ve had it since I was one, and humans are an infinitely adaptable organism.  I’m not about to let a little (itchy, annoying, responsible for my being awake just now) skin condition hold me back.  I have things to do.  Being less than normal, even in the pejorative sense, was never a reason to sit down and mourn your fate.  Humans, as a species, are the kind to be up and doing.  Do you think great great great grandfather Ogg in his cave didn’t have any physical or mental health problems?  Ah!

Which bring us to “I’m uncomfortable” — physically or psychologically — “so someone needs to make things right” movement.  These people are more or less infants, who think the entire environment including other people exists for their comfort and convenience.

Which is why they’ll never do anything or accomplish anything.

The rest of us, flawed or not, have a date with the future.  So set about building, creating, supporting, helping.  The only way to forget your own problems is to immerse yourself in tasks bigger than yourself.

Sure, of course, you’re cracked.  We all are.  But to quote Leonard Cohen “There is a crack in everything.  It’s how the light gets in.”

*A PSA before the post: I’m at Denver comicon all day today and certainly tomorrow.  If you’re out there, come see me at the Wordfire booth -Sarah *

I AM PRIVILEGED – Sanford Begley

I am privileged. This is true, but not in the way the left thinks. The other day I disagreed on social media with a woman about another program to take from workers and give to parasites. She said that she had been middle class and was now poor and I couldn’t understand because I am privileged. I thought about it and replied that she was right. That answer is the seed of this post. Many of you are even more privileged than I, but I’m going to tell about my privilege now.

I was born in Appalachia in the middle of the twentieth century. Well it was the middle of the twentieth everywhere else, in most of Appalachia it was still somewhere between the nineteenth century and the mid twentieth. Many places were still using “coal oil” lanterns and indoor plumbing was rare. I was an adult before living in a house that had an indoor toilet. Central heat was a coal fired stove in the middle of the living room and a wood stove in the kitchen. Being the first one up in zero weather was an adventure. Could you start a fire before the cold started to hurt?

Many people I knew, much of my family in fact, lived in what were known as tar-paper shacks. This was a wood frame covered with the tar paper used by roofers for waterproofing. I believe I was privileged enough that I never lived in one myself. I’m not sure, we followed the jobs and work was hard to come by then.

I remember one of my aunts lording it over the rest of the family because she married a farmer who had a pump in the kitchen, right on the sink. The rest of us carried buckets from an outside well or a spring. I remember being impressed, it had such shiny red paint.

For these reasons I had a privileged childhood. I worked like the rest of the family and we were mostly comfortable with what we had, that is privilege. More importantly I am intimately aware of what real poverty is. Not the wealth that they try to claim is poverty today. I know what real poverty and hunger is. I am privileged!

I was transplanted from Appalachia to southern OH when it was time to start first grade. Naturally I spoke with a hillbilly accent, though I didn’t know it. And just as naturally my teacher and most of the school administrators despised me for it. You see, hillbillies were the lowest of the low in the early sixties. Stupid, lazy, and thieves the lot of us. Had someone called a “Colored” student anything bad they might have been censured for racism. Not so those worthless hillbilly trash. I note that with the exception that “colored person” is not acceptable, that has not changed. I am privileged!

 

I also am privileged to come from a broken home in the days when it was a disgrace for a woman to be a divorcee. The only time I saw my father as a child, I was 18 months old and he was in jail. I have no idea what he was in jail for, nor do I have any memories of the event. That is privilege. I don’t hold it against my father by the way, I know there were controlling vindictive people in his family and my mother’s who wanted to break both of them. I got that kind of privilege too, the one where you cannot trust your family because the less sane ones ran things.

I was raised by my mother and my step-father. He is a different kind of man in many ways. He did teach me one thing that I will forever love and honor him for. He taught me that love and family is who cares for you, blood be damned. That is a real privilege.

As a hillbilly who had hearing problems due to experimental medicine that saved my life, I never lost the accent, though it mellowed to southern instead of pure hillbilly by adulthood. This meant that I always stood out, not in a good way, among my classmates. I was also better able to learn, remember and test on that knowledge than most among my age group. So much more that I was an outcast in school. I was bullied by the best. So I am privileged to know that a few taunts online don’t qualify as bullying. Bullying involves bruises at the least.

I was from a family of working poor. Thing is, they refused to remain poor. On working class single earner wages my family bought land and built a modern home by the time I graduated from school. There was no one in my family that knew about High School graduation before me, how to enter college, let alone pay for it was a mystery we had no clue about. All the news said was that there would be no financial aid for me and so, with the guidance counselors in my school being those who went into education to avoid the VietNam war I had no clue how to go to college. This was also a privilege

With no other way of paying for school I fell back on the poor man’s hope. I enlisted in the army. My time of service was technically VietNam era, though there was never a chance of my going to Southeast Asia. I did get the privilege of not wearing my uniform when on leave because there were plenty of those who thought all soldiers were myrmidons and it simply wasn’t wise to antagonize them. After all, we know what happens to a G.I. who causes trouble in the civilian world. Things have changed, though they seem to be heading back that way.

While in the army I had the privilege of being told that I had too many advantages so women and minorities got first choice of jobs and promotions, whether they qualified or not. That is white privilege as I understand it. After getting out I was told I was not qualified for any veterans groups because I didn’t serve in a time where it was important.  I am privileged!

So with all this I still managed to climb almost to the bottom rung of middle class. I have found love, friendship, and a voice in the world. Damn right I’m privileged!  Hardship makes you stronger.