According To Hoyt

Sorry to be so late today. My allergies kicked in with a vengeance yesterday – the first time this year we had two warm days in a row. I guess the trees were ready and waiting – and came with a massive headache that not even mega-allergy tablets dented.

As an aside, it’s often been a puzzle to me whether I actually think in words, or if I covert the symbols I think in into words very fast, so I’m barely aware of it. I suspect the later, both because I remember switching over to words when I learned to read and write (speaking didn’t seem to do it) and because whenever I’m even slightly impaired (or massively impaired, such as when I got concussion) I think in visual symbols. This is also likely because when we had the younger kid tested, they told us he was a visual thinker and our minds work much in the same way. It’s just at some point – probably over writing, because I remember thinking in written lines – I switched over to words and he never really did. I mean, he can use them fine, (sometimes. There’s a reason he’s High Lord Malaprop.) but he’s very aware of thinking in symbols.

I don’t envy him because I always feel impaired and slow when that connection between symbol and word is broken. I can think fine, mind you, even through a massive headache. I’m just isolated and unable to interpret other people’s words or to communicate with them. Which is how I was yesterday and why this post is late.

Note the reasoning above, like the fact I’ve always wondered how I think. It’s … Odd, isn’t it? But it is odd in a particular way. It has nothing to do with intelligence or learning, though doubtless my classes in linguistics did to some extent give me the tools to think about it. It has to do with a weird turn of mind, what Terry Pratchett calls “The first sight and the second thoughts.”

Practically everyone – or so it seems to me – tends to go through life with a lot of unexamined baggage. Things are done because they’ve always been done. They happen this way because they always did.

This is the inherent difficulty in changing cultures. Cultures are conditioned into children at a very early age, and violating a cultural taboo has the feeling of sin. Often it has more the feeling of sin than actually sin. One of the things that Giovanni Guareschi captured beautifully in his Don Camillo stories is how men can go about and proclaim they’re communists and atheists, but – having been raised Catholic – they can’t prevent themselves from doffing their hat or bowing when crossing the church and passing in front of the tabernacle with the blessed sacrament.

Nothing rational about that. If you believe in the sacrament and the living presence, you also know denying it is more of a sin than not acknowledging it. But humans aren’t rational. And no one examines his every action in the light of reason.

Even we don’t. And we in this case is a subset of humanity. Odds, sure. But other things – outliers. Strange. Different.

Most of us gravitate to science fiction and fantasy at an early age because we’re strange and different, and science fiction has odd ideas, of the sort I put above.

There are theories that most of the science fiction writers and fans are “in the spectrum.” A psychologist (also a fan) once told me that interactions at cons are all typical of aspergers people. [Waggles hand.] I’m not sold on the idea. I think aspergers as defined now casts too wide a net. Autism too. I’ve seen real autism and real high-functioning aspergers up close and personal, and it’s not a matter of squinting and saying “Well, he’s awkward in company” or “he overthinks things” (Something I’m sure all of us were accused of growing up.)

There is a drive to define “normal” really narrowly and really “group oriented” and if you’re an individualist and capable of original thought (or have real emotions – nowadays they define bi polar as sometimes being happy sometimes sad. No, seriously, I saw it in boy’s psychology handouts. We used to call that normal. To preserve an absolute even keel you need to be medicated. Anyone does. Again, having seen real bi-polar up close and personal, I’m not amused by the trivialization of all these things) they’re going to find something wrong with you. I think this comes from an infiltration of Marxist thought. I always got the impression Marx had it in for humans because they refused to be ants or bees. Maybe it’s because all my Marxist teachers held these social insects up as models for humans. (Rolls eyes.)

So I’m not absolutely sure what to call us, but we are different, and the difference is exactly what Pratchett (who is, of course, one of us) tried to describe in his witches, who are capable of the first sight and the second thoughts. You see something and you analyze. It’s what you do. And roughly speaking that’s what science fiction people are. People who think too much. People who do their darndest to stand at the window and watch ourselves pass on the street below. And yes, people who sometimes need dream to aliviate the unbearable flawed reality of life. (And those people often trend more towards fantasy.)

Of course, to ourselves, we say we’re smarter. We’re more creative. We’re special.

We are different. And most of us (but not all. More on that later) couldn’t find the box with two hands and a seeing eye dog, let alone think in it.) But if it’s intelligence, it’s a highly specialized and not particularly useful intelligence. Most of us – oh, come on guys – spend most of our lives working for close to nothing, or doing work we hate, or stumbling around trying to figure our way out of the paper bag of office politics.

Those of us who are more aware and more capable of bridging over to “normal” society can sometimes hold jobs. And writers who can fake it (I can, to a degree. Only to a degree) can bridge the gap and get read by normal people too. It takes tweaking the idea and going “Not quite like that, like this.”

Here’s the thing – it’s not that the “new, new” kids (they think. Most of them are ten years younger than I. The only difference is that by forty I’d lived. Hell, by twenty two when I got married, I’d lived. It included trips on my own to two different continents. And by forty I’d half-raised the kids, moved across the world and across the country, navigated an inter-culture marriage, learned how to function as an adult in a strange culture. And yeah, been published. Professionally. With no contacts in the field. And stayed employed through the great die-off of 03. The last ten years have added very little save a determination to no longer suffer fools gladly.) are not of us. It’s that they grew up in privileged circumstances and that, at the same time, science fiction (all of publishing really) turned to academia for recruitment and started taking “credentials” from “the best colleges” as signals of ability to write.

Part of this was because of political color line. If you graduated from Harvard, unless you’re really a cussed anti-authority stickler, you’re going to be at least pink, if not outright red. And part of it was because it’s how society has gone. We seem unable to distinguish real competence. Or perhaps we need pieces of paper to keep lawyers away. The end result is the same – credentialism, instead of competence.

The thing is the people they collected onto the field are still of us. They’re just academia oriented people like us, and many of them were raised in academic environments and work in them too. (One of the things I’ve noticed in recent years, though perhaps it was always true, is the middle aged woman at cons, accompanied by what can only be described as show-business-parents who lost their way, and who glory in their darling’s success in our small and nutty field. I know five or six of them, too, with impeccable academic credentials and no job (or family or their own) being supported by their parents in their pursuit of literary glory. Maybe this is just a symptom of the infantilization of our society and helicopter parenting.)

And outliers/Odds can go one of two ways. When we first realize we’re different (for me, it was in kindergarten) we can either revel in it or try to hide it and fit in. The sane path is neither, and those of us who have come into our own, some later in life, have learned to walk that line very carefully. We pick our battles “Here we fit in” and “here we lift two middle fingers aloft, because society is barking mad.”

The problem is academia tends to beat the two middle fingers thing out of people and push them into being good sheep. They don’t manage it, of course, because they’re of us.

BUT they become more neurotic than a shaved monkey. They hover between trying to shape everything into academia (come on, guys, the idea of ending default bi-gender would ONLY excite someone who moves in a tightly-knit bubble of gender studies babble. Anyone in the real world would know this fails to bridge all gaps between us and “normal” people.) and trying to fit in and slap down all “bad think” which they can’t help having and are afraid anyone will discover. So any ideas that “violate” what academics around them think, or what they were taught to think, ANYTHING that might feed their second thoughts and make them stick out from their self-willed ant colony is bad, and must be attacked. And by gum if a gender studies department has decided that “lady” is now an insult, it must be expunged everywhere. Lest it cause them to think.

And that, dear sirs, kind ladies, and esteemed those who just looked in their pants to figure it out, (not to mention respected dragons) is what is eating them, and why they think we’re attacking them/being mean/evil – and why they ascribe all sorts of nasty prejudices to us. Those words “racist” “sexist” “homophobic” aren’t real words. They’re prayers muttered under their breath to keep the bad-think away.

It is however important to remember two things: a) they’re of us. B) the push to enforce the conformity in publishing that has pervaded academia for 50 years, is over. Not just because Baen still exists – and thrives, at a time when Harlequin had to sell – but because there’s indie. They might be able to control an industry that has to strain through six outlets (back in the day) all of them in NYC and run by people with similar credentials. But the dam has broken. There isn’t a leak. There are thousands. And the good ones will get read. You can’t stop them.

And they are of us. Sooner or later – later, probably. They’re really good at holding “bad think” at bay in their own heads, they’re going to have to start having second thoughts. You know of the kind that goes “But isn’t most of the world bi-gendered? Yeah, I can write aliens, but if I write humans, will normal humans want to read something that they have to work too hard for?” And thoughts of the kind that goes “Wait, wait a minute. What if not all males are bad? What if women have sex because they like it and they’re autonomous agents, like the men?” and thoughts of the sort that goes “What if I create an all female society and it’s hell?”

They won’t be able to stop it. They’re of us. The second thoughts will come.

To that intent, I submit we do all we can do. Write, read and talk about good books. Big idea books that make you think.

Ride right through them. They can no longer keep us back.

Okay, did I miss a memo? This stuff happens when I’m writing.

Last time I paid much attention to the-thing-that’s-going-to-kill-us-all, it was supposed to be Global Warming, I mean Climate change, I mean Catastrophic Weather Event or whatever they’re calling it this week.

All the scientific magazines screamed with it; documenting just how hot we were was made a major mission of NASA (along with convincing Muslims that they’re not cultural losers and that finding new ways to stone/hang mouthy teenage girls and gay teenage boys is TOTALLY the equivalent of coming up with new ways to build computers or a new medicine to replace antibiotics when they stop working.)

Everything from People Magazine to Scientific American was off its mind about the need to toughen up our health systems, find places for climate refugees, etc etc, because the warm was coming and it was going to be terrible. Oh, yeah, and we needed to bio-engineer chickens to survive warming (I swear I read that somewhere.)

Of course, they never explained why the warmth would be terrible, when, historically, humanity does better in warm periods. I think it was supposed to wipe us out because “shut up.” Or something.

But at least they could wave some vaguely scary things, like tse tse flies extending their territory, malaria mosquitos… stuff like that. (BTW, technically the malaria range is shrunken in our time, because in stories about the Napoleonic wars, it was possible to catch malaria in Portugal. It must have been warmer, because in my time, the only people who caught malaria were those who traveled to Portuguese colonies or foreign parts.)

That was then. This is now.

The new hotness for end of the world stuff is “inequality”. Inequality is not only supposed to be a justification for an international tax on investment, (International tax is the polite term for paying Dane Geld and it ends exactly as you imagine.) but also will cause the end of civilization as we know it, if unchecked.

And this has me scratching my head.

Look, guys, yes, some societies have been more egalitarian than others – mostly very poor societies are egalitarian because everyone is poor. – pioneer societies tend to be more “equal” because everyone is struggling, for instance. However, anyone who’s read bios of colonial times knows that some people came over with all their fortunes, some with the clothes on their backs, some people did the absolute minimum to survive, and some worked their tailbones off and went from rags to riches. As everywhere in history.

Equality? Don’t make me laugh. Not only has it never really existed, but societies that try to enforce it become blood baths like revolutionary France, or hell holes like Cuba. And even then they’re not egalitarian. Those at the top, enforcing the “equality” always end up far better off than the masses, because, well, some animals are more equal than others, right?

So, how is inequality supposed to become a civilization-ending blight?

That I remember from studying history, some of the most expansionist, thriving civilizations were highly unequal. Say, Rome. Or ancient Greece. Or England as a colonial power.

When you ask for a clarification, you get some bleating about entrenched classes. But look here, that doesn’t happen in a free society, where the state is not trying to enforce either equality or redistribution. The only places where rigid quasi feudal classes emerge are in places like the Soviet Union or, yes, Cuba, or North Korea, where the people in power make themselves aristocracy.

Yes, our clowns are trying to do that, controlling access to the best colleges, and whatever. The difference is that as long as we’re free enough (and it’s amazing how even a little freedom can disrupt these schemes) we retain the right to make their success markers irrelevant. What? Went to the best schools and have all the contacts in the old media? Watch me be more successful than you with a simple blog. Same for indie publishing, and for … well, almost everything.

This of course is why our ruling classes are beating the drum for inequality, threat or menace? Because if they convince us it is a world-ending catastrophe, we’ll give them the power to remove what remains of our liberty, our freedom of movement and our pursuit of happiness (under which falls also the ability to accumulate and spend your own money as you please) and to – in our name – make things “fair.” Which means making everyone but them equally poor.

I say we laugh at all mentions of “inequality.”

And we tell the grave, chin-stroking academics trying to make envy THE virtue to go get stuffed.

Otherwise the next menace they try to foist on us to justify taking all our liberties away will be even crazier.

I am not ready to face, without poisoning-levels alcohol in me, the dawn of the day when every magazine at the checkout is plastered with “Tiddlywinks, the End of Civilization as We Know It.”  Laugh at them now.  This can only get worse.

This post was started several times before I actually got a hold of what I wanted to say. Yes, that’s my excuse for being late.

Lately alarm bells have been ringing at the back of my head.

I have to tell you, I’ve been through the whole progressive experiment before. In Portugal they called it what it really is “Socialism” though they called it “on the way to socialism.” Never spoken of because even in Portugal it had a bad taste was that socialism itself is “on the way to communism.” Or as people put it, “Communists are socialists with guns.”

Yes, I know this will cause howls of protest and we might even get in a “progressive” eager to dissect the fine points of each system and show how they’re not at all like the other, you know, because No True Scotsman. But in more innocent times it was more open and, you know, all the communist countries called themselves alternately socialist or democratic. (At this point the entire statist project seems much like a cheap Chinese restaurant that changes its name every week, possibly because like the cheap Chinese restaurant both are potentially sick-making and created from unwholesome ingredients. Of course, even though there have been cases in the news of bottom line Chinese restaurants dumpster diving for ingredients, nothing, but nothing can compare to the rank noxiousness of Marxism. Nor has even half-spoiled fish ever caused near as many deaths. I refuse to insult botulism – or the black plague – by comparing it to the rank ideas of Karl Marx.)

However, well, we’re Americans and we’re nothing if not innovative. The new twist Americans are putting on the whole “progressive” experiment (another part of their creative naming effort like “deutsche democratische republic” or “Pravda.” They’re named in an act of post modern linguistic effort that garantees nothing in the name is contained in the thing named. Very avant-garde, I’m sure, and by avant-garde I mean of course an old and musty movement that should no longer fool anyone with its pretended smarts) is jaw-droppingly daring and mind-boggling.

The latest, best efforts of progressivism to get around the bullwork of the constitution is … well… the idea of the “collective” rights.

Okay, so this shouldn’t surprise me. After all they’ve been, for years, and against all linguistic knowledge trying to convince us that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” means that armed forces are allowed to bear arms.

Now Justice Breyer is just taking a stick to the other amendments and beating them into the same shape. He thinks the first amendment is there to secure COLLECTIVE speech rights. That is you only have free speech in things that might influence government action. (For a more complete dissection, see here.)

Yes, this man is a justice in the supreme court of the United States. Lean back and think on this for a moment.

And now there’s a lot more talk about “collective” rights. It appears all these years, all of us, even the Progressive Project (which is like a bad rock band, but not nearly as harmless) have been interpreting the bill of rights wrong. Your right to not having a state religion foisted on you, for instance. Oh, you poor saps. It’s only a right so long as the state doesn’t wish to impinge upon your religion with demands that are against your beliefs. At that point, of course, it becomes a matter of collective interest and after all who are the Little Sisters Of The Poor not to provide abortifacients to the their nuns? Because, war on women, and also culture of rape. Collective rights trump individual ones.

Then there’s assembly. It turns out your right to assembly depends on your not pissing off the people in power too much. Sure, you can assemble but you must do it quietly and in the designated places.

At which point I, who am no constitutional scholar, sit back and think “Why would some very smart men, like our founders, take the time to make sure that COLLECTIVE rights are secured?”

Collective rights are always and everywhere secured, at least if they’re rights that can “influence government.” Of course, if they’re not, if they’re just the rabble grousing or malcontents, or “fringe groups” then there is nothing to be said about it, right?

So, for instance, in Elizabethan England, you had full right of speech about how the state religion should be conducted, unless you were one of those icky Catholics, who were fringe and influenced by foreigners, in which case you should just be burned. (Yes, I know, turn about was fairplay. There’s nothing to choose in that time. But you know, you were in or you were out.) And in the various totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century (shut up, my first awareness of politics was under one. I know of what I speak.) you could of course speak and contribute to the discourse in the manner of a loyal opposition. Your collective right to speak – unless you were one of those crackpots who thought crony capitalism with overtones of mercantilism was keeping the people poor – was not to be infringed. And if your message was “exactly but” you might even get minor adjustments in government. I’m sure justice Breyer would approve.

The point is there has never been and there never will be a government that denies collective speech rights. This is because collectives can be controlled. (It has long been my observation that all you need is a communist in any group or association and everything that group or association does becomes communist.) First of all, of course, are which collectives are recognized (and note Beyer’s idea of USEFUL collective speech.) Second because collectives are as everything else prone to be influenced by a particularly vocal person. (See, communists in a group or association. Much like a drop of sewage in a barrel of wine.)

In the Soviet Union they had freedom of collective speech. They do in Cuba.

Do you notice any difference between them and us? Or any reason why a group of men who knew history (if not the tragically colossal errors of the twentieth century, but those were forecast in the past) would feel the need to write down any of those “rights” if they were collective?

You will not find any reason for the founders to do that, unless, of course, they liked writing down a lot of things to no purpose. (And they didn’t.)

And you will find plenty of difference between societies with collective rights and with individual ones.

Look, people, we, as humans are creatures of a group. We’re social creatures. (Which the idiots who answer to this type of posts routinely interpret to mean we should be socialist.) By this I mean that if you drop a human baby into wild, even if he survives, he won’t be fully human. He won’t have language, or culture (because unlike the Progressive Project illusions, culture is NOT hereditary genetically.) He’ll be a sort of hairless ape, maybe a little smarter than the median ape, but not human.

As humans, we are creatures of culture, and we need to define and identify ourselves through our culture. In other words, we want to fit in. We, all of us, at some level, want to be the cool kids.

What this means is that humans tend to “opinion match.” Particularly when those opinions must be expressed in a group and by consensus.

This is why you see societies go through most jaw-dropping attacks of idiocy that EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW WOULD END IN TEARS. The black tulip mania; Nazism; Stalinism; Hope and Change; a sudden decision that fat is bad for you; anything from the tragic to the comic (Hope and change, we’ll all die laughing) that is clearly and obviously stupid but which takes a population (and sometimes the whole world) by storm… All of it comes from the individual’s desire to fit in, to be in tune with the crowd.

If that was all there was to Humanity, I doubt we’d have got where we are now. But it isn’t. Humanity produces a certain number of outliers. Odds we call them. Sometimes these people are smarter than average, but often they just have some other characteristic that causes them not to quite fit in.

Because we don’t fit in (in my case, would you believe my first set back at fitting in was the inability to play the elastic jumping game all Portuguese school girls played?) we usually give up being “one of the cool kids” at an early age. And this leaves us free to see the insanity of the groups from outside.

I submit to you that to the extent a society succeeds or fails it’s the measure to which they allow individual action to their cranks, outliers and “nuts.”

Take a society that represses them utterly and you have China, which has been caught in an iterative madness that is the historical equivalent of Fifty First Dates. (How many emperors burned books and banned folk tales?) Maybe they’ve broken out of it now as their madness looks more western from the outside, but I wouldn’t put my hands in the fire. They’ve gone through these periods before, too.

Take a society in which outliers are allowed to talk and express themselves, and present their crazy ideas to everyone and you have… the US. Which is why over our existence we’ve been the most innovative, creative nation ever. Because sometimes the cranks and the crazies JUST have a point. It might take them a good long while of being the voice that cries in the desert, but eventually they get through. Or some of them do. And the result is a better life for everyone.

Which is what our founders meant.

And those seeking to curtail my individual rights in favor of the collective can gaze upon my very individual middle finger. They can take a hike. They and the horse they rode in on.

It’s a bloodied mule, who has brought nothing but death and poverty wherever it was allowed to ride.

To protect us from this, we have the bill of rights, which secures the states (and individual) rights AGAINST government. To protect this we have our government assigned ENUMERATED powers they’re not meant to exceed.

Even the best government in the world will oppress its people given time, because it is the way of the bureaucrat and the intellectual to think he knows what’s best for all people.

Notice this nonsense only came up when they think the Progressive Project is almost complete, and that therefore the government is the best and most benevolent it could be. This is why they came up with nonsense like “We all belong to the government” – spit.

The thing is, if they wished to be slaves, we’d let them be. There are many places in the world where they can find themselves happily enslaved. They could depart from us, without rancor.

The fact that they’re not seeking one of those places means that’s not what they want. They want US to be slaves, and them our masters.

In the land of the free, the name for that is “treason.” Let not the pretty words and the intellectual fog distract you. It is treason they propose under their soft pleading.

We must shout it loud and clear whenever we hear this nonsense. Or we’ll lose our right to shout.

It’s Not Just Me, Is It? – by David Pascoe

Is the world getting weirder, or is it me? Seriously. I’m having a rough time with this right now, and I’m distinctly wondering if our species has gone mad.

Our nation has apparently shifted from one interested in the world and concerned with maintaining a sort of peace to one more or less – it seems – afraid of its own shadow. Those at our highest levels don’t react to genuine tragedies, instead preferring to court long-time enemies (enemies who have repeatedly called for our corporate destruction), censure long-time allies, and generally make of us a laughingstock upon the world stage.

Closer to home we have a man – a genuine racist, unlike those of us who simply are unfortunate enough to be born with a melanin deficiency – who has refused to rent to those of African or Latin descent, repeatedly and egregiously. And yet, nothing happens to him until his girlfriend records him saying something to match his actions. She almost certainly didn’t ask his permission to record his statements, and did so in his home. I’m given to understand that’s kind of a bad thing.

He’s a racist [REDACTED], and I’m pretty sure nobody argues with that. What I expect concerns most of us here is where this may lead to. I realize that the NBA doesn’t constitute anything resembling a government, and that they can sanction him or whatever it is they do (what is this sport thing of which you speak?) and it’s an internal matter of private citizens and corporations and whatnot. That’s up to them, and when people do horrible things, we human critters like bad things to happen to them right back.

But what about when somebody comes over to your house and records you talking about a villain in one of your stories (for my fellow writers), a truly despicable creature who uses children for his pleasure and sacrifices hard-working entrepreneurs to his dark demon-god? Said recording then appears, in edited form, on the internet. It goes viral, at which point, you become a pariah. Your professional reputation is ruined (now here’s a genuine case of libel, I expect) and you can’t show your face for fear of violence. Farfetched? Probably, but how much farther do things have to get before this becomes possible? Normal?

Indeed, the mayor of Sacramento recently made public comments to the effect that he hoped every bigot in the country understood that what happened to Sterling could “happen to you.”

For extra irony points, the LA chapter of the NAACP announced they’re withdrawing the Lifetime Achievement Award with which they’d intended to honor him. Which would have made the second one for Mr. Sterling.

On a more personal note, a man I know to be a good friend, a good husband and a good father is “enjoying” the attention of the rabid far left of the scifi community. (Slight digression here: libel seems to require not only intent to damage reputation, but actually doing so. I’m pretty sure this isn’t actually going to hurt his rep any. In fact, quite the opposite.) His actual words are misrepresented, and frequently, his opponents simply make things up and attribute them to him. The comments, as they so often do – painfully, tiresomely often – overflow with the most disgraceful assortment of abominable rubbish imaginable. So much so that his wife has had to reassure acquaintances that she and their children are in no danger.

On one hand, I find this all amusing. I’ve never known Larry to be anything but a gentleman in person. He has plenty of friends who don’t necessarily agree with him, and so far as I know, none of them are afraid of Larry. I expect it’s quite the contrary. Knowing his level of training – and the fact that he’s kinda huge, and I’m rather less so – I like having him around.

But. If a man can be branded a bigot and brought low through shady (and possibly illegal) means, and only after he’s said something, what then is to prevent this from happening to someone everybody – at least everybody who *matters* – just <i>knows</i> is a similar bigot? And while I think this path is missing a few rather large steps, these are the kinds of plots we deal with all the time. And I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you that truth is stranger than fiction, and not nearly as well plotted. The Author can get away with a lot more coincidence than we lesser writers.

The world is getting weirder, and our nation is marching along with it in lockstep. The White House is growing less and less coherent as information is dragged out of it. Judicial Watch received copies of emails demonstrating that the administration was working hard to spin the Benghazi attack so it wouldn’t harm the President’s re-election prospects, and the press secretary recently tried to claim they weren’t about that at all.

Economic growth has slowed to a tenth of one percent in the last quarter, yet we’re fast approaching another “summer of recovery.” We’re warned that unless a significant number of people enroll in Obamacare, it will fall into a death spiral, and I fully expect to hear that record numbers enrolled. And I understand we’re fast approaching the corporate mandate, unless that’s been delayed by royal presidential fiat. Again. The IRS continues to waffle as Congress continues to investigate its targeting of groups based on how well their politics don’t match up with the administration’s.

There’s a strangeness in the air. It seems like everybody’s walking on eggshells and keeping a weather eye out. I think John C. Wright is correct: we’re in the midst of the Crazy Years. And somehow, we didn’t notice until recently.

So what do we do about it? Personally, I mostly want to sleep for about a week, and I understand that won’t really disappear until after all the kids leave home. Considering we’re a bare couple weeks from welcoming our first into the world, I’m not particularly heartened. We’ve got strengths. We know how to learn, and we like it. We can keep picking up new skills and new information, and teaching each other when we’re together. We’ve got spokesfolks. Larry’s loud, and Sarah’s got a heck of a following. Mr. Wright has a tongue that by rights should be carried in a scabbard, it’s so sharp. Brad Torgerson is indefatigable. We have a community of people who care about good stories more than messages, and it seems to be growing. More than anything, we’re discovering our voice. When our opponents don’t want to engage in discussion, they resort to insult and attack. This alone should be considered a victory. Most of all, we should keep our humor. And get some rest. After all, if you haven’t got your health . . .

Oh! RavenCon was last weekend. Sarah and Kate have already posted their after actions, here and at MGC. First, it’s very strange to be able to more or less dawdle on the way to a convention. Every one I’ve gone to has required a flight from Hawaii to the mainland or a long day worth of driving. Sometimes both. Now that we’ve moved to the East Part, there are actually conventions that are local. Again: weird. We arrived in Richmond just as the storms began to sweep down upon us, and had just landed in Barfly Central when the hotel was struck by lightning. A quirk of the architecture left BFC without a fire alarm in the suite, so we ignored the one wailing in the hall and enjoyed each other’s company.

Mostly, panels seem to me a place for fans to try to connect with their favorite authors, and for authors to try to gather a few more readers into the loyal fold. I’m not certain yet what my role is in attending panels when I’m at a convention as a professional. Beyond providing moral support. Which was in need. Sarah had the aforementioned Matrons and Crones panel. A rather sexist panel, I thought, as there were no men on it. Apparently, our opinions weren’t sought. I guess being a woman’s son and another woman’s husband and now somebody’s father doesn’t qualify me to speak about character archetypes. Fair enough.

Back to panels: my problem with panels is that I don’t learn much at the typical writerly ones. Consequently, I don’t really attend many where I’m not front and center to be a presence for someone actually speaking. Your mileage may vary, of course, and I suspect this will shift over time. Especially as I switch which side of the microphone I’m on.

Barfly Central was, as usual, excellent. A great place to get away from the crowds, and to connect with other Barflies. Speaker brought excellent scotch, as usual. I’m partial to the Islay he shared Saturday evening. We didn’t do any room parties, and with Mrs. Dave being very definitely eight months pregnant, we didn’t really stay out very late. It was a delight, as always, to spend time with Dan and Sarah, though I think we all missed the boys. Meeting and getting to know Kate was a pleasure, and I enjoy that she’s relatively local to us (my sense of distance is skewed. If I can get to you in a day or so, that’s local). RavenCon was a lot of fun, and I expect the Pascoes will be back next year. All three of us.

Yesterday I echoed the following on my facebook page.

Of course, long time readers of my blog are giggling and going “How Sarah” though I assure you I don’t make these mistakes on purpose.  I make them through a combination of two things: incipient dyslexia and the fact that these posts are normally made either late night or early morning.

Needless to say no more had this comic gone up than someone chimed in with that hoary old chestnut of “Anything worth doing is worth doing well” and someone else came in to defend her vigorously on the grounds that “not proofreading or spell checking your blog shows a lack of respect for yourself and your readers, and whether its paid or not, I should be offered the best the blogger can produce.”

Um…  ’Mkay.  So, let’s examine the economics of my life, particularly now that indie publishing has come into “how I make my money” even if, so far, in a very minor fashion.  And that Indie publishing takes time.  And then we’ll explore that lovely Puritan aphorism about what is worth doing.

To begin with – and by way of confession – I haven’t done any indie publishing in a couple of months.  The conjunction of my trying to finish overdue books with the end of school year stuff that affects even parents of young men (as in, graduation ceremonies, award ceremonies, making sure they have their stuff for finals, making sure they don’t forget their own heads while very busy with other stuff) has joined with a spate of breaking stuff in the house, and odd health stuff to rob me of the five hours or so a week that I need for my labor of putting up my short story (and novella) back list.

I’ve also been, I’m sure you noticed, more laid back with the blog, having got more guests in and such to fill in my inability to blog every day.

This is just as an illustration of how close to the bone my time management is.  Throw in a wobble in one area and other things have to give.  They have to, because I still need to eat, go to the bathroom and — occasionally — sleep.

However, most of the year – when not in crunch time – I do blog every day.  I blog for three reasons.

First because I suspect a lot of you would never have heard of me except through this blog.  In that sense this blog is like an extended meet-the-author chat session which will, hopefully, lead to better sales for my paid work.  Eventually.

Second I blog because I’m a kinetic thinker.  I know that sounds weird, but I’m the sort of person who can’t figure out how to assemble a piece furniture, except by doing it.  I learned my letters through copying them, memorized stuff by copying it, and think best by typing.  Sometimes the sort of moral/philosophical stuff I blog about here is me trying to unknot a dilemma in my current book.

Third, I blog as a sort of free-writing exercise.  Lots of disciplines advise this as a cure against the block.  Five pages in the morning, or whatever.  This blog serves that principle for me.

Having found over my years of keeping a blog at livejournal and writing in it only when the spirit moved me that the only way to develop a following is to make it into an habit for the reader – and for that it needs to be daily – I strive to post something every day.  Having given up on the idea of just echoing things, because what I have to offer is more analytic than breezy, I tend to make rather long posts.

So, every morning I roll out of bed and write 2 to 3k words at a sitting.  (Unless I have time to do them on Sunday afternoon, and then I burn the entire afternoon writing five posts.)

I try to make sure of several things as I’m posting them: that they’re interesting or quirky – which is judged by whether they interest ME – that they make internal sense, that I check any obvious references (though sometimes one escapes me mostly through my knowing something that just ain’t so), and that my spelling and grammar are understandable.

This last involves my running a spell checker, then reading over twice – once before and once after it’s posted.  (Don’t ask me why, but some mistakes only become glaring when it’s posted.)

Contrast this with the process I go through before I send a short story to an editor (let alone publish it.)  There I not only do the spell checker, but I print it out, go over it carefully not just for typos but for flow of language, then enter the changes, then print it out and do it again, then have a friend or ten read over it and see if he/she/they can catch any other typos or places where my logic went awry.  Even for a very short short, this will take something like three hours not counting friend/s time (which I pay back by doing same service for them.)

Now imagine me doing this, every morning, with my posts.  They take about an hour to write, even short ones, and maybe half an hour to check.  This means I’m working on them 10 hours a week.  Add in even just two prints/checks and the friend pay-back time per blog, and I’d be working 30 hours a week.  For free.

For free, you say?  But I thought you did it for publicity.  And besides there’s that button up there for donations.  Uh.  yeah.  The button nets maybe $25 a month, [Now up to about $100 a month, still mostly for the fiction — thank you to all my subscribers.  I REALLY appreciate it, and it’s not bad pay for 10 hours — though it’s usually more like 20.  Eh. — a week.  SAH 2014] on a good month, most of it, incidentally, for the fiction.  As for the publicity, I THINK it’s working, (if I ever think it’s not, the blogging stops, of course) but it’s an indirect and slow process.   What do I mean by that?  Well, most people – understandably.  Would I be complaining? – will first buy my books used, to try out.  On those I get nothing.  Then, because I still don’t have any indie novels, they will buy the traditionally published ones.  Again, not complaining.  But I get at most a few cents per book.

My goal is to grow the audience so that eventually when I bring novels out indie, the money comes to me and is significant.  It’s worth a gamble.  BUT right now (two kids in/entering college, four cats, and in a precarious job market for both writers and mathematicians – I’m not seeing a huge influx of pocket money from this endeavor.  As is it is costing me money because when I’m blogging everyday I’m not writing my non-fiction articles, which do  pay (even if not crazy amounts.)

Ten hours unpaid a week and a small financial loss is doable, given what else it serves.  I consider it a loss leader.  Thirty hours means my output of the stuff I DO get paid for is cut in half, or I give up sleeping – I’m sorry to disappoint perfectionists, but I don’t feel a need to kill myself to please them.

So what about “Whatever is worth doing is worth doing well”? – note the well, not PERFECTLY.  A friend of mine who is a professional editor, and one of the best editors I know (I hire him when I can afford to.  It isn’t often) once told me that even if you have a team of copyeditors working for you (which he did at one point, since he worked in scholastic publications where the scientific writing had to be checked and rechecked a number of times) and have each copyeditor initial each line, to ensure they didn’t just glaze for half a page, a careful reader will still find typos.

Having had over twenty novels published, which go through WEEKS of my checking them, then paying someone to check them, then sending them to my (sometimes excellent) editors/publishers, who then pay someone to copyedit and have someone else in the office check the copyeditor’s work, AND finding any number of typos in the printed book, I’m here to tell you it’s true.

If you definition of “doing well” is “Perfect” you’re going to do one of two things.  I’ve seen both among writers, and they’re both deadly. One is to forever rewrite the same novel (or, heaven help us, the same short story) over and over and over again for years.  The other is to do nothing because you can’t “do it well.”

Either of these in fact are illustrations of “The perfect is the enemy of the good.”

Does this mean I don’t have respect for my work or my readers?  Oh, please.  If I didn’t, I wouldn’t even spell check what I put up.  (Okay, sometimes I typo the titles because I type those directly into the browser.  I usually catch it, though.)  I certainly wouldn’t try to make sure it makes internal sense.  And my readers would be my four cats and maybe my husband when he has time.

Look, it takes a certain amount of work to get something 90% done.  And then another equal amount of work to get it the other 5% to 95% of perfection.  (You’re never going to get to 100%.  It’s part of the human condition.  Deal.)  For the books I do the other 50% of the work.  (It takes me as long to check/edit/polish as to write a book.  And I’m a relatively clean first drafter as my first readers can attest.  But the final pass is detail work and FUSSY.  I’m willing to do it for books – and stories – because those are hopefully going to be around a long time.  Blogs?  It’s a daily page, and even though the old ones are there, they’re pretty much only read when someone hits it through a word search.  They’re also usually read by people in the same spirit newspapers or opinion columns were read.  90% is usually enough.

I’m not saying this as an excuse for sloppy writing.  Of course I do my best in whatever time I have to devote to the endeavor.  And so should you.

I’m saying it to remind everyone that the “perfect” is the enemy of the good – it is the ENEMY of HUMAN, period – and unattainable anyway.  If you feel disrespected because there’s a word missing from one of my blog posts (or three words missing.  Or two typos) you probably have other issues.  It is the equivalent of going off into a froth because your mom made you an omelet for breakfast and didn’t plate it perfectly, with a little bit of orange and a sprig of mint, just like your favorite chef at your favorite brunch place does…  Instead of being happy your mom rolled out of bed and made you an omelet at all, before she had coffee.

Most of the people who devote themselves to obsessive typo hunting in other people’s blogs are people who feel inadequate – perhaps because they don’t think they can blog, since they can’t be perfect – and the typo-hunt is a way of attempting to bring others down and elevate themselves.  “Well, I might not blog, but if I did, I’d catch that typo.”  To them I say, “Give it a try.  Find out how hard it is.  Get your self-esteem by doing it, not by pointing out flaws in the product.  Mote, meet Speck.”

Then there are the ones who simply feel entitled.  Nothing but the best will do for them, and how dare you put an inferior concoction in front of my exalted self? It reminds me of the Far Side Cartoon where the dog has mowed the yard all in a scramble of lines and the owner is saying “bad dog” instead of being amazed and grateful the dog mows at all.  To those people I say – like people with a fine palate who must eat only at the best restaurants, you sir or madam are too refined to read mere unpaid blogs.  You should confine yourself to writing that’s not published till after it’s checked by layers of proofreaders and fact checkers.  (SNORT.)

If we get to the point you think a lot of my posts are well nigh incomprehensible or typo riddled to the point of inanity, then I will have fallen below my definition of doing it well and find it not worth doing.

On the other hand, until/unless such a time arrives, or until/unless I decide that my compensation is simply not enough for the labor involved, I’ll go on doing it “as well as I can in the time I have.”  Hopefully that is enough for most of you.

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — is now up on Amazon.

This novel will get posted here a chapter every Friday or Saturday, or occasionally Sunday.  If you contribute $6 you shall be subscribed for the earc and first clean version in electronic format.  I think it will probably take another three months to finish.  Less, if I can have a weekend to run through and get ahead of the game.  It hasn’t happened yet.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

Lady Caroline Ainsling, sister of the Duke of Darkwater:

In the Kitchen of the Centaur Queen

I dismounted and Akakios’ mother led us through the narrow street, to a house that looked like one of the nicer cottages in our domains. Not exactly poor or untidy looking – it was two floors, with quite a nice-looking façade, and an ivy trellises climbing over the front door. The way in, too, looked like a nice cottage, or perhaps one of the humbler houses, such as where a parson might live: we went into a tidy garden via a wooden gate set in a low stone wall covered in climbing roses.

We meant Akakios’ mother and myself. Akakios stepped carefully over the wall, and then maneuvered his way to the same path we were taking – a tidy cobblestone path – to the front door.

I understood the reason for the carefully, as his mother said, “Akakios!” in that tone of mothers everywhere.

And Akakios said, in the tone of every boy discovered at fault, “I was careful. I looked where I stepped.”

“Yes, dear,” she said. But you know that rabbits can burrow over night.”

“Oh, mother,” he said, in a tone of great impatience, which nonetheless still sounded like he’d been discovered at fault and knew it. “I haven’t done that since—”

“Since you were twelve and first come into your powers, yes, I know,” she said, and smiled. “But this would be a very unfortunate time to have you laid up with a broken leg. Do be careful.”

He didn’t answer that. I could hear him walking behind us to the front door. He’d once explained to me something about magical horse shoes, which vanished when he shifted. They weren’t made of iron, of course – it would be terrible to do that to a magical being – but they made the same sound when he was in centaur form.

At the door, which was an ordinary door, and I was just wondering how Akakios was going to get through it, his mother turned around and said, “Akakios!” exactly like our cook used to talk to Seraphim or Gabriel when they came to the kitchen and stole cookies.

He sighed, and I was aware of his stepping behind me, and into a little branching path. I looked, and he was trotting towards an outbuilding at the end of the garden. Funny how he could move, in his horse form, in the exact same way that conveyed annoyance of his human form.

I turned to find his mother smiling at me. “He knows better than to come in without changing,” she said.

I looked at the normal size door. “Can he?”

“Oh, assuredly. It’s magical, see. But the centaur form looms in the whole kitchen, and it’s very hard to move around it. Their father does it all the time, but I have very little control over him. Husbands! However, my sons were properly brought up.”

I didn’t ask her if her husband hadn’t been properly brought up. The whole idea of coming in in centaur form being rather like coming in the kitchen with muddy boots had never occurred to me. I began to suspect there were fine points to being married to a centaur that I should learn about. Particularly if Akakios was going to retain his ability to shift in my world.

You see, I’d never thought much about it, because, well, it was supposed that he’d never be able to enter fairyland again and never be able to shift. It seemed like the burden of learning to bridge our ways and to live as it was expected would all be on his side. But now…

I followed my future mother in law into a tidy kitchen. There was a fireplace, but it wasn’t lighted, and there was a rather large, elaborate stove, made of brick, I thought. It had ovens and was clearly set up for finer cooking than the fireplace would have been.

There was also a large, well-scrubbed table, the pine pale and looking like it had been polished by generations of use. And there were four chairs, two rockers by the fireplace, and – curiously – a child’s rocker, upon which a fat marmalade cat slept.

The windows at either end of the kitchen – crosswise from the door and fireplace – were wide open, and through them came soft breezes perfumed with lavender.

The cat looked up as I entered and fixed me with a baleful eye, then sighed, as though its rest had been rudely interrupted, and curled back up to sleep.

The queen of centaurs went up to the table, where she had a spread of dough laid out, and various instruments. She started cutting it, swiftly. “You know,” she said. “I meant no more than to make some treats for the village children, but it chances it’s Akakios’ favorite, and I’ll have them ready in a moment.” She was putting the squares of dough on trays that looked ceramic, and topping them with dollops of jam. “It won’t take a moment,” she said. She had yet more flour on her nose, and a bit on her hair from careless sweeping of her hand up.

“They smell wonderful,” I said. “But I won’t be able to eat them, will I?”

She blinked at me, as she lifted the full tray. “Whyever not?” And then with a smile that reminded me of Akakios making jokes, “We rarely poison our guests.”

“Well, the food of fairyland,” I said. “I was here once before, you see, and your husband…” I hesitated before telling her the full trouble he’d gone through to avoid having me eat the food of fairyland.

“Oh, that,” she said. “It doesn’t apply to the village. You’ll have to take my word for it, but there would be nothing to lying to you – no good coming to me. And I wouldn’t do that, at any rate, your being Akakios’ affianced wife.” She slid the tray into the oven, and closed the door “It doesn’t apply to the village because our food is made of what we grow, and not magicked into being.”

I wondered if that was true. In my visit to fairyland before, I’d learned not to believe anyone. On the other hand, she was Akakios’ mother and my future mother in law. On yet the other hand, would she not want to tie me to fairyland, if she thought it would also tie down her son, whom she’d expected never to see again. And why had she been baking cookies while we were gone.

I thought it might offend her mortally if I didn’t eat her baking. But then again, what was offense to being trapped in this strange place.

Just then I heard Akakios come in. I could tell before turning that the person who’d walked in was Akakios and also that he was in human form. Turning around, I saw him as I’d first seen him in human form. He’d removed the shirt and jacket, and was wearing a sort of Greek Chiton, which left one arm free, and covered him in soft white wool folds to his knees. He had sandals on. And the facilities for changing must include a hair brush, because he’d brushed his hair back and re-tied it, so he looked neat and clean and far more at home in this kitchen than I did.

He came up behind me, silently, and put his hand on my shoulder, while looking at his mother.

“I am making nymph’s sighs,” she said. “They’ll be out of the oven in a moment. I should send for milk to accompany. Or would you prefer coffee?”

He said, with a half laugh. “So you’re worried. Because you can’t have known we were coming, so you were baking to—”

“Calm myself down, yes,” she said, with a sound of great tiredness, dropping on a chair. She looked suddenly very tired and very worried, like she was tired of being worried. “Oh, Akakios, the king– Night Arrow. That poor boy.”

Welcome to the weekend, ladies and germs. Since we had no entries at all last week, I’m glad to see we’ve got some new faces now! So kick back, let the honey-do list take care of itself (they do that, right?) and enjoy a new book from one of our lovely readers. Don’t forget to leave a review when you’re done! If you’ve been enjoying the book aggregations here, be sure to show your appreciation to Our Beloved Hostess. As always, future entries for the promo post can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Freelance Doorstop, Code Monkey, and Tongue-Clucking Grammarian

Cedar Sanderson

Trickster Noir (Pixie for Hire)

After the battle of Tower Baelfire ended, Lom lay dying. Bella was tasked with not only the job she never wanted, but the one she did. Could she keep Lom alive long enough for him to come to the rescue when their kingdom needed them? And what did Raven, mysterious trickster spirit and honorary uncle to Bella, want with them? If the threat was big enough to have the trickster worried, Bella knew she needed to have Lom at her side. Underhill might look like a soap-bubble kingdom, but Bella and Lom knew there was a gritty underside. Why else would fairyland need a dark man willing to carry a big gun and be the Pixie for Hire?

Tom Knighton

After the Blast

Jason wasn’t having a bad day, but all that changed with a blinding flash of light and a mushroom cloud on the horizon. Overweight and out of shape, Jason must struggle home, only to learn that finding his family would be more of a challenge. Along the way, he transforms into someone different. Is he the kind of man that is the problem with this new world, or the kind of man this new world needs?

Casey Neumiller

Destiny’s Heir (Throne of Letale Epic Fantasy Series)

Everyone has a destiny.

Street-wise thief Ben is at the top of his game, so when he is recruited to join a band of brigands for a heist promising riches enough to leave the slums, he’s eager to help. But the job will not be easy – not when the target is the royal crown, locked away in the most secure castle in Letale. And when the unity of the group begins to fray, he is forced to choose between friends, when the wrong choice means imprisonment or death!

Magi apprentice Arraya is content with her quiet life of study, but her solitude is shattered by her master’s vision of a rightful heir to the throne. She is forced to pursue him by her own vision: a horrifying image of his death by fire at the hands of an unseen foe. Untried and untested, she struggles to reach her master, but finds herself caught between newfound allies and old friends, with time running out to prevent a tragedy and complete her master’s mission.

And sitting on the throne, backed by allies dark and powerful, is the Imposter-King, a man who guards his rule jealously and will surely kill any who trespass on his power…

If you’re a fan of traditional fantasy like The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, don’t miss this book!

*Before we begin this post, management has a small announcement:  New cover and free on Amazon  Where Horse And Hero Fell. This is one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever written, not in what it is, but in the sense that I’m not sure how it happened or how I thought it out, or….  You see, it was… (counts) 11 years ago, and I’d just passed out in the bathroom (we’ve never figured out why, but pure tiredness might have done it.  I’d flown to a trade show — courtesy Berkley — to promote the Shakespeare series — and came back to a notice it was being taken out of print, but never mind — then came home to organize and set up the younger kid’s 8th birthday party.  And then, after the party, I sat up for a while, and had a glass of wine with husband.  When I went up to get ready for bed, I collapsed.  The problem is I hit my head and gave myself concussion and added a diopter to my glasses prescription.  Anyway, for about six months, I was also completely … weird.  Not that I’m not weird normally, but I don’t normally careen between dialects of English or even foreign languages mid-sentence.  And I don’t normally have fugue states lasting hours.  The scariest part of this was driving through this REALLY nice neighborhood and thinking “I’d love to live here” before realizing I was a block from home.  As for what I did in my fugue states?  Mostly grocery shopping.  Anyway, in the middle of this I got a phone call asking me to write for Places to Go, People to Kill on short notice, because they had a hole.  So, I did.  Six months later, I got the contributor copy, and I had NO clue what I’d written.  I mean, not one word.  So I read it.  Not a bad story.*

You know the old saying, about man not being an island onto himself?

It is wrong, of course, in many ways. In many ways, we are islands onto ourselves. Look, no matter how much I write about other people, how much I love other people, even how much I live with other people; no matter how much I struggle to develop empathy, at the end of the day, it’s just me, Sarah, in the voice behind the eyes.

I can by an intellectual or emotional exercise, see and feel what other people are seeing and feeling. I can say “well, I’ve been there, and it was awful, so if the kid has just had his heart broken, I’ll do my best to ease his life these next few days.” I can say “Well, you know, the people who were just hit by the hurricane need food and clothes, and I’m going to make sure they get it.” But this doesn’t make me them. And what I think they want might not be what they want. Heck, what I think they need might not be what they really need. (Which is why the old pablum about “To each according to his needs, fromo each according to his abilities” is not just stupid but also evil – because who decides what your needs or abilities are, tovarish? Your level of unhappiness, perhaps your very survival hinges on the ability of some bureaucratic stranger to know you better than you know yourself. Would you care to lay a small bet on the results?)

For instance, while we were living in South Carolina, with a baby and two mortgages, and coming up short every month, someone might have thought what we really needed was baby food (someone did think that, which made me sigh at the box of it) but we didn’t use baby food at all. Robert was breastfed till one and a half. Someone might have thought what we really needed was baby clothes, but I’d got a couple of boxes from Portugal, and I was good. Someone might have thought what we needed was adult food – we did need that. But there were farmers’ markets almost year round and cheap fish markets in the least savory parts of town. We survived.

No, what I really NEEDED was a $40 book of Leonardo DaVinci’s art. Because we had no TV, couldn’t afford any entertainment, and I was circling the drain of post-partum depression. Fortunately my husband knew me well enough to buy it for me, and it did more to get me functional again than all the food and clothes in the world could have. But that’s because it’s my husband, and we live as close as we can (but still not one person) – not some government bureaucrat who’d never met me.

So to an extent we’re all islands. But whoever coined the thought had an odd idea of islands as perfectly isolated. They aren’t. There are boats, and there is radio communication, and there are, occasionally, bridges. In metaphor, the bridges would be really close relationships, like my husband and I. He’s lived with me for years, and just by observing me and my reactions, he has to have a pretty good idea of who lives there, behind my eyes.

Radio and boats are our friendships, but more importantly – or perhaps, but also – books. I tend to joke I had to learn to be a woman from books. In a way it’s an exaggeration, but to learn to be a modern woman and not a village termagant which is what was modelled to me, I did have to learn from books. Note the fact that I had a vagina didn’t confer upon me instant understanding of such things as the games women play. Flirtation was an unknown art. Conveying to someone I liked him (other than by a real close attention to everything he said) and the other things that go into the game between men and women – or even between women in a public relationship of work or power – was a complete mystery. Reading about it in books told me how someone else (often male) thought about it, and it was the beginning of realizing that ignoring guys did not tell them I was interested. (Who knew?)

Which brings us to the current politically correct handwringing, moaning and general bitching about how we are both supposed to write more people of color and different sexual orientations, but how doing that – if you’re not of those colors or political orientations – means you’re “exploitative” and “imperialist” and the Lord alone knows what.

Twaddle. Racist/sexist and homophobic twaddle at that.

Oh, yes, I know, in the glittery minds of the idiots (some of them well known authors) proclaiming this nonsense, the idea is not that more white people (or whatever) should write these characters, but that writers of these backgrounds should write them.

At which point one scratches one’s head and wonders what passes for thought and logistics inside their minds.

Look, no matter how many “opportunities” you provide and welcome mats you extend, the DESIRE to write (let alone the ability, since the two aren’t always correlated) and the desire to write more than one book are not evenly distributed.

Hells and damnation, I’ve been known to say I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy and I was only half joking. For the amount of time and effort I expend on these boks, if I put that into any other business, I’d be at the top of the ladder, and have a beach house in a tropical island.

I know this comes funny from someone who always has half a dozen mentees trailing, but those people, when they come to me are already lost cases and I can’t talk them out of writing. Same for the sons. And if you can’t dissuade them, they might as well make money from it.

So if what these warriors for the proper distribution of characters mean to distribute literary INTEREST let alone talent evenly among all minorities, I wish them luck. It’s a little more mad than a government program to place tarts in lakes to hand out magical swords, and the sheer magnificent insanity of it would make it funny to write. I’m not sure it would mesh with real life, though.

Even if it did, the distribution would be skewed. I mean, minorities are minorities for a reason. (Except women who are actually the majority and used vagina-foo to get classed as a minority.) I’d guess that even if proportionally distributed the number of lesbian writers of Polynesian ancestry will be vanishingly small.

So, what if you want to read about a Polynesian Lesbian and there’s no books available? Well, don’t even think about writing one, because that would be racist and also stealing victimhood.

It’s that stealing victimhood that brings us to the knot in the thinking of these supposedly rational people.

See, it’s perfectly acceptable for me, as a straight Latina to write books about straight white people (and Latinos, I presume.) But if I write about a gay person, or someone of a darker hue than I, then I’m a racist. People of other “more oppressed” races are totally opaque to me and besides I’m exploiting them by writing about them.

WHAT?

Either everyone is completely opaque to everyone else – we’re not – or we’re all equally transparent in the same amount.

Unless the people who spew this nonsense can truly and rationally believe that white people are never discriminated against (they do) which means none of them ever heard of the skinny, non-athletic boy getting pounded into the ground at recess, or of the cute girl being presumed to be stupid, or….

They can’t believe that rationally, in the sense that they can’t reason themselves into this. No one could.

The idea behind this is that there is a hierarchy of oppression; that you can understand it upward (towards lack of oppression) but not downward (towards greater oppression) which is a Marxist idea, BUT also that your exterior characteristics dictate your interior ones. That is, from navigating near the island, you can tell what the thought pattern behind the eyes is.

This is the old idea that culture is genetic – something Adolf Hitler would have loved – but with a new twist. According to the ah… shibboleths (no one can call it thought) behind this theory of “exploitation” by “writing the other” is the idea that your culture is conferred by your appearance.

How many kids do you know who are a different apparent race from their parents? Believe it or not, these kids (adopted or not) are supposed to have a different interior life from their parents and (if darker) be completely opaque to them. (This reminds me of the Latino group – never mind, there’s more to it, but not for the blog – who was recruiting at an event where both Robert and I were in line. They picked him out and said “Hispanic?” He said “Half Portuguese.” They said “Portuguese counts.” He said “My mom is Portuguese.” Keep in mind, I’m standing RIGHT BY HIM. And they look around, bewildered and say “Is she here?” – by the rules of PC, my son has a completely different culture from me, and is more oppressed than I am.)

The insanity of this is obvious. Say you are a very pretty and slight young man, whether you actually like women or not, you’ve been endowed with gay culture. (Until you reveal yourself straight, which immediately puts you in the never discriminated against bracket. Sorry.) Or say that like me at 14, with an affro (it was popular) and after a month at the beach, everyone thinks you’re black (my features are actually like a collision between the Middle East and Africa), does this confer black culture on you, or doesn’t it?

Where the rats got in the heads there is the whole idea of “group victims.” This is distinctly Marxist and like most Marxist ideas hinges on treating people as things.

To an extent understandable. They thought it was a “scientific” way to run society, which means that they had to have scientific classifications of people. Always tricky if you go person by person.

So they went with historical oppression which generally moves in the direction of darker skin color and smaller minority. (Every society always treats its smallest groups worse. Even those you’d think would have power, like geniuses. Because society is always geared to ‘average.’)

The problem – do I need to point that out? – is that who you are is only marginally influenced by your skin color, your orientation, your external characteristics. I bet all of us have known people whose life history, etc, dictated they should be helpless victims sobbing on the floor, and who were, instead, standing tall and holding a pretty effective cudgel for self defense.

I know that I, personally, as Latina, immigrant, with a liberal arts degree, have never now nor will ever be a victim. Some people have victimized me, but that doesn’t mean I’m a victim. It’s the willingness to lie down and take it and assume you can do nothing about it that makes you a victim. (And those who’ve taken advantage of me weren’t doing it because of my skin color or gender, but because they could.)

Anyway – so, some better known writers than I are wringing their hands about how difficult it is to write minority characters without offending people, and about how you can enver know someone else, and is this stealing their victimhood or their culture, or…

They should stop wringing their hands and start typing, and forget all that politically correct claptrap.

Look, I write the characters as they come to me. Some will be darker, some will be gay, some will be women, and some will be men.

Will they be real men, as they exist in the real world? Real gay people? Real—

Oh, please. Books aren’t REAL. Books are an intersection between how the voice behind your eyes views people and the archetypes of how society views people. For the longest time, I couldn’t write women, because my experience of being a woman is so weird, that people went “what?” or (my favorite) told me I’d never met a woman (I was using a male pen name for that one book.)

I’ve learned. I’ve learned by observation, by talks with my female friends, by reading other people’s idea of women.

BUT my women aren’t that archetype, either. They’re the intersection of who I am and what people expect (just enough of what people expect to make it understandable.) And so are my men, who are my observations, what the story needs, and just a little bit of archetype.

The same goes for any minority I write.

Will my gay men mortally offend some gay guys? Probably. But my fan mail and the many whispered “thank you for Nat and Luce” I get at cons tell me that for a large amount of gay males, they are just right, too.

This is because humans are not widgets. Being gay, or black, or brown, or purple or polka dot doesn’t make you the same as everyone who is gay or black or brown or purple. (It might make you the same as everyone with polka dots, because you might be a minority of one.)

And being gay or black or brown or anything doesn’t rob you of your essential humanity. When I write a character who is different from me, I’m not trying to make him/her something of a culture which never did get genetically transmitted (or we’d all be living just like in Ur of the Chaldees) but to make him/her human and to connect with him/her at that fundamental level of humanity.

What I’m doing in fact, is the same thing I do when I try to help my kids or be a good wife. “I’m not him, but this is going on in his life, and so—”

Interestingly, this whole idea of other races/genders being opaque to everyone else and of trying to bridge the gap being exploitation, negates the collectivists’ ideas of government from the top. If we can’t know each other, how can we be governed?

And curiously, I’m the one telling you that’s bullsh*t. While you can’t know people well enough to dictate their every need and want, which is why government should be small and stay out of people’s lives as much as possible, we can know each other well enough to connect at the level of fundamental humanity and to experience friendship, love, and yes, common human empathy across genders, races, and everything that divides us.

Because we’re human. As someone or other said “If you cut us do we not bleed…”

In other words, every man might very well be an island, but thank heavens, there’s telephones, radios, telegraphs, row boats and occasionally bridges. And writing and reading are definitely ways to navigate the space to the heads of those people who aren’t us… no matter their race, creed or gender.

There was a – communist as it happens – Portuguese song that ended with “To navigate is needed, to live is not needed.”

I’m not sure what they meant by living not being needed. But I’m all with them on the navigation.

Send a flotilla, a barrage of radio signals.

Carry forth the message of our common humanity. And let the idiots who think that race, gender, orientation make people into inhuman widgets eat their hearts out.

If they’re good, someday, we’ll send them some coconuts to their barren little islands.

As much as I don’t like trigger warnings, apparently I can be triggered. No, it wasn’t a PTSD thing. Well, unless hearing the same unsubstantiated claptrap over and over induces PTSD, in which case, this particular piece of claptrap I’ve been hearing since I was seven or so, and first aware of the existence of something called the United States. (It will tell you what a woman of quick decision I am that at eight – the next year – I announced when I grew up I was going to be a writer and live in Denver. Mind you, at the time I thought Denver was by the sea, so quick decision and truly spectacular geographic ignorance.)

What I think it was is the same thing that caused me to throw shoes at the head of the Portugal-Russia speaker who was telling us about the glories of Soviet Life in my 6^th grade geography class. Over and over and over again. As in, I’d throw a shoe, then the other, then limp up to get them. Then throw again when he crossed the line of what I was willing to tolerate. No, the teacher COULDN’T do anything with me. The Russian tried. He took the shoe that had hit him on the head and held it and said “What if I didn’t give it back.” “Then I’ll throw dictionaries!” He gave me my shoe back. To be fair, I didn’t hit him often (though that time I had.) Mostly I hit the podium and made him flinch, or just missed him and made him duck. Again, to be fair, I’d told the teacher I didn’t want to be there. Also, to be fair, she couldn’t send me to the directive council again. Because they’d call mom. And mom would take my side and terrify them to boot, by telling them just what kind of spineless life forms they were, and detailing the horrors of the Soviet Union. They’d learned in the past that I was a pain, but mom was trouble.  At the time she had a radio show and wrote for a lot of newspapers. Also, the teacher might or might not have had permission to have Comrade Stinkface speak to the class. At least THEORETICALLY the school was a non-political zone.

Anyway… moving right along. What motivated me to a really inadvisable outburst was the same feeling about that particular panel speaker as I had about the Soviet Speaker. It was like being trapped in one of those nightmares, where people are saying crazy things and nothing makes sense.

The difference is that this poor woman, on a panel with my friend Kate was probably on the balancing edge of maybe being on our side. (The maybe is very maybe. While people can and do change their political stripes, it takes more than knowing things are wrong and what would fix them. As has been observed here, people can be startlingly libertarian in their private lives and total statists when it comes for what they vote for. Heck, I come from an entire country like that. Portuguese merrily ignore the laws, but are convinced there should be MORE laws… for other people.)

But still and all, she wasn’t Comrade Stinkface. Otoh, neither did I throw shoes at her head, so perhaps we’re even. (Though the high heeled crocs would never, at any rate, have made the impact of the steel toed ankle boots I wore at the time. Yes, I know what bearcat said about steel toes causing you to lose your toes. But I bought them not for work (I wore clogs for work in the dirt, or any other place I might get crushed toes.) Work boots were strictly for kicking. Stop laughing. Athena totally ISN’T autobiographical. I get along with dad. Also, how many times do I have to tell you I have no sense of direction?)

Anyway, so there I was, late at night on a Saturday, after signing, Baen Roadshow, panel, dinner, taking in the last panel of the evening, before crashing, and this woman starts talking about the death of meritocracy and how tough times will teach special snow flakes they’re no entitled. So far so good, but it’s really hard to understand her (I thought she had a speech impediment, but Dan tells me she was from … New Jersey? Something like that.)

And out of her mouth comes the words, “America is an empire, and I guess we’ve hit the decline. Empires don’t last forever, and this is a decline—”

At which point, my mouth, with no notice to my brain erupts into “We have not yet begun to rise.” And when she tried to protest, I might or might not have said “Bullshit” (I thought it) but I did say “We are not an empire and we are not in decline. I come from Europe, I should know.” Oh, yeah, the voice was like the voice of the Metatron, splitting the clouds.

If Sarah – Mrs. Kilted Dave – hadn’t grabbed my arm, yanked me down and talked me down, I suppose I would have proceeded to March to the podium, take the microphone, possibly climb on the table, and start shouting at the very sleepy dozen of people in the audience. I don’t know. I honestly was just a spectator at the back of my head at that point.

Yes, I know some of you are going to argue, but no, we are not an empire. The Soviets, weirdly, were an empire, with occupation of other lands and feeding of products (and riches) to the mother land. A predatory empire at that, since they never gave anything comparable to what they took. Instead, they protected the colonies from the imaginary “imperialism” of the US.  (Which is why they accused us of it, and that piece of propaganda is still around. They needed that boogey man.)

You know, the same “imperialism” that made our client states filthy rich and quite able to call us names.

Yes, sure, we have economic influence. Or had, at least – frowns – we did. And sure, we have on occasion installed if not puppet governments as close as makes no difference. But we don’t occupy/claim territory, and no matter what the no blood for oil idiots had to say, we’ve never seized the natural riches of other lands.

We were… at best, the facilitators of a commonwealth.

Again, I know there will be all sorts of protests. Americans always feel guilty over the few times they fought for their own national interest, instead of for things that couldn’t benefit them at all. This comes, I think from not having studied history to any marked degree. Each country is SUPPOSED to defend its own interests. It’s part of the functions of a nation. If you don’t look after your interests who will? The international community is not a kindergarten, and there is no benevolent, all-knowing teacher.

However, I still agree with Dave – and I do know history – Americans are horrible imperialists, all they want to do is go home.

As for decline…

Well, my dears, and I won’t deny we’ve caught the Marxist virus. We let it infect our schools, our universities, our journalists, and our so called “elites.”

However, people don’t die of trifling little colds, and nations don’t die of Marxists taking over sectors that used to be vital and which are now being superseded by technology. We might have got “penicillin” of new technology just in time. I think we have.

I’m not saying it will be easy. I’m not saying it won’t take your lives, your fortunes and your sacred honor. (For some of us, at least. When I came out of the political closet, I knew I might be signing my life away.) But that’s neither here nor there.

Empires enter decline and die, sure.

But America isn’t an Empire. America is an idea – a new idea unleashed upon the world. This is why she scares the lackeys of the old and busted statist ideas, the servitors of the old territories and the old feuds.

Sure, we have problems. But when haven’t we? Since 1776, when has there been a time that our liberty was completely assured and we knew we’d not have to fight for it?

We’re here because the idea of individual liberty will not perish from this world – no matter how much the precious snowflakes cry.

We’re here because the idea of special snowflakes, the idea of an aristocracy of any color or class is repugnant to the very core of our souls.

Yes, if we have to fight on the streets we’ll be scarred, but I hope (and pray – oh, boy, do I pray) it won’t come that.

But here’s the thing: a nation under stress reverts to its fundamentals. Not the fundamentals of that generation, mind, but the fundamentals of the nation, the fundamentals of its founding, its myths, its glorious legends.

When shocked Russia reverted not to the proletarian revolution/anti-capitalism its latest generation had been raised in, but to the glories of the Russian Empire. While Putin might be an ex KGB man, he has been seized by the national ethos and become tzar Putin.

Our nation is – that the woman talking was right about – going to hit the wall. (SPQR linked an economic article on the thread yesterday. Apparently our growth for the first quarter was 0.1%… which is essentially stopped, particularly since figures are always revised downward. Oh, but don’t worry, because they PROMISE us that the economy is/will grow by 0.3% this quarter and also that we’re at the roaring start of a recovery. And if you believe that – they say it’s because of the better job numbers. Brother. They don’t live where I do – I have some swamp land in Florida. Almost no alligators, and I sell it cheep. – and I wish SPQR wouldn’t post those articles. No, I don’t, really. BUT he does owe me money for wood putty for those dents on my desk.) You can’t really screw up a massive sector of the economy all the while printing money in a fiat currency (so every new bill takes value and trust away from the existing ones) so you bolster a stock market into a bubble, and not cause a massive crash. (Oh, but fear not. Consumer spending is up… because of rising energy prices. Yes, yes, I knew it would cheer you up. Me, I’m crying for joy. Well… crying anyway.)

I predict we’re going to hit the wall and it will be both more terrifying and far less impressive than people expect.

Your tech isn’t going to vanish in a poof of smoke. Your knowledge won’t vanish either. Those of us who are even minimally resourceful might lose a lot, but, health holding up and us not being in one of the areas where there’s physical violence (and there might or might not be such areas) we’ll be okay. BUT the ones who expect everything to be smoothed for them, and the disciples of “equality” and “fairness” that consists in giving special things to special snowflakes are going to hurt.

And we will find new ways, but the ways we find are likely to leave the Marxist-infected sectors in the dust. (No, that’s not wishful thinking. See, the problem is that the creatures can’t be creative. They can try. But as Hollywood and most of traditional publishing proves, they just can’t CREATE. And also, because they drink their own ink and believe their own lies, they stink as managers, even in the good times. In the bad times… well…)

And then the ethos of this country will reassert itself. You know, the fundamental ideas of our founding.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

We have not yet begun to rise. Our greatest days lie in the future.

So I went to Ravencon over the weekend and it was much fun. RES, Laura M., CACS, physics geek and some people who read this blog incognito, as well as Speaker, Kate, Dave Pascoe and his lovely wife came out and hung out with me, which means my horrible sense of being exposed to strangers was gone, and I felt all warm and fuzzy, like a family reunion.

In fact, finances improving we would like to put it at least on a every-other-year rotation, because that way I can see these people more often. (Unless they get tired of me.)

The panels weren’t bad, either. Okay, I lie. There was the humor panel at 9 am on a Sunday, aka the morning after party night, but never mind. I’m going to assume the person who booked it didn’t realize how difficult it is to be funny at that hour. (It’s either that or catch them and make sure they die laughing.)

For the full report for the con, sashay on over to Mad Genius Club. This is going in another direction.

I found myself on a panel on Matrons and Crones. I have a vague memory of indicating that I wouldn’t be totally opposed to it, but heaven alone knows why. I usually have better sense than that. However, Through Fire has had me so turned around and upside down that well… maybe I thought it would be okay.

By the time I was at the con of course, I knew it wouldn’t be okay. Let’s just say there was quite a bit of glitter in the air that didn’t come off Kate’s outfit. Of course with a theme like Women in Science Fiction what else could we think.

We’ll avert our eyes from the panels support for the “Women destroy SF” and apparently Fantasy now, anthos and their belief that because the kickstarter funded “there’s a great hunger for this out there.”

Oy. In the ghetto that science fiction has become, maybe, though I don’t think even there. I mean, a question for the audience, how many of you have EVER had trouble finding an sf/f book written by/featuring women? None, right? Because since the eighties, I’ve been going up and down bookshelves muttering about how women shouldn’t be allowed to write.

…Which usually causes my husband to choke with laughter and make gestures that indicate I too am a woman. Yeah. Aware of that. Like it even. My fetish for lace stockings and really high heels would make me even odder than I am, had I been born male. But the thing is not that the people writing are women, but that they’re… enamored of being women. Like the poor people who dressed themselves as vaginas for political events, they seem to think what’s between their legs is THE most interesting thing about them. Alas, I don’t share the interest, so most of their books leave me cold. I want to read about space and the future, about magic and strange events. Inchoate paens to the specialness of women and the evilness of men leave me cold. Partly because I was RAISED on the specialness of women and they quite mistake the matter. But we’ll leave that for later. It’s entirely possible that there is a great hunger for even MORE inchoate vagina-praising in the reading public that remains in the ghetto that’s now science fiction. I doubt it though. Considering how kickstarter works it’s possible for people to spite-fund something to “show them” without their numbers being very high.

I wish the ah… destroyers well, I just wish they’d cool their jets. You see, I work in the same vineyard and I’m getting sick and tired of having people WHO FOLLOW THIS BLOG or who talk to me on Facebook tell me they’re ONLY NOW reading Darkship Thieves and are surprised they love it because “I got tired of reading all the female-written science fiction, because it tends to be about how men are evil and everything sucks.” So, to the extent they’re polluting the waters, they annoy me, but hey, I don’t own the field and unlike them I don’t confuse the wrapper with the gift, so I don’t even think taking back SFWA would help.

I wish them well, and I’ll make my way on my own and prove myself – which, er… I do.

We’ll also gloss over the audience member who thought she was being so … thoughtful… in telling us that Robert A. Heinlein couldn’t write women. I was very tired which can do one of two things to the berserker. Right then because I’d been prepared for clever stupidity, the berserker was “dulled” and I didn’t leap across the room screaming “Yeah, he was so terrible, he’s the one who broke SF out of the ghetto and it took you clever boys and girls about fifty years to chase off all the normal reading people and lock us back in as a place for weirdos and people who think the world is NOT full of binary gender, and other genius insights.”

This was probably to the good. I hear throttling fans is very bad for business.

I’ll confess the panel irritated me at a low level gradient, including the question on who was our favorite matron or crone character. (Rolls eyes, which are conveniently on a little chain, to avoid becoming cat toys.) Do people do that? Keep little charts of “my favorite sex/age character?” Or do women read to look for women characters? (It reminds me of this writer I used to know, raised in Colorado Springs which is, ah, rather lacking in minorities, and in an upper middle class environment. Young man was black, though, so his books were completely full of black people. Because he thought he was redressing oppression. The fact that he had known fewer black people than I had, and was therefore drawing from (bad) movies and TV series was just icing on the cake. Pity too. One of the greatest raw talents I’ve ever met. Wonder if he ever got over the fact he had a congenital tan.)

You see, I don’t read that way. I read for characters that impress me. Vimes and Granny Weatherwax are filed somewhere in the same place as “Guardians.” The putative gender doesn’t matter, though their source of power is different (and we’ll go into that too) which is one of the things that Pratchett does very well at an instinctive level.

I was so beffudled by the question I couldn’t even think of Granny, or of Granny Aching (as close to a spitting image of my grandma, except we weren’t from a sheep shearing region and grandma didn’t chew tobacco) or for that matter of Mimi from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If I hadn’t taken the precaution of having a Kate in the audience, I’d have gawped like a gold fish.

Then we went to the question of which historical women we admired, and I realized what was wrong. Very, very wrong. The people they admired were people like Queen Elizabeth or the Empress Matilda, or…

Women who were queens and at least nominally commanded armies. Women who in fact, exerted masculine power – the sort of power that required armies and force, which is not a female sort of power.

These women, all of them “feminists” were in fact enamored of the idea that to be powerful women must be men. That sound you hear is my head hitting the desk. Hard.

I started by trying an experimental sally on the other error of their premise. They were picking people who were prisoners of their role, and who were therefore not “women” in any sense of the word, but symbols, rulers, functions, ranks.

The reaction convinced me there was no point further challenging their fundamental beliefs. Besides the main offender was the guest of honor at the con, and I have a policy of never beating the guest of honor about the face and head with their mistakes of reasoning and logic, no matter how much I want to.

So I went inside and took a little nap while uttering platitudes. I did at one point mention that women pretty much ran the village I grew up in. They took this as brave resistance from prisoners of the patriarchy, so there was no point. Again, they quite mistake the matter.

You see, I grew up hearing lectures about how superior women are to men. I think I heard these lectures more than other girls, because I was a tomboy. I think I started hearing them around three as I was being dragged away from some boy-group and told “Girls play with girls and boys with boys.”

We’ll leave aside the fact that clearly the society was too bi-gendered for words and unenlightened to boot, and skip to what I learned in the kitchens, while sitting around and pretending to read while women talked, or what was told directly me as I got older.

I was told women were superior to men and more powerful too. I’m almost afraid of telling these stories, because I’m afraid the league of women will come out and take away my woman card, as the feminists have already done. Never mind. It needs to be explained.

I think it is this sort of story and “feeling” that has become the poisonous anti-man and “all men are stupid” stuff in our culture – because most women are raised away from older female relatives and because their teachers are full of stupid feminism that thinks men have all the power and therefore want to take it away.

I’ll start by saying that I do disagree with a lot of the provisions in the Portuguese law when I was very small, such that a married woman could only get a job if her husband signed a permission form (and since this was a shame for him, families starved rather than do it,) women had to be part of a “family passport” with either parents or husband, and women couldn’t vote. I disagree with them, but I’m not particularly exercised about them. I once asked my mother – a feisty independent woman, whose income from her self-started, self-created business (she had a 4^th grade education, too, far less than dad.) supported us until I was about ten (dad’s job was white collar but poorly paid) – if she minded those things. She said, well, she didn’t want to make dad sign the paper for her to get a factory job, so she created her own business. And she had never had the money to travel anyway, but if she wanted to she could have got the family passport and got dad to sign the paper saying it was okay. As for voting she said any married woman who can’t make her husband vote the way she would have, doesn’t deserve a vote.

And that’s where we start. You see, it wasn’t that women didn’t believe men were smart or good at stuff. They did. They would actually brag about their husbands. Qualities such as ingeniousness, ability to climb the job ladder (such as it was. In the village most people were self-employed craftsmen and small time farmers) and to make money, ability to hold their own in a discussion, etc. all of these were highly valued. Women also valued men as protectors (they ARE bigger) and as influences in the kids’ lives.

What they didn’t think – and forgive me, I’m just reporting what I see – was that men were competent to run families or groups, or, frankly themselves, at least in some regards. For instance, if a guy appeared in public in utter disarray (or drunk) it was considered a grave fault on his wife’s part. Unless his wife was beaten and abused, in which case it was considered a REALLY grave fault on HIS part and often something the village women decided to do something about. (Meeting a bunch of very upset women in a dark alley at midnight cured some of them – if not all.)

Women were in fact supposed to manage money, manage kids and manage men. By extension they managed life. If you wanted to rent the vineyard rights to someone else’s property you could argue it with him till you were blue in the face – the smart person asked his wife.

This wasn’t subversion. It was simply that by making life pleasant and comfortable, women held all the power.

They were, btw, sternly opposed to lifting any of the restrictions on women, so this wasn’t subversion. The gender role thing I so often fell afoul of were enforced BY THE WOMEN. This was not for the men to do. The men concerned themselves with the external world, not the people management. I think the older women viewed it as an intelligence test.

Now, am I proposing this as a role model for a society? Oh, h*ll no. As I’ve pointed out, I came to America for a reason. And in America, we’re supposed to start anew. And that’s fine.

But here’s the thing – women should keep in mind what is their NATURAL source of power. I don’t want to hear any frigging nonsense about gender being a social construction. Some gender behaviors are, but gender itself isn’t. And though individuals vary markedly, the general trend of genders has been shaped by evolution.

Oh, sure, there were women fighters in the middle ages (not nearly as much as our glittery friends think) but the bulk of the armies was men. Oh, sure there are women who do the hard, dangerous, unpleasant work. In the village these were usually “to ugly to get a husband” though not always. When they married, their husbands tended to be small and meek, though. BUT in general, if you drop in to a group of people cow-punching, most of them will be male (as Dave Freer pointed out.) Most construction workers? Male. Most long distance truckers? Male.

In the same way I have a number of friends who are house husbands, partly because they are writers, and so of course stay at home. However, even in our small mountain town when we lived there (we doubled the heterosexual population of the town by moving in. Okay, maybe not that bad, but the general sense is right) Dan was looked askance as a kindergarten mom (for a couple of years, he worked from home and I was teaching in college.) Not because these people were sexist (probably 80% of them were gay) but because it was odd.

In general, the genders were shaped by evolution so women do the indoor, group, persuasive, word-oriented (as in rabble rousing) work, and men do the outdoors, difficult, painful, dangerous work.

Not saying that women should be kept from that, understand, or men for that matter. Just saying that where I grew up, women would be chased away from a wood-cutting party, and men would be chased away from laying out the dead. (Both unpleasant, in different ways.)

I’m not advocating for a return to rigid gender roles. See above where I never fit in. (I wasn’t ugly, but I was a moose compared to Portuguese women my generation, and a hundred years earlier would probably never have married, because I didn’t FIT and was taller and bigger than most guys, which it turns out is a turn off for them.)

All I’m saying is women had a source of power too. In these older societies that women, now, imagine were patriarchies (and were, in outward form) women had their power too, and often more power than the men who were nominally ruling. Yes, they stood in danger of the man finding out. See Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. Yes, the law often left them unprotected. But women could do things and arrange things and often got to positions of prominence if they wished to. And they were often the holders of the line.

Sexual persuasion? Sometimes. Look, no one said it wasn’t a weapon. Oh, okay, idiots convinced young women it’s empowering to just give it away. Tell me, if this were a plot of men to get ah… laid without any ties, how would it be any different? Right.

But there were others. “Woman” in man’s mind has incredible power. Elizabeth I used the power of the “Seductive but untouchable virgin” to get what she wanted not a few times. In fact, by dint of makeup she kept it up into her old age. Because those archetypes have power over men’s minds.

As does the fact that women nursed them as children and likely women will look after them as old men. I found a thing in a book, can’t remember where “We start out surrounded by women and we end surrounded by women.” If you think that doesn’t have power you don’t understand human psychology.

Trading it all in for being shouty and saying “me and my army?” Ah… that is throwing away the gift and keeping the wrapping.
Even Elizabeth the first didn’t do that. She played the game as well as she could, in her very restricted role, and she shamelessly used her femininity to play both foreign princes and her subjects, which was no small part of her success. (That said, do I admire her? Not really. Like Isabel of Castille, she did some truly horrendous things, and it’s hard to tell how many she HAD to do. Power on that scale deforms the mind.)

If I had a daughter – which I don’t – and if I ever have a granddaughter, what I’d try to teach her is that women have power too. Yes, by all means, move in the world of men if you wish to; perform a male function if you want/need to. But never forget you’re not a man, and that you have more power over them – ultimately – than they have over you. Use it wisely and kindly, and not as a whip to drive them. And never assume they’re stupid. They’re not. Yes, they have their blindnesses (my mom’s favorite trick when she’d blown money on something dad would disapprove of, like a new piece of furniture, was to put it in an inconspicuous place for months, before moving it to its intended location. Then, when he noticed it, she said “Oh, that? We’ve had that for months.”) We have our blindnesses too. To assume that only women are smart or accomplished or capable is a mistake. Yes, I can see how easy it is to do, because of course, you see your strengths and their weaknesses so well.

But I bet you from the other side, it is easy to see the opposite.

So, treat your male friends and colleagues with respect, because they see things you can’t see or aren’t interested in. And in return use your powers for good. Don’t use them to guilt males for being males. Don’t use them to try to turn yourself into an ersatz male or them into females.

It’s a good thing we come in two varieties, and for more reasons than how much fun it is in bed. Making us all alike would – besides being impossible – leave us with some serious cultural blind spots. And it’s not needed. Also it might be evil.

Treat people as individuals. Know the powers within you and be aware of them.

And if you ever feel tempted to say something like “Well, women are smarter” remember that yes, they are. And men are too. Just in different ways.

And if you push your way too far, theirs will inevitably come back at you. We’ve seen the end result of the male form of power prevailing and I don’t want to live in Saudi Arabia, thank you so much. We haven’t seen the end result of female power prevailing and I have my suspicions as to why, but before you think it’s a utopia, let me assure you I went to an all girls’ middle school and high school and paradise on Earth, it wasn’t. Nor peaceful. In fact, the boys’ school across the street had far fewer fights, let alone battles.

Don’t throw away the gift for the wrapper. Be a woman, not a man manqué.