According To Hoyt

I’m one of those people who has always prided herself on handling change well.  (Hope, OTOH I’m not big on.  I prefer to do than to hope.  And let’s not talk about charity, either.  I do what I can, but my thoughts aren’t always the most charitable.  I find, particularly as I get older, that I have a tendency not to take fools at well, let alone gladly.)

I mean, I  was all of 17 the first time I packed up and crossed the ocean on my own, (kind of.  There was a plane and a crew, and a bunch of other exchange students.  Stop being literal) with no relative to hold my hand, even thought this was unheard of in my culture for what Austen referred to (and which still applied in the culture I was brought up in) a “delicately nurtured girl.”

Not only did I do okay, and enjoy it, but I discovered I like strange things and new experiences.  Um… not the kind where you say “if you’ve never done it how do you know you don’t like it?” something my first serious LTR used all the time to try to coerce me into stuff.  (I know it will surprise you it didn’t work.  My answer usually being “I’ve also never tried being cut in two, and I’m sure I wouldn’t like it.  Some experiences are terminal.”) I mean given a choice of the known and easy or the difficult and different, I’d try the second.

Mostly because I’ve come to the conclusion at 53 that the thing I dread most is boredom.  In fact I tend to get away from it instinctively and without noticing, like a flat worm and a pin.  It took years for my husband to understand (I THINK he does now) that when I wander away from say a cash register line or a conversation, I’m not being rude, or at least not consciously so.  There’s a switch at the back of my brain that goes “bored now” and next thing you know I’m elsewhere, doing something else. This is a problem when writing the slower parts of a book, because my brain goes, “Okay, if you won’t let us leave, I’m going to fall asleep” and this is why I couldn’t have a career writing only lit fantasy, on pain of dying or becomeing pseudo narcoleptic.

I seem to have this trait in higher concentrations than normal human beings, because in the exchange student group, all of them presumably people who liked exploring and discovering new stuff, the tendency was to cleave to your linguistic or cultural group or as close as you could.  Portuguese hung out with Portuguese and failing that Brazilians, and failing that Spanish, and failing that Italian or Greek, progressing until, if there were Europeans in the group they clung together, and if there weren’t, then Portuguese would gravitate to Latin Americans.

It’s not that I don’t understand the attraction or don’t have my moments of oikophilia.  My host family were friends with a Cuban family and visiting their home was balm to a homesick teen, because it was SO similar.  They even had similar names for things that my family had named.

And honestly my first expedition away from home (at 12) to a summer camp was torpedoed when I got so homesick I had to leave halfway through.  But that was  different. It was one of those super-regimented summer camps, which scheduled your every minute.  And they didn’t let me watch TV news, which at the time drove me nuts.

And that brings us where I am: a strange environment I can’t control.

Okay, let’s make some things clear: I actually like the house we’re renting now very well, and our cats seem to love it.  If we were to buy it, I estimate 100k in improvements, but that doesn’t arise, as it’s not where we need it to be.  However, moving is a horrible dislocation, we’ve lost things, and life’s rhythms are disrupted.  Also we can’t unpack everything (a) no time, as we’re probably only here for three months on the outside and b) no room, as if we were to make this our permanent abode, we’d need to expand and make offices in the garage.  Yes, we’re space hogs.  We were talking about this, because it seems obscene to need so much room.  And objectively we don’t.  We use three rooms for the three of us, with additional space for the kids, as needed.  But here’s the thing — books (research) and office equipment and supplies take up way too much space.) So inevitably some of the things I need (like batteries, this morning, or all of our cutlery) are “in a box, somewhere.”

But what is distressing me, and what made us decide we DON’T want to rent long term is that I can’t control the change.  I.e. we moved here, suddenly (and are grateful to have it) because the landlord at the other house decided he wanted to sell and wanted us out.  He was within the law to give us a 40 day notice, but it was d*mnedly inconvenient, particularly since it’s possible (!) the short sale will still come through in the next month or so. And the last thing we needed or wanted to do was to move twice in that time.

And this is what made me realize that while I don’t mind/like change, I hate being out of control.  This sojourn (we’ve been renting for over a year and trying to find a place to live for six months) would be okay if it had an end date and we knew when we’re moving and where we’re going.  It’s the loose and unpredictable nature of the situation that’s driving me nuts.

Which means that some changes — the availability of Indie! — are good because they offer opportunities I can explore in my way.  And some are very very bad — the insanity of our national politics — because all I can do about them is panic and cringe.

Which means the next four years or so are going to be “fun” for me and people of similar disposition.

Meanwhile on the domestic update front there is some movement on short sale.  Those inclined to prayer, please pray that it actually comes through if it’s meant to be for us, and that it does so quickly.

And Derpfish is swimming around and eating, which seem like hopeful signs.  (As I type this, just watch he’ll be doing the backstroke by tonight.)  Also we have the cats back home, and office and kitchen are more or less unpacked.

Which means by tomorrow we should be fully functional, even if we intend to use the time here to cull our unnecessary possessions (mostly books, but any number of kitchen stuff too) and simplify our lives.

So, I’m trying to control the chaos, before it eats me.  Which might be the secret to living with chaos, but still leaves me in a blank about our national politics.

 

 

This comes to you from the once and future office, but I couldn’t get my regular (wireless) keyboard to work, which is what made it so late.  I’m using Goldport’s keyboard, until I find batteries for the darn thing.

Post in a little while.  Going to do Mad Genius Club post first.

When I was in a writers’ group years ago, my friend Alan had this gag he did when commenting on an obviously short or funny story.  “I found what it said about the human condition profound and illuminating.”  Or “This is obviously about the human condition, but other than that—”

Well, that gag made me hesitate to make this post, but this post IS actually about the human condition.

Yesterday just before going to bed, I read an article linked from Instapundit about poverty in the Appalachia.  Of course, this meant I spent most of an unquiet night (yesterday was one of those days where real life and interruptions intervened to keep me from going for a walk or even using the treadmill – by the time I had time to, I was dead on my feet.  For some reason just walking around most of the day, but not an uninterrupted, full out, fast walk of three miles, doesn’t allow me to sleep well at night.) dreaming of buying land in that region.  It was the line about violent crime being below national average and also the line about how cheap cost-of-living was.  Something in my back brain went “Well, it would be a place we could live in on my writers’ income.”

While this is probably true it would be quite stupid at my age, since I doubt there is any easy way to access emergency medical services.  (Yes, I’m only fifty, but my health has been iffy from early on, and I tend to work myself into sickness.  Also, given my inability to catch on that I’m ill till I’m VERY VERY ill, I have needed medical services in emergencies more than I should, and I don’t expect this trend to taper off.  Also, if we bought we would be buying for the rest of our lives, and I hope (fingers crossed) for another forty years with increased need for medical services as I go.  Which is one of the reasons for considering relocating to a LARGER city.)

Now I’m awake, and not shopping for land amid verdant hills I’ve driven through once or twice in my life, I was thinking about the article.

I have reasons to add some salt to it.  First the characterization as a “White Ghetto” brings with it a whole lot of freight which the journalist should have been wary of and clearly wasn’t.  Because of the title and leaving the correction about how low crime (other than welfare fraud) actually is, I imagined the images that “Ghetto” conjures: shootouts in the glades, women murdered in their houses… that sort of thing.

Turns out no.  While it is inhabited by a bunch of welfare recipients, has almost no stores (this possibly to the lack of population density) and lacks opportunities for local employment, this region is not a hell hole of gang shootings and violent theft.

Which immediately makes it completely different, and far more desirable as an address, than any urban ghetto.

In fact, the author says that for those who have money and who are “well connected” (though this is likely true I think the more important part is “self controlled”) it’s a paradise.

Which brings us to what is wrong with the rest of the local population, and how to help them.

The first is obvious and is going to make me sound horribly heartless.  The second… Ah the second is far more difficult.

The answer to the first is “There is nothing wrong.  They are normal, sane humans.”

And now you’re going to gibber at me about drug use and child neglect.  And – not here, but elsewhere – someone is going to call for more federal money dumped into the place.  They’ll call for more Head Start, more jobs programs.  The left who – with more than a bit of self flattery – will flap gums about how our technological society is leaving people behind, how all these poor people simply aren’t SMART enough to make money and thrive in the new new technological world.

DIGRESSION

This flatters the left insanely because they clearly are “smart” enough to thrive in the new technological world.  Lately in reading their stuff it’s all about power couples and marrying intelligent people and – bah.  They wouldn’t know intelligent people if one bit them in the arse.  They are what in our school system were A students.  These were never – at least when I was going through school – the actual SMART people (unless the smart people made a great deal of effort.)  True geniuses tended to be odd.  They dressed funny, sometimes had er… hygiene issues, and they had the confounded habit of correcting teacher.  As such, they were heartily despised by all right thinking people, and usually managed Bs, unless they were really really smart, in which case they trolled the D/F region.  In adulthood the geniuses I’ve known – those functional enough to hold a job – tend to hold jobs in convenience stores, fertilizer plants, or other menial positions where the fact they don’t dress fashionably and haven’t attended Harvard doesn’t matter.

This is why the beautiful people hold on to CREDENTIALS over accomplishments as signs of their specialness.

Which is why the “economy” the left is thriving on is a combination of glitz, glamour and valueless money printed at speed and of crony capitalism which devours the real substance of prosperity accumulated by our ancestors.

HERE ENDETH DIGRESSION

Part of the reason that even as the welfare model is collapsing all over the world, the left is hysterically seeking to bolster it is that they really think they are in a “With Folded Hands” future, where everything that “the little people” could do has been mechanized and therefore we should give the little people the means to survive and let them get stoned out of their minds, because, what else is there to do?  Kill them?  Oh, please, the left aren’t monsters.  They just hold on to monstrous ideas.  (Note I said “part of the reason” – some of the left is doing this for the power, of course, and to create a neo-feudal society.  But the rank and file of the evil party are not actually evil.  They’re just human and know a lot of things that just ain’t so.)

(Is there a lack of work for uneducated/not particularly intellectual people?  What, in the last 20 years?  Show me where the advances in manufacturing/computing/etc put these people out of work.  What is really happening is that our personal do-gooders have priced the US worker out of competition – and it’s not even the minimum wage, an effort as sane as legislating air humidity, as the crazed and increasingly futile environmental and other regulations – so the jobs have moved overseas.  This will correct itself either when the other lands create a middle class that demands better treatment – though they’re unlikely to demand crazy enviro regulations – or when we hang the komissars with their own guts.  Because as has been pointed out on this blog, there will always be need for the kind of mind that thrives on detailed, repetitive work, and which really really really doesn’t want to speculate about the causes of the Spanish-American war or read about Elizabethan England.  Whether these minds are less able, I refuse to even consider, because look… I couldn’t do what my plumber – or my hairdresser! – does.  I certainly couldn’t do what factory workers do.  It would drive me as batty as for them to do what I do.  Yeah, they test lower on IQ, a test designed to measure achievements of a certain kind.  We’ll just say they have different types of mind and that, without interference, there would be work they could do.)

So, what is wrong with these people is that they’re human.  When war on poverty was declared, it’s obvious what they were thinking of as an explanation for poverty was what is now called “The beesting theory of poverty.”  That is people are poor not because of any one big problem/injustice, but because of an accumulation of little things.  Car broke down, children got sick, got laid off, and is so held down that nothing – nothing – can lift you up again.

Does this happen?  Yeah, sure.  I’ve known cases of its happening to my friends and relatives.  I’d call it “crisis poverty.”  But I’d dispute the theory that this explains long-term poverty.

The facts seem to dispute it too.

I’m not just going on my own anedoctal experience – though I have that – having been in that situation at least twice in my life, and having clawed back out of it, or even in the experience of my friends and relatives, ditto, but on the fact that very few middle class people “fall” that way and never get up again.  In fact statistics seem to show the middle class moves up far more frequently than down.  I can’t find it, of course, but someone did an analysis of middle income in constant dollars, and the middle class has shrunk, as has the poor class, but the upper income has grown.

No, the sort of ground in, long lasting poverty is, as instapundit noted in linking this “the condition of the human race.”

Heinlein has a quote about it, and I’ve mentioned it here before:

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

This is known as “bad luck.”RAH

Insty mentions this, but Heinlein doesn’t go deeper into the mechanism, and neither goes insty.

Look, I’ll admit I don’t have any study on this, except what everyone has: that minimum income guarantees don’t make regions markedly richer (I understand that there was a program in Denver that spectacularly had the opposite effect.  I don’t remember when – the seventies?), that people on welfare that covers their bare minimum needs have trouble escaping it, and their kids have trouble escaping it, that socialist countries tend to go the route where no one quite starves but no one thrives, and everyone sort of simmers on at “poverty” level, more so as the years go by.  (Sweden? Norway?  Well, not enough years.  Despite the oddities of culture there – and yes, culture does count – they seem to be heading down, just not as dramatically and as fast as bigger and more diverse countries.)

Part of the issue with the war on poverty is that it seemed completely reasonable “Give people just enough to lift themselves up out of dire need and they’ll do the rest.”

Only people don’t work like that.  No?

Okay, do an experiment with your toddler: offer them a food they like well enough but aren’t crazy about – say eggs – and tell them they can have chocolate cake instead if they clean their room to your satisfaction.

Sure they’ll take the bait SOMETIMES, but most of the time they’ll shrug and have the egg.

I don’t know about other human beings, but I know one of the most prolific writers I know says he’s the world’s laziest writer.  He just FORCES himself to work.  And I can attest that I too often think I’m two people: one that wants to go bum out on the bed with a book, and the other who chases her around and makes her write.  (The chasing around time usually involves my bummish self trying to justify her leisure with increasingly crazy stuff like “I’m cleaning the litter boxes.  Scrubbing the toilet!  Ironing!)

I also know my older, extremely driven son, often tells me he is incredibly lazy and doesn’t force himself to do a quarter what he should.

I think all humans are lazy and all humans given a “minimum to live comfortably” don’t do anything else.  It’s not a bug.  It’s a feature.  A Neolithic hunter who continued hunting after he’d eaten enough for the day would deplete the food supply and the meat would rot.  This idiot left no descendants.  We’re descended from the sensibly lazy ones.

So, what about that “despised minority” – well, the despised minority that does more than strictly needed and thereby makes themselves “rich” and advances the wealth of all human race are usually, in social terms, deeply flawed.

It either has a tribal identity which needs security in mobile goods for the next time its crazy neighbors try to kill them, or it – one on one and individual on individual – is deeply broken.  Often they are Odds, and no, don’t get recognition just for “being smart” or whatever their oddity is, so they keep trying to get some recognition for SOMETHING.  And often they have other issues.  It is not coincidental that the lives of almost all great men often resemble horror tales, particularly the childhood parts.

There is another driver and that is a cultural identity that prizes work above all else.  The famed “Protestant work ethic” though I always thought that was funny as obviously there is the same thing on the Catholic side (but maybe there wasn’t at one time) was a powerful driver.  People would judge you for being lazy and not trying as hard as you should, and that in turn made people try very hard indeed.  Most people.  Because as Heinlein also pointed out the strongest motivating force for any simian, member of a highly social species, is the approval of its peers.

So you can see how when the “war on poverty” started and there were still fumes of this social judgment going on, the bee sting theory would apply.  Oh, sure, there were still ne’er do wells who weren’t even pretending to try, but they were few and far between.  Most people would at the very least PRETEND they were trying to climb out.

So people looking from the outside would think “let’s make it easier”.

But the very fact of giving people unearned income makes two implicit assumptions: that poverty is not their fault and that it can and should be treated from outside.  (I.e. that there’s nothing they could do.)

That in turn changed the culture so people don’t at all feel guilty for not trying to climb out.  In fact the poorer they are, the more “deserving” and the more obviously burdened, and they should be given more stuff to bring them to parity with “luckier” people.

And then you have vast regions of poverty.

I resent very much the implication that the people of that region are good for nothing but being “peasants” – although in a right wing publication, the writer clearly buys into the left’s nonsense about “too dumb to thrive.”

Medieval peasants were in their unenviable condition because they needed the Lords to defend them in case of attack and this meant giving the lord rights to micro-manage their lives.  Which meant they could never climb out, because this was their “condition” – and yes, the lord looked after them in terms of keeping them alive.  And could kill them as well.

It might seem primitive to us, but it’s a highly sophisticated structure and far from natural.

As soon as the Black Death burst the bounds of the middle ages structure, the peasants took off into the wilderness, where they could take risks for their own survival AND they could innovate and be richer than ever before.

So, am I suggesting we abandon the people of Appalachia to their fate? Isn’t that cruel?

How much crueler can it be than what we’re doing to kids raised by drugged-out parents?  And what business is it of ours anyway?  Keep the payments for the elderly and the too young, and cut everyone else off.  Let them make their way to where they can make a living, or learn to wrest a living from the land again.

Horrible, right?  Well, it sounds horrible, even to me.  Because I grew up in a time when it was assumed it was the state’s right and duty to improve human lives – even in contravention of human condition.

Right.

The chances of it happening?  Not high.  So these people will go on living in pill-happy serf-like poverty (but producing nothing useful, unlike the serfs.)  Until and unless the gods of the copybook headings in terror return.  Or until the culture takes a turn where work is again enforced as a virtue.

And then we’ll find the vast majority of those “too stupid to thrive” people do indeed thrive and that most of them aren’t stupid at all.  They’re just human.

And here’s the truly stupid thing about humans: as much as we hate work, work is good for us.  When we work, we create something of value to others, and that raises our simian status among our peers, and in turn that’s good for our mental health and even our physical one.  (Work here being defined as doing something useful, not filling federal forms or polishing dog poo.)

And the more we work and the more confidence we gain, the more we find we can do, and the more interesting it becomes.

But none of us would start without some incentive that makes it more painful not to work.  For a lot of us that’s being not quite right in the head (what, you think a person who sits around writing lies for a living is sane?); for others it’s having something to prove; but for the vast majority of sane humans it is to need to eat and have a roof over their heads.

And this is why in the war on poverty we lost.  We met poverty and found that the seeds of it resided in each of our very sane normal brethren.

Poverty is normal.  Sloth is normal.  It’s we who work who are crazy. Absent that madness we’d all be living in caves and feasting-starving on hunted mammoth.

Sorry to be so late with this: woke late/starting upper respiratory trouble, I think, then in order: laundry, unpacking, comcast.

But we’re not here to talk about my personal life (thank heavens), we’re here to talk about literature.  It is a subject I’m eminently qualified to discuss, as the normal end result of my degree was either as language professor/literature professor or translator.  A rare and vanishing few made it to the diplomatic corps and that was mom’s ambition for me — did you just snort giggle? — but despite my having the grades to do it, and having made contacts at all the foreign consulates (particularly the American Consul, a Texan Reagan appointee who shared the GOOD Bourbon with me) I really never thought I could make a success of such a career.  I know, hard to picture.

And by the time I finished third year I had had fishing on the part of my college, on letting me establish a program on science fiction literature, and giving me one of those permanent jobs with retirement plan.  Some days I wonder why I threw it all over, then I remember generations of Portuguese college children subjected to my skewed view of both science fiction and literature and realize that it’s all for the best in the best of all possible worlds and all that.

So, today I’ll revert to my roots and we’ll discuss literature. You may picture me standing at a lectern, in my black skirt suit and black tie and looking very proper.  (Is that a smirk?  Did you bring enough to share with the whole class?)

First I’ll confess I have defenestrated more “How to write” books for the crime of trying to define non-literature than for any other crime.  There was a particular one on plot and theme, which I was following riveted until in the middle, the worst pedants of his nature took over his brain and he wrote something like “if you’re writing so called genre literature, like science fiction or mystery, you don’t need to read this, as all they do is bash a story on the page, just like all the other stories before, stuff about space lizards and old maids who solve mysteries.”

First of all, this showed a regrettable lack of knowledge of the current genre (Margaret Atwood not withstanding — and why do I now what to write a space lizard story called The Handmaiden’s Tail?  Except for the fact that the imp of the perverse and I are best friends?)  — I’ve read exactly one science fiction novel involving lizards: Karel Capek’s War With The Newts. As for maiden ladies solving crimes, even cozies these days are more likely to have what are technically — perhaps — spinsters, but neither maiden nor ladies.)  What it revealed in fact, is that the author had no glimmer of understanding of genre literature, having been told it was bad, and trusting his mentors without ever verifying.  There is a lot of that going around.

In fact, here, recently, one of you seemed to think that the difference between genre and literature is that literature features characters with depth and growth.  Not only no, bu t hell no.  In fact, “literary fiction” these days is often populated with walking cliches who wouldn’t grow if you watered them.  Meanwhile just about all of genre, and certainly the best of genre has plenty of character growth.  If you don’t think so I’ll assume you never cracked open Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, The Left Hand of Darkness or, h*ll, even Dragonriders of Pern.  And only one of those is at risk of being taken for literature, and only because our betters are obsessed with genre stuff.  Okay that and the somewhat opaque manner of telling that I tend to shrug off as “it was the seventies” but which is our first clue in our quest to find “literature” and “literary sf/f” as presently defined.

This is where you must abandon your illusions, not that I think many people on this site have them.  “Literary” does not mean better.  “Literary” does not mean more profound.  “Literary” doesn’t even mean more complex.  Literary is in fact a genre like any other.  If you remember that genres are things invented by bookstores to sell books to customers, it all will make sense.

Genre didn’t always exist.  Since I grew up in a time capsule, I can tell you it didn’t exist in the more oldfashioned bookstores I frequented as a kid.  Romance and adventure, western and historical would all be shelved iggledy-piggeldy in a glorious hodge podge of story  Some of the more sophisticated bookstores aspired to historical shelving — that is, they had the books in order of release.  Some of the more anal-retentive alphabetized them.  But most of them were hole in the wall places, where the proprietor glowered at you as you passed the counter, at which he sat reading some tome, and glared even more as you brought books up to buy (then proceeded to act as though you were kidnapping his children right under his very eyes.) So mostly, however the books had once been organized, they were now scrambled by eager customers, and the result was a sort of buffet where the salads, main courses and deserts were all intermixed, but it didn’t matter, since they let you try it out before buying.

I spent many an afternoon browsing through those and reading the beginning, before rejecting or accepting the books, completely ignorant of genre.

The more modern bookstores had a place for everything and sf/f was usually on spindles, which I learned to recognize because Heinlein, Asimov, Simak, Dick, Van Vogt and much much later on McCaffrey  and countless others were often loitering there, waiting for me to pick them up and take them home (or more likely to read standing up in the grocery store, leaning against a pillar, while the trains home went by unnoticed.)

In those bookstores I rarely strayed to the “literary” shelves, unless I’d been directed to do so by a teacher.  You see, the Portuguese books were so predictably left that you had to cringe (“the working class was oppressed” is the complete summation of the plot.  Oh, with a dash of noble savage now and again.)  The foreign ones (this was the seventies) seemed to have a fascination with improbable sex.  Being a teen, I was myself fascinated with sex, but I was fairly sure it wasn’t meant to be joyless and nasty.  And these were ALWAYS joyless and nasty. So I didn’t go there.

Since then what defines “literary” has changed.  The sex-obsession of the seventies had all to do with the sexual revolution, now a thing of the past.  While you’re still likely to find your neverend of joyless sex in literary novels, it’s now more likely to be “oppressive” sex — to wit, class race and gender oppression, because the marker of “literary” has moved on to the Marxist theories taught as literary analysis in all the best colleges.

What you have to remember about “literary” is that it could be defined as “things that college professors will read on a train.”  I.e. “literary” is an aspirational mark, a mark of prestige.  The book might or might not have a plot (or a prayer of making sense) but it is generally viewed as “difficult” “prestigious” and “saying the right things” and by right I mean political and social views as a positional good, which in the twentieth century has mostly hinged on being properly LEFT. And the twentieth century persists in critical and literary analysis, two notoriously conservative (in the proper sense of the word) fields.)

All of these apply to literary science fiction and fantasy, though using tropes of the genre.  My Shakespeare books, for instance, were going to get tagged as “literary” no matter what I did, unless I wrote them in very American vernacular and sometimes even then.  While they didn’t precisely say the “correct” things, it was easy to miss it through the haze  of Shakespearean English (I spent a lot of time listening to the plays, watching the plays, and reading Elizabethan-era essays, to the point my then three year old spoke Elizabethan English as his second language, and sometimes reverts.) Also I had a transgender character, mostly because sonnets, but if you squinted you would think it was politically correct.

My Magical British Empire would probably be considered Literary, if it weren’t for Regency Romances having tainted the era and made it low brow.  (Those books are actually Victorian, but judging from stock photo sites, knowing the difference between Victorian, Elizabethan, and Medieval (let alone regency) is a skill of the privileged few.

John C. Wright has no hope of ever being considered anything but literary.  It’s the dense packing with meaning, the symbolism and the depth of language.  He could write a story about space lizards and scantily clad barbarian princesses (please, John?) and it would still be considered literary.

This makes perfect sense if you think of literary as aspirational and positional and generally “things college professors tell themselves they like.”  If you have to have a massive vocabulary and WORK it to read a book, the book will be “literary.”

The origins of this are that “literary” used to refer to “old books that are still read” (this occasions another confusion mentioned later and those usually take some amount of work to interpret/get into.  Hence, if you need to do some work to enjoy a book, it must be “literary.”

Beyond that the book can be anything, from deep and interesting to the sort of thing that makes you want to watch paint dry, as a lively change.  It doesn’t matter.  It’s still shelved under “literary” or tagged as “literary sf/f.”

If you hear a sneering tone in my description of difficult language as a way to earn that mark you would be wrong.  I do sometimes enjoy a densely packed linguistic experience, and word pictures painted in obscure terms.  Sometimes the right word IS obscure, and you should always use the right word.

I do however despise “thick” language for its own gratuitous sake.

Look, language is the one writing gift I get naturally.  Usually the more tired or out of it I am, the denser and more difficult my language gets.  This works fine for some books, but not for others.  If I’m writing about Shakespeare, yep, a certain amount of poetry is justified.  If I’m writing about a chick who likes hitting people on the head with shoes, in space, not so much.  Struggling against my own tendency to polysyllabic latinate words is the cross I bear, okay?  Sometimes it takes me three passes to readable colloquial English.

Which brings us to what annoys me about denseness of language and high faluting vocabulary.  It annoys me when I can see the writer sweat.  Those are the books that fly like birds to kiss the wall, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

Other than that, I have to be in the proper mood to read the denser books, while the ligher ones I consume like popcorn while unpacking boxes or you know… cleaning the house.

And by lighter, I don’t mean a lot of those books don’t pack a punch of meaning, character growth and symbology that goes with me after the book is closed.  That would be maligning Pratchett and Butcher and yep, Heinlein and Simak and Asimov and heck Rex Stout and Agatha Christie, too.

If you return to a book and read it multiple times — heck, if you remember the book’s name and the author’s — it probably is not just meaningless drivel.

The idea that “literary” means better comes from confusing it with “books that have survived the centuries.” It’s slightly crazy, because most of the books that have the same markers (difficulty of language and self-conscious hitting of the present day’s intellectual “elites” obsessions) not only haven’t survived the DECADES but won’t.  It’s notable that Shakespeare was considered low-brow entertainment in his day and that most of the high-brow writers haven’t survived.

But being a positional good it is impossible for the “elites” not to posture about liking it.  After all, their “refined tastes” are what divides them from us peons.

Same as it’s ever been, same as it will ever be.

However and fortunately, the elites tend to be what passes, while solid writing and entertainment (whether linguistically gifted or not) remain.

So smile politely at their claims of superiority and go on enjoying what you consider good.  Who is right only time will tell, but if we’re both alive, I’ll be willing to collect on as large a bet as they care to make.

And now, I go unpack and talk to the very confused-looking comcast rep.

 

 

 

 

 

I was going to write a post on the concept of “literary” and might do that tomorrow, but today is all taken up with family things.

On the unpacking progress we now have functioning bedroom, bathroom and kitchen.  Next up, my office and the laundry room, and then we can bring the cats home.  (We’re putting the boxes in the laundry room.)  I miss them.

Derp fish is most assuredly dying, but after looking closely I’m not sure if it’s a fungus or a tumor.  Looks more like a tumor, which means I might as well stop torturing him with the medicine tank and put him in his comfy one with the heating element and filter and stuff.

Poor derpy.  He used to be a very fun fish.  Ah well.  Whatever it is near his eye it’s making him swim on his side.  If there were fishy surgeons I’m sure he could be taken care of, but there aren’t.  So all I can do is make him comfortable until he goes.

And now, kids and friends await me, so have a good day.  I’ll be back tomorrow.

So, I didn’t mean to leave this without a post but this morning we left before I could come up with something to write.

I’m trying very hard to be good to myself, but I keep running out of spoons.  I don’t think I’m still sick, though extensive surgery and a year of moving and rebuilding a Victorian probably didn’t help my overall condition.  I think it’s more that I’m not twenty anymore, and when I was twenty I was pretty awesome, in the sense that I was the energizer bunny.

Our fourth move as a married couple, from Columbia SC to Colorado, we packed an entire 1800 sq foot, three bedroom household in three days without sleeping.  Yeah, mistakes were made.  For instance I somehow moved without my own, handmade maternity wardrobe (done on patterns from Dan’s grandmother, so it was all twenties look), we left a piece of the high chair and I almost threw away a $6k check, but by gum when the movers arrived the house was ready to load in the truck and — because it was my 30th birthday — we went out to dinner and were semi-coherent.

I don’t expect to be able to do that anymore, but when I start flagging after two hours, I get very upset with myself and with my stupid body.

So what do you do when you’ve got nothing: no strength, no drive, no ability to go on?  You go on anyway.  This is something my writing career has taught me.  You take little breaks — I look at blog comments, or just sit down with my eyes closed for five minues, and then I go on.  Because I have to.  And an amazing amount gets accomplished.

We’ve spent the last three days mostly at the other house, collecting “stragglers” — i.e. the little things that weren’t boxed or were left behind, notwithstanding which I’ve completely unpacked our bedroom and bathroom, and done a million loads of laundry.  I’m four boxes away from unpacking the kitchen which is good because eating out as a default is NOT for me.

My goal is to have everything essential (kitchen, office, bedroom) done by Monday so I can settle in and work.  We’re not unpacking the non-essentials, like fancy dishes or such, as we’re very much hoping this is a 3 month only stay.  We’re grateful for the house, but I’m dying to be in a permanent place and truly able to settle in.

I’ve already told Dan, though, that IF it all goes according to plan and we move in June, I am going to go to a hotel for the duration.  (We have points, anyway.)  The packers can come in and pack us and move us, and I’ll be there to direct unpacking at that end.  This slow mo death march is not for me anymore, and I have books to write and publish.

All of which are very loud right now, of course.

In other news, I really think derpfish is dying :(.  I’ve tried everything that worked before, but he’s just not springing back.  Ah well.  I neglected him too much, but when you’re moving and trying to write…  I’ll stick to cats from now on.  They tell me when I’m neglecting them.  (On one notable occasion by peeing on my lap.)

And relating to the whole war on competence theme, the house we’re renting was builg in the fifties, and it is far smaller than where we were living, but infinitely better designed with so many conveniences and little tricks to make life easier that it makes me a little angry.  Why angry?  We’ve been seeing all these brand spanking new houses, and none of them is nearly as convenient, neat or well designed.  (If it weren’t in the Springs, I might really be tempted to buy.)

It’s like the knowledge of the ancients.  Once upon a time we believed in designing our houses to make things easy and convenient.  Once upon a time we believed in improving things both great and small.  We were going to the future, and it was going to be great.

Now these things are like knowledge of the ancients, that we must bring back.  “Humanity is not doomed”  “You don’t need to punish yourself” “the future is better than the past.”

Hark, I’ve unearthed the knowledge of a lost civilization: our own.  And I will share it with a grey-goo present, even when I have nothing to pull from and I’ve run all out of spoons.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you keep going long after you want to give up.

And sometimes that’s what you have to do.

So, in these days of moving, and dragging and pulling and kicking boxes, all the while worrying about derpfish (he’s still alive, but I can’t tell if he’s getting better or worse.  If he goes, I’m not getting another fish again.  I like pets I can sort of guess at and who live longer than 2 years) I’ve been thinking about the Hugo mess.  And I realized it’s part of a bigger mess.

And the problem isn’t Larry or anyone defying the Hugo cabal.  That would have come sooner or later.  And the masterminds of the opposition aren’t fighting for the shiny plastic rocket, they’re fighting for their livelihood.  And the writers caught in the middle are divided between those who have woken up and those who have.  And I could have been on either side, but for a fortuitous circumstance.

Bear with me ladies and gentlemen, as I take you back to a distant time and place.

When I tried to break into writing, I bought all the propaganda.  Who didn’t?  As lovers of books, it is easy to convince ourselves that all the good stuff is getting published, and that by and large, the best stuff is getting recognized.  Oh, sure the taste in what gets published is not often mine.  (I enjoy very few non-Baen bestsellers and NO mainstream “literary” ones, all of which seem to be despicable people doing despicable things described in beautiful language.  Though some of them are just hopeless people doing hopeless things described in beautiful language.)

However my degree is literature and languages (we can’t uncouple them in Portugal) and so I really some people appreciate that sort of book and a high culture that, by and large, has given up on life and civilization considers these books true to life and therefore good.  Fine.  I could live with that.  After all the book machine still produced a ton of stuff I wanted to read.  By and large more than I could afford.  (Remember, this was 1985, I’d just come to the states and I had decades worth of books to catch onto.)

The first twinge of doubt came when I bought science fiction magazines to read, to scope out why I was getting so many rejections, (i.e. to see if I was even aiming in the right direction) and found myself flabbergasted.  Of the majors, Analog was the one I could at least read every story (though some of them were mind bogglingly insane.  What was with the re-built princess Diana as space ambassador again?  WTF?)

Asimov’s (I got a subscription to the two majors) ranged from unreadable grey goo to one of two truly amazing stories a year or so.

The rest?  I’ll just say one of those magazines is on my list to never even open again unless I’m completely and thoroughly SLOSHED.

It wasn’t that those stories, even the ones in Asimov’s were bad, precisely.  It was that they weren’t stories that… that met my internal feeling of what stories were.  (And keep in mind I studied the literature of seven countries.)

I shoved the doubts away by telling myself this was how little I knew of stories.  I needed to read more of these and figure out the internal logic.  Eventually I did, btw, but I never liked them.

The second doubt came around 94? (I don’t remember date exactly.  Might have been 96.  Kept it till almost 2000) when I had a subscription to the sf book club and got the main selection or the alternate, for the same purposes of studying the market.  Unlike with short stories, I couldn’t convince myself it was just my sideways perspective.  I discovered one good book out of this (I was already reading some of their selections and those I don’t remember.  But without them I’d never have read Diamond Age.)  But 90% of the stuff they sent me was … not even bad, just “What”” Or perhaps “did I get a subscription to the literary book club, by accident?”

This sent me on a quest to investigate how publishing worked.  You see, I’d assumed it was lots of little publishing houses, each cranking out what made the owners/publishers happy and competing for the market.  But not, apparently, since the mergers of the 80s.

I discovered it was in fact an oligopsony.  There were only five (now four) big publishers.  They all had offices in the same space, they all hired the same (mostly ivy league) college graduates, and there were no taste surveys, nothing.  The only people they were publishing for, in other words, were themselves.  And their opinion of each other was far more important than anyone else’s opinions or for that matter sales numbers.

Which explains what I went through later on, after the failure of my first — Magical Shakespeare — series which was literary fantasy.  Every agent I talked to after dropping my agent told me in the same breath that a) Literary Fantasy didn’t sell and b) that this is what I should write, since I “could.”  This baffled me, but it should have clued me in that prestige, for authors and agents is the coin you trade to get money — nothing so crude as sales to the public.  And that the field was rotten from top to bottom.

It took a while for this to sink in.  You see, I was arguing with the eight year old who was going to grow up and be a writer.  She was still somewhere inside me, and as hard to talk to logically as any eight year old.

And besides I can write anything, though writing the Magical British Empire convinced me that there are things that aren’t advisable for me to write.  It is also literary fantasy, of a sort, and I almost killed myself through sheer depression while forcing myself to write it.  (In a writers’ edition, i.e. cleaned up, it will see light of day again soon.)

Then I ran away with the Baen circus, and I don’t actually have any objections to writing shifters and space operas, and besides baby needed new shoes (school books, actually) so I worked my tail off on Musketeer’s mysteries.  Writing six books a year while homeschooling a middle schooler leaves you curiously uninterested in the state of the publishing industry.

What I have assembled a posteriori is not absolutely certain, so you guys can protest if I’m wrong.

You see, the oligopsony worked fine as long as there was another control mechanism, which we’ll call distribution and sales.  The sales were mostly tiny stores, run by people who loved books.  This meant that as rotten as the NY publishing establishment was, if it threw out (almost by accident) something worthy, the distributors ran with it and the retailers handsold it, and you had a surprise bestseller.

This didn’t please the establishment who decided they needed full control.  Enter mega chains of bookstores that put small stores out of business; enter distributors who didn’t read the books; enter retail clerks who also didn’t read and pushed only what they were told to push.

Sometime by the late nineties, the publishing business had a perfect lock on distribution, the famous push model.  I.e. “You’ll sell what we tell you to and LIKE it.”

Enter Amazon.  Their hatred for it goes that far back.  Suddenly people were finding and buying books not scheduled for bestsellerdom.  And liking them.  And buying more.

I think the push model started falling apart then.  I remember seeing a few books that got all the push and disappeared without a sound.

But there was worse to come: indie.

All of a sudden the lie that whatever got published was the best became apparent.

It was around this time that a well-established traditional author told friends of mine “if this indie thing works I’m going to be very rude to many people.”

And that’s what the Hugos fight is all about.

I woke up to Indie, in my personal timeline, because I had a weird coup-de-writing.

While in the middle of an extremely tight schedule, I took art classes to avoid thinking in words for a little bit.  And coming out of an art class an August five (?) years ago, I got an entire trilogy downloaded into my brain.  A musketeer trilogy, in a parallel world where vampires are winning.  I came home and typed in a jumble of scenes, mostly at Kate who said what I felt “this is good.  This is gold.”

Now, I know good doesn’t mean anything in publishing.  Agent, push, getting it in front of the right eyes at the right time have more to do with it.

But I thought…

Well, my agent shopped it around or at least told me so.  I only realized recently that unlike her other submittals, she never sent me rejections.  It’s alright.  Maybe it was done all in electronic, but still…

She finally sold it to this tiny house, for 3k a book.  And then I got the copyedit on that manuscript, and all hell broke lose.  For one the next book stopped cold.  This is the copyedit where the copyeditor spent a lot of time doing stuff like correcting the names of the musketeers (unnamed in the Dumas books or correcting my sentences in even more bizarre ways.  I looked at those comments recently and while it’s not the worst edit I’ve ever got, brother it’s a doozy.)

Even though we were broke at the time, I tried to buy the rights back.  And then I considered giving up writing.  If my agent could only sell what was to me at the time my best work (Yeah, A Few Good Men is better, but it was not yet even a glimmer) then I gave up.

In the middle of this I contacted Kris Rusch who told me to come out to an “how to go indie” workshop.

Everything else, including letting my agent go came from there, and if my indie career isn’t more advanced that comes down to a health collapse.

But it also freed me to come out of the political closet.

And you have to understand the closet is deep because livelihoods ride on it.

I don’t know why anyone would bother claiming publishing doesn’t trend left.  Of course it does.  It’s run by NYC people, with NYC opinions.  As NYC votes, so is it run.  They don’t THINK they’re left, because in their world it’s just what everyone thinks.  But thought NYC is a city-world, they’re missing the majority of people out here.

The result though was that in the old oligopsonic days, you had to play along and pretend, or be labeled far right wing (it should give anyone a clue that now they label me far right wing.  Me.  Oh, sure, not Marxist, but close enough to anarchy — true anarchy, not the leftist weirdness — to touch it, and they shove me into the neo-nazi spectrum, because, you know, those of us who want as little government as possible SURELY want to have goosestepping troops.  WHAT?) and never work in that town again.

I’ve said before that years ago, being mentioned at Instapundit would have meant the end of my career.

It wasn’t a stupid fear.  It was real.  Even though writers can’t control who reads them and likes them, if you’re liked by the “far right” you must be using “dog whistles” — and thus the blacklisting starts.

So those people asking to be removed from the Hugo recommendations which were made by fan vote?  Perfectly logical.  Getting tainted by association is a thing in their circles.

The people proclaiming that we: Larry, Brad, myself, John C. Wright, I don’t know if they were stupid enough to include Kevin J. Anderson and Butcher in that, but definitely everyone else in the list, had “ruined their careers” are right.  For their world and their definition of career.  None of the big four will ever publish us again, except Baen.

They are stuck in the old push-model days in their head.  They think that everyone down the chain will now boycott us.  And they want to make d*mn sure it doesn’t splash on them.

Meanwhile we’re living in a different world.  We’ve tried indie, and it worked.  (Even though in my case it was just toe dipping.  More to come once internet is fixed and bedrooms, kitchen and office unpacked. (It’s all we’re unpacking in this house.)

We’re living in a world where we can be rude to whomever we please, love our fans whoever they are, and have our own opinions.  Because NYC publishing is NOT the boss of us.

And though I’ll write for Baen as long as they’ll have me, I’ve done enough to know that indie will pay more.  (Never mind, Baen is family.  You do what you do for family.  And it’s worth it.)

Which means we live in a land without fear.  And it’s hard to remember that the reactions to being put on a list BY THE WRONG PEOPLE is perfectly logical.

And it’s hard to remember that the publishers too are afraid, and that holding onto the Hugos is all they can think of to keep prestige which they can then use to dangle in front of new writers to attract them, since they can’t have money.  (First book advances are now 3k.)

To them it’s a deadly serious game, which is why they can’t understand we’re doing this half in jest (the Sad Puppies name should have been a clue.) They can’t understand that to us it is “we can do it” and not “life or death.”

And this is why the two sides talk past each other.  And why it’s perfectly logical for each side, but the logic of one doesn’t apply to the other, because we’re living in completely different worlds.

(Hopefully internet works long enough to post this.  Pardon typos and weird constructions.  Typing in more haste than usual.  Now must open boxes to find essentail supplies to run the house.)

No Excuses, No Regrets

 

*So, I just want to know which shrine I desecrated.  On Tuesday, with fifteen minutes to go on the clock and an owner argued down to the price we wanted, someone came in and made a full price offer, snatching a pretty much perfect house from under our nose.  (We could go full price, we could, but I refuse to get in a bidding war.) Yesterday the movers arrived at the same exact time as the biggest snowstorm SINCE the one raging when we came into town 23 years ago.

Meanwhile poor derpfish appears to be dying.  While I was busy packing, I didn’t notice the fungus had come back.  I’ve put him in the hospital tank, but I think he’s too far gone.  We’ll see.

It’s sunny today for the second day of moving, and I hope the streak stops, before I have to wake every morning with “What fresh hell is this?”
Keep the place clean and black hat free while I move and unpack.  we’re unpacking the essentials only because, being deluded, we still hope to find something permanent soon.*

I was talking to Charlie yesterday about the problem of “social justice writing.” By which we mean writing that is more concerned with conveying the “right message” delivered by the “approved group” writer than with telling an entertaining/uplifting or otherwise interesting story-that-earns-its-own-keep.

First of all, of course, there is the fact that a story that relies on “right think” to justify its right to exist might not bother with less glamorous bits of craft such as making sure your reasoning makes sense throughout, or that you have established the character’s traits to evoke an emotional response from the reader and catharsis at the end of the story.

In fact, in this “writing to effect social change” shares the exact same drawbacks as writing fan fiction. As a former fan fiction writer (Jane Austen fanfic. Yeah, I know. Exciting. Shud up.) I’m just glad I was a professional before I started playing in fanfic. It is all too easy to acquire bad habits from writing fanfic. For instance, if you’re writing Pride and Prejudice fanfic, all you have to do is name the character Lizzie, even if you set it in modern day, and the reader immediately imbues it with every characteristic of the Jane Austen character, without your having to do any heavy lifting. In the same way if you name a character Whickam, everyone knows he’s a cad or worse and never mind making his faults believable or foreshadowing them.

Writing the politically correct story is much the same thing: introduce a minority character, be it racial, sexual or religious, in one of the approved “categories” and the readership, which are “fans” of social justice will immediately imbue that “victim character” with all the characteristics of noble victims ever penned since Jean Jacques Rosseau rode the noble savage into the sunset.

Because of that, “message writing” will always be inferior to “entertainment writing” when viewed in the dispassionate cold light of day.

Change how fashionable the message is (and frankly the left seems to do that every few years, as a matter of course) and today’s “masterpiece” becomes a story only of interest to historians of passe modes of thinking, if not an outright heresy to the people trying to pretend that we’ve always been at war with Eurasia.

But there is more moral peril to “message writing” because of the very mode of thought it encourages amid its practitioners; a mode of thought best described as “seeing oppressors under every bed.”

I’ll illustrate by admitting that when I first came to the US, within the first three years, I fell in with a group of people who were generally minorities (racial, sexual, cultural.) Nothing strange about this. A lot of my friends (perhaps a majority) still fall in those categories. However, my group these days is mostly conservative or libertarian or yes, which makes them a completely different type of creature.

You see, the first few friends I made were people who obsessed over what today would be called “micro-aggressions.” Oh, macro too. And there was some reason behind their paranoia (and mine, at the time.) Where I was at the time, and the faux-pas I committed as I tried to adapt to living in the US did cause a lot of very strange reactions, and some of them outright hostile. Some of my friends at the time had similar causes of complaint.

I mean, just because you’re paranoid, it doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you.

For instance in my first (retail) job every guy (including the ex con) and every “white” (mostly blond) woman was taught how to open the safe and trusted with it, but myself and the black woman (who had an MBA and was only working retail due to a recent divorce, while looking for another job) were not. However, when money went missing, we were the only two people questioned. (Turned out the ex-con was taking money out of the safe whenever he felt like going out to dinner. I know you’re shocked.) This was definitely outrageous, but instead of taking from it that one should strive not to work for *ssholes, we took from it that everyone was bigoted against poor little us.

Anyway, at some point, it hit me that we were getting together to share grievances, and that most of our conversation, not to say most of our thoughts revolved around injustices done to us and how unfair the world was.

And then it occurred to me that more than a few of my friends, and to an extent I, myself, were using these ‘injustices’ inherent in the system (so to put it) to justify not doing anything, not trying anything and not making any efforts to improve our (relatively invidious position.)

Now, I want you to know that yes, there were injustices against us. It wasn’t all in our head. And yes, we were in a relatively difficult position.

But that wasn’t the point. Having realized the effect it was having on me; realizing that my resentment and my feeling of being victimized were holding me captive, I decided to set myself free.

I broke up with my comfortable/encouraging/justifying crowd overnight, and resolved that while I might be discriminated against, I didn’t have to let it define me. That is, while people might think I was less capable, I wouldn’t allow them to make me less capable.

For my own sake, not theirs, I would from then on ignore any discrimination against me (save for occasionally finding it very funny, like when the school was persuaded my younger son had a speech impediment because my husband and I spoke Russian at home. [Why Russian? And why poor Dan who was born and raised in New England and Ohio?]) and proceed to take no excuses for underperforming.

I might or might not be able to prove discrimination against me. I might or might not be in fact discriminated against in some particular. But the fact remained that I couldn’t control those who might or might not discriminate against me. I couldn’t even predict it, or the reason why.

Discrimination is not, as the left seems to believe, a rare thing or confined to minorities. Yes, I know, part of the reason they go crazy about white male “privilege” is that they assume there’s a hierarchy and that white males are the least discriminated against.

I suppose that is true if the white male is you know, one of the Norse gods with inherent superior looks and abilities. But even white males are never exactly what it says on the package. Any white male of less than say five feet six is going to be discriminated against. So is any over 300 lbs. So is any who is just Odd enough to have to back-engineer other people’s reactions to figure out how to react himself. So is any who is too smart or stupid for his own good.

In fact, once you figure out the various kinds of white male, there is no privilege left. And the same for every other “category” of human.

So, most of the time, the obvious form of discrimination against me comes in reaction to my accent. And it’s not even exactly unjustified. I find myself worrying, too, when talking to someone with an obvious accent. You’re not sure they can understand you, and you automatically dumb-down the talk.

But I’ve also been discriminated against because of culture. And I don’t mean Latin (though the boss in that first retail store being a dumb *ss did think I was Mexican. He also thought my name was Feliz (as in Feliz Navidad) – loooong story.) Many people (my inlaws included) just don’t “get” science fiction and fantasy. My mother in law thought and might still think that I invented “grown up stories with elves” and at one time told me I should write for children because ‘they’re the only ones with a mind as open as yours.’ She’s not alone, though most people in that position wouldn’t dare voice it to my face, so I don’t know most of them.

I was even discriminated against when I was young and slim and pretty for being young and slim and pretty and fairly well dressed. For instance, at a gathering of an unnamed high IQ society I was repeatedly asked whose date I was.

The truth is that people make judgments based not on social justice but on past experiences/what they’ve read and watched/the bottomless depths of their own weirdness. The good people revise them later, but almost every one of us has been discriminated against for something or other. And sometimes for nothing at all, but the idea in someone’s head when they first saw us.

Having realized this, I figured that if I became hung up in every time that someone didn’t treat me fairly I’d be paralyzed.

And so, in my head, I’ve decided I’ll ignore those who discriminate against me. (Save for occasionally pointing and making duck noises, because that’s only fair.)

If I let their oppression define me, I’ll be a captive of the impotence that their oppression engenders.

If I ignore it, pretend I’m the mistress of my own fate, and continue pushing to get better and to do what I want to do, then no one can stop me. Because it’s all dependent on me and how hard I’m willing to work.

And that is how I have avoided the moral hazard of victimhood. And why I feel sorry for all the writers entrapped into writing “socially relevant” fiction that enshrines and deifies victimhood.

The chains of defining yourself as a victim are a tourniquet wrapped around the soul.

The only way to stop it is to declare yourself free and ignore those you think are trying to limit you. The only way to break the chains is to believe you alone are responsible for your state of happiness and prosperity or lack thereof. Yes, other factors (including the animosity of strangers) might influence that state, but if you are willing to work hard enough you can overcome additional factors. And if you aren’t willing to work hard enough nothing, not even the most favorable of circumstances, can make you successful.

The chains of victimhood are insidious and will destroy your soul as well as your writing.

Fortunately the key to freedom is in your own hands.

Refuse excuses.

Set yourself free.

 

Where have all the heroes gone? – Amanda S. Green

 

I have been sitting here, staring at the computer screen, trying to find the words for my feelings in the aftermath of what happened in Brussels. Oh, the immediate reaction is easy. Disbelief followed by anger mixed with a large dose of concern and sympathy for those impacted by what happened. Then, as the stories continued to roll in, other emotions came. With it all comes the understanding that the time has finally come for us to realize that we can’t continue to play by the rules of civilized warfare because the enemy is using our own ethics, for lack of a better word, against us.

For years, decades even, many in our country and in our government have operated under the belief that war is something that can be waged by following the rules. They want it to be clean, with no collateral damage. That is a grand idea and one I could get behind – if the other side agreed. Unfortunately, as we have seen time and time again, that isn’t the case. We try to use surgical strikes to avoid destroying non-military facilities and avoid civilian casualties. The enemy, knowing this, hides in mosques and churches, homes and schools. They use civilians as their shields, knowing our citizens won’t put up with “unnecessary” civilian deaths.

We have watched as our citizens have been targeted overseas. We have seen in living color the attacks on Paris and now Brussels. How many other attacks have there been? I don’t know. Our media doesn’t report it all. It doesn’t fit the narrative, especially not during an election year. Most especially not when our President is making his so-called historic visit to Cuba.

I cringed when, as news was still coming in on the bombings in Brussels, the media talked about how President Obama was not going to cut his visit to Cuba short. In fact, at that time, he was still scheduled to watch a baseball game between a Cuban team and an American one. I’ll even admit to not knowing if he kept to that schedule. Why? Because the thought of him sitting there watching a baseball game when our allies were under what could only be called attack made me sick to my stomach.

How long are we going to sit back and watch, telling ourselves that the battle isn’t going to come to us? How long will we continue to delude ourselves by saying that all we need to do is listen to why ISIS hates us so much? After all, to hear some of our fellow countrymen talk, the real responsibility for all this ill will falls directly at our own feet. Funny how there are always those singing that song until the shit hits the fan right outside their door. Then they are crying for the rest of us to step up and protect them. That is exactly what will happen here if we don’t find a way to end the war before it gets any worse.

One of the comments I heard in response to the attack came from Donald Trump. Now, as those of you who have read my previous posts here know, I’m not a big Trump fan. Hearing his response to the attack on Brussels had me, initially at least, cringing and telling myself that his comments were exactly why I don’t want him to be president.

“You know, we work within laws. They don’t work within laws — they have no laws. We work within laws. The waterboarding would be fine, and if they could expand the laws, I would do a lot more than waterboarding,” he said.

My first reaction was probably similar to what many of you had to that comment. I cringed and said to myself that we couldn’t allow ourselves to become like the enemy. We are better than them. Just as our Constitution has provisions against cruel and unusual punishment for criminals, those same protections should apply to those who are enemies of our country.

Right?

The good part of me says “right”. But the other part, the part that watches the enemy attack civilian targets without compunction, the part that knows my son and so many other mother’s sons and daughters are in harm’s way because of ISIS and their allies, says maybe not. Maybe that old adage “All’s fair in love and war” is right.

Still, I am conflicted. My brain tells me that is what the enemy is wants. It wants us doubting our approach to them. It wants us second guessing what our government and our military does – or might do. In short, it wants our doubts to hamstring any quick and decisive response we might have to them.

Hell, it is something they have successfully done for years. We did not finish the job with Operation Enduring Freedom. We didn’t finish the job with Operation Desert Storm. We sure as hell aren’t finishing the job now.

Let’s be honest. We haven’t “finished the job” since World War II. I can understand Korea. Our country was exhausted, our resources stretched then by World War II and just a few years after we found ourselves in Korea. Vietnam? I’m not sure we ever had a battle plan for success there. Add in the fact the media was sending daily updates that we could watch at our dinner tables, as well as there had been little down time from Korea and, well, we had a recipe for anything but winning.

Now we are fighting an enemy that won’t be satisfied until we are dead. Not just our leaders. Not just our military. All of us. How long is it going to take us to wrap our heads around the fact there is no negotiation with a zealot? There is fight back, fight hard and fight to win.

But that doesn’t mean I believe we need to round up every person who has come here from a predominantly Islamic country. Nor does it mean we round up every follower of the Islamic faith. That would be just as wrong as it was when, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, our government rounded up the Japanese-Americans and put them in camps.

It does mean, however, tightening our borders – all our borders. It means reviewing our immigration rules and doing a better job at vetting everyone coming in. It means increasing the number of Border Patrol agents and giving them the authority to actually stop and arrest anyone they find coming over illegally.

It also means remembering who our allies are. Kissing up to certain leaders in the Middle East and Africa has done nothing that I can see to help keep our country and its citizens safe. In fact, it has done just the opposite. The enemy has seen our president bowing to those who hate us. They have seen our government turn its back on allies like Israel because a potential ally – pardon me while I laugh hysterically – might be insulted by our continued association with Israel. We have walked the path the enemy has set for us, never really striking back and never finishing what we start.

At least that is how it seems from the outside looking in.

Now I find myself remembering the 1980 presidential election. I had no love lost for President Carter. I’d watched, along with so many others, as he sat on his hands while our people, and our allies, were held hostage by Iran. Oh, I know negotiations were going on behind the scenes but what sort of lesson did that teach the Iranians? The answer is simple – we would rather try to talk our way out of a bad situation even if doing so makes the situation worse in the long run.

Not that I had much more confidence in what Ronald Reagan could do. I’ll admit, I didn’t know much about the former actor turned politician. I knew he had been governor of California. I’ll even admit, I wasn’t that impressed. I’m a Texas girl after all and I knew even then that California was much more liberal than my beloved home state. So could Reagan, even though he was a Republican, be the conservative – or, even better, libertarian – that we needed?

What quickly became apparent was that our allies liked his plain speaking and our enemy quickly came to realize that he meant what he said. We may never know all the discussion that went behind Iranian doors before they decided to release the hostages before Reagan could take action. My gut tells me that they were scared to death about what the Cowboy President might do.

Which brings me to Trump. I’m still not a fan. Far from it. But I have to wonder if he would put the fear of God into the hearts of our enemy. He certainly scares some of our allies – which is not a good thing.

There’s a song by Bonnie Tyler called “I Need a Hero”. Right now, I’m asking myself the same questions she asks in the song but about our national leaders. I know where the real heroes are. They are in our military and serving in other positions that help keep our country safe. Unfortunately, their hands are tied all too often by the “civilized war” requirements the pols and the vocal minority place upon them.

It is time for each of us to wake up and, whether we like it or not, admit that the war has come. It might not be taking place each day on our shores but we are no longer an isolated nation. Technology and advances in transportation have seen to that. What happens in Europe impacts what happens here and vice versa. We can no longer afford to sit back and shake our heads in sorrow as our European allies are attacked. We can no longer extend an olive branch and watch it be batted away, telling ourselves that if we try again maybe, just maybe it will be accepted next time.

As I sit here looking at the framed memorial document hanging on my den wall that recounts my Great-great grandfather’s Civil War battle history, I have to admit that we are at war once again. Our government might not want to admit it. Our President might prefer making his “historical” trek to Cuba rather than deal with the realities of what is happening around us. But the truth is there and it is time we all recognized it.

The question we have to ask ourselves is how we are going to respond. Are we going to sit back and wait until the battle lines are in our own backyards or are we going to demand our government finally stand up and once again prove the United States deserves to be called the Leader of the Free World? I don’t know about you but I’m hoping for the latter. That means making sure we have men and women on Capital Hill after the election who will stand up to whoever our new president is and demand the country no longer sit back, waiting like the lamb to the slaughter.

I confess when listening to Leonard Cohen’s “The Traitor” I love the lines “The dreamers ride against the men of action; oh, watch the men of action falling back.”

I also will confess that I identify with “the dreamers” in those lines, though I’m not sure that’s true anymore.  But as a teen I was very much a dreamer, with my head in books or in the clouds.  Many of the things I dreamed were air-fantasies and impossible and I didn’t even know it.  Many others would be tragedies, not the utopia I imagined.

And in a way I was a “woman of action” in the sense that I walked everywhere in all weathers and I’ve always had a constitutional (not that constitution) tendency to roll up my sleeves and DO when doing is needed. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t see myself as a “dreamer” of “impossible dreams.”

Part of this was my identifying most with dad, who is actually a man of action, but who is also a reader and someone with his head in the clouds half the time.

But–

But even though I identify(ed) with the dreamers, I loved  books with hyper-competent heroes. (Yes, including female ones.  The opening of Friday is riveting because someone is following her and she doesn’t drop and cry for help, but takes care of it.  Efficiently.)

I loved authors who could do what I knew d*mn well I couldn’t: get dropped head first into a situation and control it and come out on top.  Some of my favorites, like A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Prince and the Pauper, Robin Hood, and of course The World of Tiers and Operation Chaos, Puppet Masters and The Door Into Summer hing exactly on that hyper competent hero doing what he must do.

I love these not because I am like them, but because I’m not.  Because it’s fascinating to watch someone with everything under control.  And it helps me, too, not panic when the excrement hits the rotating object (so many times this year) to think “Okay, there’s another way to handle this, now.)

I’m not saying I don’t love hopelessly neurotic characters as well, though the only one I can think of, early morning and sans caffeine is the main character of Fire and Hemlock, by Diana Wynne Jones, (she has reasons to be neurotic) or for a more “dreamer” the main character of Way Station by Simak.  (My husband wouldn’t allow me to name a son Enoch.)

But yesterday as I was falling asleep, I realized why the science fiction establishment keeps saying we only want big bad male action heroes.  You see, they’re hopelessly in love with characters who when the going gets tough curl into the fetal position and scream for mommy.  They think this makes the characters sensitive or special.  They think in fact that dysfunction and the inability to work in the world as it is is a mark of specialness, from intelligence to insight.

I think this is because most people who are attracted to science fiction are “odd” — we stick out.  We tend to think non-standard thoughts.  We work at odd angles. That’s fine, every primate population has its “goats”, it’s “outliers.”  It’s how social species work.

Many if not most of us were bullied or mistreated by our peers as kids.  Most of us, when interacting outside the community, still get the “you’re weird” look.

Some of us — I’d guess about half — figure out that’s the way we are, that’s the way life is going to be, and we derive strength from it and learn to work in this strange world of ours.  (I swear half the reason that book sold was the title.)  Others … curl up and cry and demand accommodations, and say the world should accommodate them.  It’s all so unfair.

Most of the establishment right now is the half that want accommodations, for themselves or others they imagine weak and in need.  I think most of this comes from a decent pity and concern for your fellow humans, and from wanting to help them.  Unfortunately it’s also misguided, as they tend to identify the people needing help by Marxist class and race markers, which actually have bloody nothing to do with who can cope and who can’t.  In fact, the ones less likely to cope are the ones raised in too-easy circumstances, regardless of their skin color or wealth. Because humans are a scavenging animal, reverses and challenges harden and improve the individual. (Of course, it is also possible to have too many of these and break.)

The thing is and what makes no sense is that even those of us who write men (and women) of action don’t write what the other side accuses us of writing: privileged, flawless creatures who stride on the scene and set everything right.

Were there some books like that?  Sure, to an extent.  A lot of World War II wrote World War II veterans.  I was reminded of this when reading The Book Of Ptath recently.  I hadn’t read it in decades, and when I read it I remember the type was familiar, (though I couldn’t tell you the other similar heroes I read.)  I don’t know if Van Vogt was a veteran, and, right now, am too lazy to look up his bio.  But his character has an overlay of a personality that fought in WWII and which has a “can do” attitude towards the world in general.

I vaguely remember reading a lot of those, and they are yep white males (mostly white.  I have a vague idea not all) who had won a difficult war and were men of action not daunted by anything.

My guess is most of those books were written in the 40s and 50s, but even then they weren’t universal.  Theodore Sturgeon tended to write more nuanced, thoughtful characters, as did Heinlein (yes, I know, but they haven’t read the books, have they?) and so did a lot of others.

I, myself, and h*ll very much Larry Correia, not to mention John Ringo and others write people who act out of a deeper trauma.  Yes, they’re men (and women) of action in the sense they try to fix what’s broken in the world and try to take care of themselves and those they feel responsible for.  BUT often the reason they feel responsible and what makes them rise above average is a deep trauma, a deep flaw or some crack within themselves from which flows both insecurity and the ability to get things done.  (I think these characters are far more authentic, anyway.)

So why do these books offend the mavens of the establishment so much?

Having dipped into their offerings, my guess would be because they think the only AUTHENTIC response to being broken is to curl up and stay broken.

Now that is the only valid response to being broken beyond all boundaries, but people like that, though they exist, of course, and excite our compassion, of course, don’t make very good characters.

“And then they were all killed by a flaming meteor” is a lousy ending but it’s vastly preferable to a series of books about people dithering and hesitating and suffering reverses and humiliations from which they can’t escape.

And yet, people read them.  I mean, there is no doubt of that.  I don’t know how big an audience this has, and I don’t know how many of them are influenced by the “great literature” shill, but some amount of people do read it.

It wasn’t until yesterday when one of the commenters insisted if books didn’t show people like you you felt “erased” that I realized what might be the driver there.

Some people ONLY want to read about people like them.  I don’t understand the attraction, but then I am someone who crossed the ocean to live in another culture, so I’m attracted to knew experiences and different situations and tend to assume most SF/F readers are.  But perhaps some just want the validation of knowing no one, not even characters, can hack the world, and therefore the only reasonable thing to do is to be neurotic and ineffective.  I don’t know.  Even when I feel neurotic and ineffective, I don’t want to remain so (like now) and I certainly don’t want o live in other people’s heads when they’re being neurotic and ineffectual.

But maybe it is the attraction of the similar and the “I’m not guilty of doing nothing.”  Perhaps.  In which case there are a lot of broken people out there, and it’s a little scary, because most of them are white, upper-middle-class and have no reason to be that broken.

Anyway, so when they’re complaining about us wanting “White men doing manly things” when our characters are either not white or not men (or various variations of white men, definitely not straight or non-handicapped, for instance) what they’re doing is reflecting inherent racism in their world view.  Because what they actually mean is “Your characters are too competent.” And in their heads, that means white and male.  Which is the ONLY thing that explains why they call competent female characters “men with boobs.”

Anyway, that was my sudden flash of understanding.  And while I don’t care if they want to read about neurotic people being neurotic, and I don’t care if those books are on offer (not my circus, not my monkeys), I neither consider them the highest form of literary expression, nor want them to be the ONLY books on offer.  I don’t think they fit with the tastes of the vast majority of the human race, nor that — frankly — they’re a healthy attitude.

Let them have their books, of course, if they enjoy them, but don’t let them dictate that these are the only “good” books.  And don’t let them close the market to others.

“The dreamers ride against the men of action; oh, watch the men of action falling back” is a great thing for a teen.  Teens don’t have the experience to solve things and identify with similarly paralyzed characters.

But if I wrote the scene now, the dreamers would have enough resources within themselves to REALLY make the men of action fall back and, thereby, become men of action themselves. (And women, duh.  It goes without saying, but I know some people need it said.  In this the human experience is not that bifurcated.)

Because that is the path to maturity and more importantly that is the path to a functioning society.  Neurotics are interesting, but they have to learn to act in the world before their stories are interesting.  Otherwise they’re just neurotic and rather pitiful.

And now I’m going to go pack boxes.  Because– Because when this is done I get to write.