According To Hoyt

Did you hear about the caterer who was so self centered, he thought that parties were a place of business?

No?

Well, there are apparently a lot of writers who think so.  Because science fiction conferences are – for them – a place of business and a must-attend, they think that they are the same for everyone else.

As I’ve said before in this space, there is a set of my colleagues so strange that they think the important part of the gift is the box.

But I think it’s actually odder than that.  I think my colleagues have lived so long in fictional worlds that they think rules prevent things from happening.

I’ve been getting the usual pitches for cons — mind you this year it’s Ravencon and Liberty con and that’s it, because a) money is tight and b) the reason money is tight is that nothing really got turned in last year, and it must be compensated for this year, so we can sell this house and move (which must be done for various reasons including this house is too much to keep up while having a full time writing job). — and reading them, and about half of them tell me they’ve signed on to the non-harassment rules, so you know, I’ll be perfectly safe.

They’re SO proud of it.  And I sit here and all I can think is of the non-harassment rules in work places, and of the normal behavior of fans, male and female, and then I think:

Before you start screaming, I’m not for harassment (who is?) and I’m not even against rules.  Some basic, enforceable rules are useful.  Say “don’t bring up pron on your computer in a con suite with children playing around.”  Or say “Don’t go feeling up people, or cornering them and trying to feel them up.  And don’t try to get into their rooms.”

Why, yes, that later has happened to me, (no, I wasn’t doing it, sillies.  Well,  I do this stuff to my husband — groping, not pron — but he doesn’t mind.)  I fail to see in the situation what a rule would have done about that, since the first instance (trying to corner me and feel me up) was done by a — then — powerful editor, late at night, in a semi-deserted corridor on the party floor.  Quite frankly, what he was trying to do was already against the rules — civil society rules.  I believe forcibly stopping someone and trying to grope them is assault, right?  Unfortunately, I also wasn’t carrying a handy policeman in my pocket.  I was carrying a knife (I usually am) but you know how con hotels are about blood stains on the carpet.

It never even occurred to me to report it, because a) he was a powerful editor.  b) I was a newly published writer.  c) No one saw it.  d) He was more than three sheets to the wind — and probably wouldn’t remember it in the morning.

Note that C is the killer.  It would be he said, she said, and no matter how many rules there are about it, and no matter that it was I saying it, he should be considered innocent until proven guilty.  And I couldn’t prove him guilty.  Had I been able to prove him guilty, I wouldn’t have bothered the con com.  I’d have gone straight to Tor.  (Yes, him.  Though I only figured that out recently.)

On the other hand, let’s not make of this more than it was — yeah.  He made me feel uncomfortable.  Am I the only woman in sci fi who went to bars when young?  Evading drunk gropers is par for the course, and it shouldn’t make you spend the rest of your life acting like a rape victim.

I had an uncomfortable minute.  I’m going to assume that he had a longer uncomfortable time.  Our transaction was cancelled in my favor.

And right now you’re thinking “But if you had that happen to you, why would you object to a few sensible rules against harassment at cons?  Even if the rules don’t stop it, wouldn’t it be good to remind the troglodytes attending that there are rules?”

The most important part of my objection is this.  A con is not this to most people:

To most people — to the fans, the people that make a convention a convention — a con is this:

This means that a set of people who are so far from average they can’t see it with a periscope use conventions as a means of meeting potential mates; of talking to friends they haven’t seen in years; of — sometimes the only time in the entire year — letting their hair down and being themselves.  I know that I keep a running check at the back of my head not to freak the mundanes.  If I’m talking to someone at church, or in the park, or when the kids were little at school, I have to remember not to use sf references or the geek jokes that are the language of our people.  Because even in these days when geek=cool, the wrong word at the wrong time and suddenly you’re:

So if people now have to mind their every word and be very careful what they say and do at a con, suddenly it’s not a place to go and relax anymore; it’s not a place to have fun.  Suddenly it’s:

Or depending on the rules, and on the rule creep, and on how much credence it’s given to “she said” versus “he said”, it becomes:

Of course, we don’t have to worry about this, because there are no people in science fiction and fantasy (either professionals or fandom), so exquisitely messed up that they suffer from pre-emptive ptsd.  PRE traumatic stress disorder, you could call it.  That is, there are no people who freak out at the mere thought of someone maybe, possibly, saying something that could, might, offend them, at a talk they can attend or not, as they prefer.

Because in an assemblage of geeks and outcasts, we never have anyone who either been stomped on so hard, or been raised as such a precious little princess (particularly the guys! ) that they think the right not to to be offended is a basic right.  And we NEVER have people who completely misinterpret someone else’s actions and think they’ve been “harassed”.

But it is worse than that.  In offices, things can be weird enough.  Studies have been done on what’s considered “sexual harassment.”  Did you know the same exact come-on from an unattractive man with poor hygiene and from an attractive man with signs of wealth are variously considered “harassment” or “Flirting”?

Mind you, in offices, the business of the company and the reason people are there takes precedence, and if there’s no flirting and no hanky-panky (to the extent that’s possible with human beings) it’s all to the good.

So why do I object to no flirting and no hanky-panky at cons?

Guys, do you hear yourselves?  The business of a con is this:

Cross that with the social skills of my people:

How many guys are going to have what they think is a perfectly respectful come-on mistaken for harassment?  How many geek girls are going to take offense at the fact that he is — let’s face it — often lame and think they were abused? (I should add here the only cases of SERIOUS sexual assault I know of at cons, and the ones that go largely unpunished/unreported are guy-on-guy.)

This is what is waiting to happen.  Over and over and over again:

How long, in fact, before conventions become a bit of a chore and something people avoid?

So I look at all these “rules” being put in place by people who think the world can and should be made safe for them, people who believe that not just sticks and stones, but words can break their bones, and I think of the royal families of Europe, when their kids were hemophiliac, trying to save the royal line by putting cushions around every tree and bush to keep the kids from hurting themselves.  It didn’t work for them.  For us… Knowing how overworked, tired, uncompensated the few people people willing to serve on con committees are (I put one on long ago, not in sci fi.  Trust me) I predict what they’re going to get is an avalanche of complaints from booth babes that some guy looked at them wrong.

The good news is that though rules can’t make a con safe — they can make the con com nuts; they can make everyone uncomfortable; they can create spectacularly involved he-said, she-said situations — people can make a con safe.

You need one rule: Jim Baen’s “Don’t be a butthead.”

And you need a bunch of people ready to enforce that rule.  You also need women (and men) who aren’t fainting flowers and, in the last instance, stand ready and willing to defend themselves.

Because no matter how many friends you have, or how many fans ready to defend you, they can’t always be with you at all times — for the same reason you can’t carry a policeman in your pocket —  if you do this:

You’re only giving the butthead power he shouldn’t have.  RULES CANNOT STOP BUTTHEADS.  And there is a hair-fine difference between buttheads and nice guys with zero social ability — which are abundant in our field.  Complaining about the nice guys will just make them run away and hide in the basement for the next fifty years.

So, be prepared to do this:

Because that’s something that both the buttheads and the misguided geeks will get and learn from.  And recover from — far more quickly than an involved, disciplinary “he said/she said” bureaucratic mess.

Do I expect this to be listened to?  What, with people who believe violence never solved anything and that rules will keep them safe?

Never mind.  Carry on with your:

But don’t come crying to me if after the first few crazy blowups, fans do this:

*Oh, yeah, the next musketeer mystery is ALMOST ready to go — my proofreader caught the death flu.  And Witchfinder is hanging by a thread, before subscribers get it.  Thanks to everyone for your patience to me this last year.  I’m not kicking anyone out of my subscription, even if they don’t renew, because I figure I owe you a year of  freebies, anyway.  I think I am FINALLY crawling out from under, just up to my neck in overdue stuff both traditional and indie.*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — has been removed.  I do promise to go through the copyedits as soon as humanly possible and send the advance copies to those who pre-ordered.  You’ll know when that’s eminent because I’ll remove scattered chapters from this blog.  I do hope to manage it next week, but I’m not promising as I’m still finishing a novel under contract to Baen. Meanwhile, if you donate $6 and note it in the field, you’ll get advance-subscribed to this novel.  I do, however, understand it can be a long time to wait, and if you want to, do so.  I will continue to post chapters here, roughly one a week.

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

Wolfe Merritt, Supervisor of Manufactories for the Earl of Savage

 

The Promises of Rogues

 

I never knew when we went through the portal.  What I did know for sure was that we were not sent to the Earth, which is what we were promised.

There might be reasons.  After all the magic had gone bad, and was twisting everything.  The Lady Helen had not planned to end in the myth world, and none of us had planned to end up in the belly of leviathan.

Perhaps Hermes didn’t mean what happened.  Or perhaps he did.  The gods can be right bastards.

But I knew that something was wrong the moment I broke through the portal.  First, it was the oddest portal I’d ever seen and there was not the momentary freeze of the inbetweener.  Only we were in Mythworld, then suddenly we were not, and there was mist all around and in the distance a glimpse of a fairy-like castle, and I groaned, and then I cursed under my breath, and then I regretted cursing, because in fairyland words can make things happen.

The Lady Helen, still firmly grasped within my arm, a promise of warmth, a bit of life in this world that had none, turned to look at me.

“We’re in fairyland,” I said.  “In fairyland.”

My voice must have echoed my dismay.  Indeed, I felt as though a hole had opened at my feet and I would presently tumble into it head first.  And from there to the madness I’d known once before was but a breath.

The Lady Helen looked at me, her eyes wide and scared.  I tightened my arm around her, involuntarily and she said, all gasping, “How do you know?  How can you know?  What—”

“I’ve been here before,” I said, between gritted teeth.

And to her look of great shock, because I suppose it is not normal for people of my station – or indeed for anyone – to go traipsing out to fairyland on a whim, I laughed.  I would not normally laugh at the lady nor at her surprise, but indeed it was the strangest thing, for how could one explain one’s life when even one’s own mother found it strange and inexplicable how her son had turned out.  “Pardon me,” I said.  Myrth still colored my words.  “Pardon me, but it is a long story, and a complicated one.  You see, I had to go to fairyland, open a portal on my own, and pay the forfeit too, because it was the only choice I had to get my son back.”

“Your son,” she said in a wondering tone.  Around us, the tendrils of magic fog grew, a sort of pink dazzle in which I could almost see forms.  “You told me you had one,” she said.  “And that you were married.”  She pulled a little away from me, though not much, and to own the truth it was all foolishness.  The barriers between us were much stronger than the mere objection of my being married.  As though her family would ever let her marry a man with no title, no position and one, moreover, who worked for them in a menial position.  She must know that as I did, as I had been conscious of ever since fate had pitchforked us together into this strange adventure.

Before this moment, I’d known that I admired the Lady mightily. I knew nothing of her, then, of course, save her looks and that expression she had, as of a mouse caught in a trap, but a mouse who means to fight back tooth and nail.  But I didn’t love her, anymore than one would fall in love with a statue or a picture.  That is, one hears of men doing so, but they’re invariably the sort of noblemen who also would fall in love with a tree, if the fancy took them.

But after the time we’d spent together, I knew her.  Her quick wit, her indomitable courae.  I knew that she was perhaps the one woman I could love.

And yet, it went for nothing.  I was married, though both the legality of my marriage – since there were varying opinions on the legal status of marriage to the fair folk – and the status of it – since my wife had disappeared into fairyland seven years ago – were not very clear.  But more important than that, she was so far above me as the moon is above the Earth.  And what was more, Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage was my employer.  And Jonathan Blythe was the image, and in many ways the echo of his grandfather.  If he even learned I was in love with his sister, even with my never having done anything to make my love into a more practical concern or a more physical affection, I knew him well enough to know he’d have me horsewhipped.  And that was if he were in one of his more lawful moods.  If he were in one of his other moods, if the stories of his grandfather which I’d heard were true, I might find myself stabbed in an alley, in a darkling midnight.  And that was if he didn’t bind me, hand and foot, and sell me to some amphibian magical people in some parallel world, where I’d spend the rest of my life fanning water larvae or whatever else nasty job he could think of.

I sighed and told her, in as cold a voice as I could manage – though let go of her I could not.  Not in this eery, irrational place – “I married a maiden of the fairfolk I found in the woods near my mother’s house.”

She gasped, and this time, though she too didn’t fully wish to leave I think – because there is much comfort in sheer human company in the fairy woods – managed to be within the circle of my arm, without touching.  “But you must know—”

“That it’s not advisable?  Yes, I knew.  But you see, she looked so lost, so forlorn.  She didn’t know how she’d come to be in our woods.  She was mother-naked and lost, and she looked….”  I paused.  “Like one of the naked little birds who have fallen from a nest, and who will die if you don’t care for them.”

It seemed to me she giggled, quickly suppressed.  But when I looked at her, she was red and just nodded.  She cleared her throat.  “So you did it… to protect her?”

“I think so,” I said.  “though there was the glamour, of course.   You know how … no, you probably don’t.  But there is glamour to the fey.  After a while I thought I was in love with her.”  I shrugged.  “I was in love with something, though it might be a counterfeit of what I thought I loved.  Like…. Like when they give you gold coins that are nothing but rubbish.”

She nodded.  The mist around us was thicker, and I wished to heaven that I didn’t have to tell her this story in fairyland, where words were like living things.  It tried to hurry the narration, “I married her.  After a year she left.  She left behind – we thought – my son, Jimmy.  Until we realized it was but a counterfeit, too.  And then I came to fairyland, in search of him.  And I took him back.”

Oddly, it seemed to me she relaxed.  “Oh,” she said.  And then with a sort of nascent hope.  “Then you’ve been here.  And left before.  And… and won.”

I bit my lower lip.  I really didn’t want to tell her what I had to tell her next.  But she had to know, “Not unscathed,” I said.  “there is always a price.  And mind yourself, and try to stand beside me.  What I heard is that in fairyland you always walk alone.  I don’t know if that is true, but I know you can find yourself alone, away from all your companions.  And that no one can protect you.”

I don’t know if she heard me, because on that moment, she was gone.  I was alone in fairyland and the magical fog made me cold to the bone.

Around me echoed the sound of laughter – sharp, little laughter like bells out of tune.  Laughter with sharp teeth in it.

*From Monsieur le Oyster, this morning.  And yes, I’m writing chapter of Rogue Magic.*

We had just one submission this week, so hopefully that means you all are too busy writing to send me links! Now take a break from torturing your characters and watch someone else torture theirs! As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to freerangeoyster [aht] gmail [daht] com. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Pachyderm Fancier, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Surfer on the Human Wave

Karen Myers

Bound into the Blood – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn)

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

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

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

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

Also available from these fine sources:

• Amazon Canada
• Amazon UK
• Kobo
• Barnes and Noble
• Barnes & Noble UK
• Smashwords

*So, why two blasts from the past in one week?  Partly because I was doing the preamble to book plug Friday and it touched on Human Wave, and I thought it was time we had a reminder.  Can you believe it’s been two years?  We need to make more waves! And let’s get with that linked list and all.  Cross-promotion DOES work.*

UPDATE: the complement to this piece is at Book Plug Friday.

This is a manifesto.  I’m not sure what we’re manifesting, but it’s probably destiny.  Or density.  When you’re dyslexic, it can get confusing.  But in any case we’re manifesting something and it’s a patent manifestation.

The proximate reason for this is my post – here.  Or in other words, it’s another fine mess my mouth got us into.  (Okay, my typing fingers.  If you’re going to be nitpicky, you’re right out of the club.)

The purpose of this is to create a new “idea” in science fiction, a new way to look at the genre.  Properly observed (and I’ve observed it) I think the genre should be a way to play with possible futures, with possible outcomes, with possible ideas.  The wonder of science fiction lays in the open possibility.

When we have the list of what we’re sort of aiming for, we can start getting people who “subscribe” to those ideas, or to most of them
Once we have the list of who you are and your websites, we shall send enforcers to your hom…  No, wait.  That’s another list.  Oh, I see.  That’s the list the trolls left behind.  Never mind.

Once we have that list, we can we can have some large, linked aggregate, so we can help each other, and get more attention to the whole idea.

We should also en-list some critics and reviewers.  I know some reviewers but not much about critics in their native habitat.  However, someone else might.

Because we are rebelling against enforced conformity of style and opinion, of belief and ideology, this list is not “though shalt nots” but “You’re allowed to.”  It is also, in the nature of my nature (Okay, who let the copyeditor in?  Rent his robes and throw him to outer darkness, where there shall be wailing and gnawing of blue pencils) to know that this job is not completed.  Heck, it’s not even really started.  There will be discussion of this list at both According To Hoyt and Mad Genius Club.  Come and be heard, and let the discussion begin.

You are allowed to write escapist science fiction – or fantasy.  Sometimes we just need a good read.  If it doesn’t have a big idea but is enjoyable, it’s still a worthy endeavor.

You are allowed to write as much as you wish.  In the new limitless market we see no reason to artificially restrict your output.  Anyone who thinks quality depends on how long something took to write has never known either professional writers or struggling middle-graders.

You are allowed to write first person.  You are also allowed to write second person, third person, and in persons yet to be invented.  As long as your work is entertaining, we hold you harmless in matters relating to verbal malfeasance.

If your world building holds internal consistency, at least according to the buying public, anyone objecting because it doesn’t conform to his or her idea of a future shall be pelted with soft boiled eggs and wear the yolk of shame.

Your objective is to sell books.  Writing is communication.  Your objective is to communicate with as many people as possible.  Or at least to amuse them, distract them, or make the burden of life less burdensome for a while.  Wishing to feed your family is also an acceptable goal.

You can write male heroes.  You can write female heroes.  You can write alien heroes.  You can write human heroes.  You can write western heroes.  You can write non-western heroes.  You can write squirrel-heroes (but you have to know you’re weird.)  You can write it in a boat, you can write it with a goat (but which end do you hold on the paper?) You can write it in a moat (but it will probably drip) and you can write it on a stoat.

You can have a happy ever after.  You can have a happy for a while.  You can have a fleeting happy.  It’s your happy and you can have it if you want to.

You can write action and plot oriented books.  (Who will stop you?  You’ve researched fighting techniques, right?)

You can write sex.  Or not.  It all depends what fits the plot.  You can even write sex with a robot.

You can write politics.  You can write them from the right, from the left, from the middle, the top, the bottom or everywhere at once.  Just remember to make them fit the plot.  And remember not to infodump.

So do we have no principles?  No guidelines?

Oh, it’s guidelines you want, then?  Well, I was manifesting.  But fine.  I’ll throw out a few simple rules:

1 – Your writing should be entertaining.  If you’re writing for the awards and the literary recognition, you’re hanging out with the wrong crowd. (Does the other crowd have a tiny raccoon in a kilt?  Or even a quilt?  Think!)

2 – Your writing shouldn’t leave anyone feeling like they should scrub with pumice  or commit suicide by swallowing stoats for the crime of being human, or like humans are a blight upon the Earth, or that the future is dark, dreary, evil and fraught with nastiness, because that’s all humans can do, and woe is us.

3 – Your writing should not leave anyone feeling ashamed of being: male, female, western, non-western, sickly, hale, powerful, powerless.  It should use characters as characters and not as broad groups that are then used to shame other groups.  Fiction is not agit prop.

4- Your writing shouldn’t be all about the message.  You can, of course, have a message.  But the message should not be the be-all end-all of the novel.  If it is, perhaps you should be writing pamphlets.

5 – You shall not commit grey goo.  Grey goo, in which characters of indeterminate moral status move in a landscape of indeterminate importance towards goals that will leave no one better or worse off is not entertaining.  (Unless it is to see how the book bounces off the far wall, and that has limited entertainment.  Also, I’m not flinging my kindle.)

6 – Unless absolutely necessary you will have a positive feeling to your story.  By this we don’t mean it will have a happy ending or that we expect pollyanish sentiments out of you.  Your novel and setting can be as dystopic as you want it.  In fact, your character can die at the end.  Just make sure he goes down fighting and dies for something, so the reader doesn’t feel cheated.

7 – You will write in language that can be understood.  You will have an idea of what your story is about, or at least of its beginning, middle and end.  And so will your reader, once he reads it.

8 – You are allowed to write scientific speculation that counters “currently established fact” – just give us a reason why that makes sense in your universe.  (For some universes it can be highly whimsical, for others you’ll need serious handwavium.)

9 – You will not be boring.  Or at least you’ll do your best not to be boring.

10 – You shall not spend your life explaining why your not-boring is better than your fellow writers not-boring.  Instead you will shut up and write.

Comments, suggestions, goats?  Stoats?  Oranges?  Peanuts?  Lightly thrown chickens?  (What? I find thrown chickens humorous.  No, I don’t know why.  Oh, please, I’m a writer.  Like I have the money for a psychiatrist.)

For Your Own Good — A Guest Post By Patrick Richardson

Speaking of maligning a generation, my sons inform me they’re sick and tired of all the articles maligning the Millenials.  To be sure, even I am tired of those, and weirdly it starts me feeling sympathetic to my friends who are boomers, and understanding why they get so upset when people like me (the in between generation) and genxers pile on them using the worst members of their generation to pillory them.

To be fair to us, the obnoxious boomers are very obnoxious.  And to be fair to those who pile on the millenials, what they’re mostly complaining about is the echo boom.

The echo boom was the long-delayed reproduction of most boomers, and technically my son Robert – born in 91 – is one of them.

Which shows you the craziness of this whole “generation thing” being by years, and not by “general definitional experiences.”  To lump me with the boomers – conceived by WWII veterans after their return home, by definition – for instance, is fairly nuts, since my dad was a child during WWII, and since – born in sixty two – what the “summer of sixty eight” means to me is that I learned to write.  (I’d known how to read for a while, but arguably my handwriting wasn’t readable till I was 19 – for a brief and shining moment, at that.  Since I’ve typing mostly since then, my handwriting has gone back to “flog me if I know what I wrote down.”)

So, mostly the millenials who upset the general public – you know, the entitled, unique special flowers with “all the right credentials” who melt when asked to do any actual work – are the children of “the bad boomers” – the noisy stereotypical ones who give roughly half the generation a bad name.  And technically those kids aren’t “millenials” so much as defined by being born to those boomers who thought they were re-inventing life.  The president is one of them, and he’s a year older than I.  BUT arguably my kids went to school with a lot of them.  This was probably worsened by their being in gifted classes.  In their case they were in gifted/advanced classes because they bore easily, but the system is gameable by determined parents, and the sort of parent I’m talking about is very determined to get their little display child everywhere.

My kids, and the other half of their generation, who weren’t born to parents who sent them to an urban public school with five hundred dollars of pocket money a week (you only think I am joking) had to work very hard from kindergarten on.  Because this is when the generation of “question authority except mine” was in charge of education and therefore the children had to be (and often were) more responsible and organized than the adults.  My kids had to compete against kids whose parents had had the one, special, important child late in life, and helicoptered around it so hard it was hard to hear for the sound of their rotors.  They did their kids homework for them, sometimes engaging the resources of an entire office which they managed to research it for the precious snowflake.  (You only wish I were joking.)  This meant even when number two son, who is always a perfectionist, would devote a month to his geography project, including art and all, he would have a B, because you can’t compete with professionally-generated booklets.  It also meant when applying for universities, they competed against professionally completed applications by people who are paid to get the special kids in.  (They have a name, but I can’t remember it, so I want to call them Fluffers.  They cost from a couple thousand of dollars to tens of thousands.  They write the application essays, buff the resume, etc.)

At this point you’re probably asking “But Sarah, you have resources – why didn’t you help your kids?”  Oh, I did.  I spell-check, and copy-edit their essays or any other piece of writing.  If they remember to show it to me.

No, seriously.  Why not?  Because that is the source of all the moaning we hear about millenials.  “They can’t perform.”  “They don’t take criticism.” “They have no idea what effort is.”

I’ve been fortunate, as a parent, to have my teeth kicked in several times while pursuing my chosen avocation.  What I mean is, writing is a difficult field to break into when you have no connections, no idea how to navigate the network, and no interest in fitting whatever the flavor of the month NYC was looking for.

Complaining?  Don’t you believe it.

This is not fifty shades of writer, and I didn’t enjoy my eviscerations by publishers and critics any more than the average human being, but I tell you what, it taught me that life is never a little padded playground.  If you want to play with the big boys and at the big level, you’re going to get bruised.  The trick to life is not to never be knocked down – it’s to have the resources to get up and fight again.  Read the biography of any man who accomplished anything, from the founding fathers to oh, Heinlein, and you’ll see their eventual success was preceded by a series of often stunning failures.

Studies have been made.  People who are most successful at love are those who aren’t afraid to fail at relationships.  People who are most successful at business are those who survive failures and go on trying.  If you’re afraid to fail, you’ll never get anywhere.

So I figured the best gift I could give the boys, given I don’t have a few million to cushion their way through life (and at that, that might be child abuse), was to let them learn to fight their own battles, skin their own knees, bruise their own noses.

Has it worked?  Who knows?  I’d say they have a tendency to be perfectionists, who try too hard and become more neurotic than shaved monkeys, but that’s probably hereditary.  However, I do know they’re not like the millenials people complain about.  They don’t require praise and cup cakes just to do their job.  They work hard – really hard – at what they’re supposed to do and always go a little further.  And they have learned that failure isn’t the end of the world.

Oh, yeah, and they resent being lumped in with the precious flowers.  As they should, because they aren’t like them.

And because this isn’t generational or time bound.

Take the SFWA thing, for instance.  No, I’m not going to harp on it.  Yes, I find it palls, too.  But I use it was an illustration, in this case, so bear with me.  I use it as an illustration because I’m in possession of facts the average outsider probably lacks for what really is at the root of all this.  And it relates to the theme of this article and is universal.

When I was trying to break in, back in pre-history circa 1998, as a young mother of 36, I read all the industry news religiously.

Imagine how I choked on my own tongue when the editor of a large magazine said in print that no one under 40 had enough “life experience” to write well.  Yes, the editor was one of those boomers, but then most of them were.  Long march, and all that.  I was 36 at the time, and I figured that this was their equivalent of “never trust anyone over 30” — now “never trust anyone under 40” since their parents weren’t trying to break into publishing, and designed to keep people like me out.  Because it made no sense in any other way, since well… life experience has nothing to do with how long you lived, just like writing practice has nothing to do with how long you’ve been writing.  You might have been writing since six, but you write an essay a year.  Or you might have been writing since six, but you write five novels a year.  Even if the first person has been writing for thirty years and the second for five, the second has more writing practice.  In the same way, I know young people who’ve survived massive personal tragedies and fought for everything they have, who are more mature, more “experienced” than pampered college professors who have done nothing, their whole lives, than live in the hot house of academia.

But little by little I found out at that point in time, that was the general opinion of NYC publishing.  (Except Baen, of course.)  “If you’re under forty, you’re too young to write well.”

Fast forward five years.  My first series had tanked, and I was submitting proposals everywhere.  I kept getting back rejections not to the material but to me.  “We’re looking for younger writers.  Early twenties.  See, we need to attract more young readers, so we need young writers, who speak their language.”

As someone who both speaks English, just like the younger writers, and who was reading Heinlein when she was in her teens and he was in his sixties, I tend to think no rational person could believe that the age of the writer has anything to do with the age of the reader.  The cynic in me goes “Oh, so the editors had twenty something year old kids at that time.  Or their friends did.”  On the other hand it’s possible they aren’t rational.  Certainly this sad tale shows that this thing is both still going on, and that it defines “not rational.”

That btw is the sad story of a twenty something year old writer, who got a 200k advance for a book of essays, which then proceeded to sell less than 8k copies, which didn’t daunt the publishers from offering her 30k for her next book.  And she’s lamenting about it all in a tale that  you’d have to have a heart of stone not to laugh at like an hyena.  But see, she’s a “feminist socialist” and young and female and so, of course, exactly what NYC publishing was looking for, since well… they often confuse the wrapping for the gift and the writer for the work.

Anyway – the most important influx of these writers, who got doors thrown open for them because they were the right age/gender/upbringing – most of whom were very young and female – was about ten years ago.  Young women just out of college were getting huge offers for books that were what young women just out of college and with no life experience would write (and no, I’m not committing the error above.  This wave of what I call “red carpet acceptances” was targeted at young, just out of college and parroting the right “truths” – no life experience or rational thought wanted, or, in fact, accepted.) – very derivative, with a lot of sex and, in mystery, a lot of shoe and fashion shopping.  (I read Manolo shoe blogger, but look, there are limits to how much I care about shoes.)

Which brings us to now.  These young people, often very protected, were taken in and told they were the next best thing.  Not because of what they did, but because of what they WERE.  Success was their right and inevitable.  Like the poor kid who wrote the essay I linked, they were told they were so smart and brave and stuff for exactly parroting what they’d been taught.  And by and large – with a couple of exceptions – their stuff didn’t sell all that well, though they’ve won awards and been fetted and told how wonderfulglittery they are.

And even the ones who were successful are now shaky, because all they ever did was enter into traditional publishing and be massively supported and do fairly well within that framework.

I don’t even know if the smartest ones know all the breaks they got.  I doubt it.  First of all, because in publishing this stuff is all hidden and it’s hard to realize how much support you had, or even that other people didn’t get it.  (Unless you don’t get it, in which case you start wondering how the process broke down, then find out this is standard.)   Second because it’s human to take credit for our own success, no matter how helped.

So, you see, in their eyes, they think everyone else got this sort of magic carpet ride.

Now, as the carpet wobbles in the air currents, going indie is unthinkable, and of course someone else must be doing something wrong.  It must be those old, antiquated people, out of touch with the current generation, who refuse to retire.  Or perhaps it’s discrimination.  Must be discrimination.

And now you know what is at the back of the SFWA hysterics, and also what is coming to us, in society in general.  In the case of the SFWA darlings it’s worsened by their being now in their thirties.  When you’ve been told you’re so special BECAUSE you’re young, the thirties have to be a shock.  And you’re not famous yet, and people like Heinlein are still more read/influential than you – and… trembles lip… they’re dead.

But this is coming to society at large, because we do have a lot of kids my kids’ age, (and about ten years older) just about, raised by helicopter parents under the idea that children were trophies.  They’ve been making sure Johnny and Jane (only for this set they’re likely to be spelled Gionny and Gianne) never experienced failure and had perfect credentials since kindergarten.

I’ve actually heard parents bragging about that entire generation as “the best educated, the nicest, kindest” – sorry guys, I vouch for my kids being fairly well educated, generally decent human beings.  Not for any “generation.”

But  little Gionny and Gianne don’t know that.  They were told all their lives how special and important they are.

Only the economy – Summer of recovery 6 coming up!  How that must perk you up! – not to mention technological change are ensuring these people – who have never skinned their knees —  meet the wall at speed at face first.

How will they handle it?

One would like to think they will pull themselves up and charge on.  Doubtless a lot of them will.  Maybe even the majority.  But that will still leave a vocal and noisy and very large group of people who will throw serial tantrums because it can’t be their fault.  And who will try to pre-emptively protect themselves from any hurt-discrimination. And who will scream it’s all the fault of those bigoted old people who don’t have the decency to die.

So, hold on to your seats.  The ride is about to get rough.

And if you have kids, let them fall and skin their knees and bruise their noses a few times.  The most interesting people have scars.  Being thirty five and behaving like an unspanked baby is a dreadful fate.(VERY interesting people are a mass of scars.) 

And some things – like failing – you can only learn to survive by doing.

No one likes kicks in the teeth.  But you learn to wear a mouth guard.

* Oh, and if you’re a beginning writer, there’s a post on how to start your career over at Mad Genius Club.

So Amanda’s post here last week got picked up by the BBC who thought she was “maligning a whole generation.”

Maybe she was.  Maybe she wasn’t.  I’ve long disagreed with Amanda on the “kids need more homework” but I don’t think it’s so much a disagreement on what we think the kids should be doing, as that we’ve encountered different forms of school-stupid.

My particular form of school stupid was my kids being given HOURS of homework that had no possible redeeming value.  No, seriously.

Look, I’m not the sort of parent who thinks that rote, repetitive tasks have no value in education.  On the contrary.  I learned to read and write in a village school where even the slow kids learned to read and write and cypher too: largely through never-ending repetition.  What is more, I suspect I had the same sensory and hand coordination issues as my younger son.  For instance, I didn’t start enjoying detail work, like sewing or embroidery, until after sixteen which is typical.  That type of work was incredibly difficult to me, all out of proportion to other kids my age.  And the same with you know, all clothes “itched” etc.  What’s more, when I started reading/writing I had the same issues.  BUT since my father – before I entered school – believed in rote learning, he set me to do a page copy a day (and the pages got more text as we went on.)  By six I wrote slow but not disastrously so, and by fourth grade I wrote faster than other kids.  (Mind you ANYTHING else I needed to do with my hands was a disaster.)

In fact, when younger son came home to homeschool for a year, and he was dealing with all these sensory issues and difficulty in focusing that made him write verrryyyy slow, the optometrist gave us a million exercises for him to do.  I have issues visualizing written instructions.  I was supposed to supervise his exercises and I had NO clue what he was supposed to do or in what order.  There was all this stuff with beads and string and rulers, and frankly I’m not smart enough to even know what to do.  So I ditched all the professional advice.  (eh!) Instead I set him to copy a page – increasing to three pages – a day.

By the end of the year, not only was his writing much faster (though still slow for his age, but not badly so) but he had impeccable spelling and grammar.

In the same way, I’ve taught language, and I can tell you the way they teach it in our schools, trying to make it fun and giving the kids colorful magazines written in the language, before they even know the basics is not only insane – it’s counterproductive.  When neither of my kids could learn French, I asked for their books and looked through both instructional materials and notebooks.

Guys, I TAUGHT languages.  The only way my kids could learn languages from what they were given was to be naturally gifted on the order of my brother, who could be dropped naked in the Amazon forest and would emerge two weeks later speaking the language of the nearest tribe like a native.

I’m not like that and neither are my kids, and neither are most people.  Most people NEED a basic vocabulary which includes a couple of verbs and some grammar rules, before you drop them into the deep end head first.  And the easiest way to acquire a vocabulary is to memorize lists.  Which is boring, and rote, but by gum it works.  (It is in fact all that most language learning software does.)

Now, after you have the basics, say about second year level, then you need to be dropped into the deep end head first.  I did this with older son (younger never really wanted to learn French, so he scraped by with a b, and then stopped taking it) by teaching him lists and lists and then, over summer, having him read Dumas in French (with dictionary at hand.)  Once he finished the Three Musketeers he had a very tolerable command of French.  (And an outdated swearing vocabulary.  Apparently Ventre Saint Gris said in class made his teacher – native – say “oooh, lala.”)

Anyway, I realize that because it worked for me and mine, it doesn’t mean it works for the entire population.  But kids used to come out of school minimally competent in reading and writing and now they don’t.  And in my area at least – though apparently not Amanda’s – kids do more and more homework.

I realize #2 son had issues that slowed his writing, so stuff took longer, and I won’t use him as an example, but #1 son, who was faster than average, usually had 4 to 5 hours homework.  EVERY night through high school.

Now I don’t know about you, guys, but when I was a kid my homework took at most two hours.  Three if we were ramping up for a test.  Which left me time free to read, spend time with my family, have hobbies.

But what was weird was the nature of the homework.  Part of the reason it takes so long is that it tries to be “fun fun fun” instead of just having rote memorization.

Look, let’s say you’re trying to teach your cat to fetch paper balls.  Yes, it can be done.  I did this with Pixel (best cat evah.)  — well, I had no kids, and I was bored.  Shut up – by throwing the ball, picking it up, bringing it to him, throwing it again.  Eventually a light bulb went on in his head, and he started bringing me the paper ball.

Now imagine that you’re told cats only learn if it’s fun.  So, first you soak the paper ball in sardine juice and throw it.  It seems to work better, because the cat goes to it immediately.  But then he tears it apart.  So then you fill a water bottle and spray the cat when he starts eating the paper.  Now the cat is afraid of the paperball and you must add catnip to make him go near.  Now he’s playing with it but not bringing it to you.  So you put sardine juice on your fingers.  He comes, but he doesn’t bring the paper ball…. Etc. Ad Nauseum.

As tedious as the first process is, the second, as you can see, can extend to absurd lengths.

Well, it’s sort of like that with teaching.  Say they’re trying to teach basic French vocabulary.  They can’t give a list like “Fille->girl” because that would be rote and bad pedagogy.  (And besides any idiot can learn that way, so what’s the fun in that?)

Instead the homework will involve going through the fun fun magazine printed for French teens, finding every picture of a girl and writing down the page number of the page where the girl is.  Then looking at all the captions (without reading French, remember) and finding the common words.  Then you write all those down.  Then you write your answers as to what “girl” is in French.

Guys, writing down Filleàgirl twenty times affixes it your mind better and takes five minutes (TOPS at kid speed.)  To do the other?  An hour.  And at the end of it, the kid is tired, cranky, and has learned nothing, because girl could be fille, or it could be gamin, or jollie, or elle or…

So my kids had HOURS of homework which not only didn’t teach them anything, but didn’t leave them free to learn anything on their own.

Not only that, but because the homework wants to teach kids in ways the kids don’t know they’re being taught, most of the exercises come across as utterly pointless.

Like most kids I HATED vocabulary lists.  I HATED copies, and there is nothing more despicable than multiplication tables.  BUT I knew why I was being given these.  I was supposed to memorize them, duh.

The kids don’t.  What I mean is, no one could.  Most of the stuff makes no sense for its stated purpose. They just know they have hours after school of putting tab a in slot b and coloring tag c and they have to do it because homework now a days counts way more than it did in my day.  (I should know.  I was very good at spacing homework.)  So even if you have all As in tests but don’t do homework, you’ll fail.  (Trust me, younger son tried this.)

So what the kids are taught is that they must perform senseless tasks they don’t want to do, which accomplish nothing, or be punished…

Worse, as I found out, the teachers don’t even remind the kids that homework is supposed to be turned in.  “Oh, I told them two weeks ago.  They’re supposed to remember.”  This is used as early as elementary when most kids CAN’T remember, so unless the parents remember it for them, it’s not going to happen.  (Surely you DO remember being young and the sense of floating in timelessness?  That’s neurological.  You’re not good at keeping track of time at that age, and I was told by a psychologist friend this can persist till 14 in boys.)

OTOH when older son had to have surgery and we asked the teachers for homework for the next two weeks, we found that they didn’t know it and had no plan.  From then on our reaction to homework was “the children must plan, because I can’t.”

This too is a bad thing.  Someone in power who does what he/she pleases while the kids/peasants must scrupulously follow the rules.  Bad precedent.

My point is, calling for more homework isn’t going to fix this mess.  The teachers happily pile on more and more mind bogglingly stupid homework, designed to avoid that awful “rote” and thereby more or less utterly pointless.

Now they’re talking about year around school, because the kids just don’t have enough time to learn.  (Rolls eyes.)

Oh, and they say that “it’s because the kids have so much more to learn.”  Poppycock.  This reminds me of publishers saying that “people are reading less because there’s so much more entertainment.”  When in fact, people were reading less because they had trouble finding anything they wanted to read.

How about you teach kids to read and write and let them pick up “all that important stuff” on their own?  Because, guess what, they do to the extent they need/want to.  And if they can’t read/write, the rest won’t happen EITHER.

Guys, there will never be enough time so long as we try to teach the kids without the kids knowing they’re being taught.

I come to praise rote, not to bury it.  Sure, if ALL you learn is by memorization, you create a learning system like China’s, where people can’t reason over what they learn.  But what we’re creating is exactly the same – a sort of behaviorist hell, where we’re trying to teach people things through other actions, but which ends up imprinting the idea that obeying pointless instructions is good.

Basic skills can be acquired through memorization.  I would skip the wooden ruler on the knuckles for memorizing the multiplication tables, because all it did was make me incapable of speaking when called on (I was likely to mentally transpose and say 45 instead of 54, and then the ruler would descend.)

And after you have the basics, you should move on to more challenging things.

If you’re trying to learn the basics without rote, you’re doing it wrong.  If you have the basics and still doing rote, you’re doing it wrong.

Removing all rote from learning because it’s bad after a certain point is like making strollers illegal because kids are supposed to learn to walk.  All it does is limit people’s choices and take away the time parents should be doing other stuff.  (OTOH some parents would become Olympic lifters.  I mean, Robert weighed fifty pounds at 2. And he wasn’t fat.  I have pictures.)

Right now?  Homework or no homework?  I’d say homework is a tool for keeping your kids FROM learning, unless your kids go to an exceptional school.

Agitating for more homework without checking on content is not the answer.

In fact, the more I look at it and hear, and exceptional schools like second son’s second high school excepted, I’d say the best thing you can do, if at all possible, is bring those kids home and make them do some copies and memorize their multiplication tables.  At least they’ll be bored for a reason.

 

*We don’t have a raiding party post and that’s partly my fault, as I should have given them a schedule by now, but I also decided not to push anyone, because they’re all either dealing with family or health stuff.  So I hope you guys will be happy with a blast from the past post. The kids  guests will be back next week*

Something has been working at me since my post against using stupid slogans instead of thinking (when reality is almost if not actually the opposite – and no, I’m not going to reprise that.  I made all the arguments I wanted to make in that post.  And everyone got a chance to yell at me.  Enough.)  Weirdly, what bothered me most was not the name calling, but a seemingly innocuous comment, which was echoed and repeated by any number of commenters.

To begin with, it was the way it was repeated – not, like a lot of it, as though the person were working from a cheat-sheet, but more – as though a lot of people at the same time had come up with the same clinching argument…  Or what they thought was a clinching argument.

Except it wasn’t, not when you step back and analyze it.  Worse, when you step back and analyze it, you grow quite alarmed at its underpinnings and the fact that ANYONE would think this served as an argument to defend anything.

If, like me, you are – for your sins – a graduate of an excellent college, and hold a degree in the humanities, you don’t wonder why so many people echoed it probably without coordination.  The reason is that they all heard this in school and that in school, if this had been a college paper, it would have won a good grade.  And like most such arguments, it echoes the bias of thought of college professors and current academia.

I don’t remember off the top of my head whether we let any of those comments through.  I wasn’t the only one weeding through them – I have helpers who do that also, so I have time to write.  So, I’ll have to reprise it.

The comment omitted what they were against so I’ll put it in square brackets [It doesn’t surprise me that you think that men get a worse deal in current society than women because] This reminds me of all the Victorian women who were against female suffrage. [presumably meaning: and you don’t realize that just like them you are brainwashed.]

If you are nodding along, you probably ALSO had an excellent college education in the humanities and learned what would get you an A in sociology or feminist literature or whatever the heck it was you took.  (In my case it was theory of Literature, American Literature and Comparative Literature.  Also American Culture, British Culture and German Culture.  Possibly also linguistics, though those tended to be more factual.)

If you are nodding along you ALSO never took the time to unpack this argument.  Don’t feel bad about it, though.  It bothered me – and not in the sense that it felt right – because though it felt like while it was a “valid” – i.e. “logical” – argument, I had a feeling it was wrong.  Not just in my case, but in general.

Still even now, several decades after leaving college, it took me hours and the fact I had a lot of time in a waiting room yesterday to unpack it and figure out the LEVELS of wrong in it: in general, in particular, and when applied to my blog.  We are ALL the product of our education, and if you think that unlike your grandmother you had an education that prepared you to think without bias, it just means you haven’t seen through the bias.

This is a staggeringly bad argument in general because it can be used to dismiss anyone’s ideas based on what a group in the past did.  Say you don’t believe – I plead the fifth.  Most of the time I have a better image of humans in general and yes, women in particular.  Periodically I get annoyed and have to point out certain issues – that women tend to repeat slogans without examining them and fall for quasi-messianic movements without examining their underpinnings.  I could sneeringly dismiss your argument with “Well, you know, the first thing women did, given the vote, was pass prohibition.”

And then you’ll say – rightly – “but Sarah, that was a different set of women, educated under different circumstances, informed by a different set of beliefs, which make your argument irrelevant.”

Which brings us to the second part of why this argument is wrong in the specific and why it’s appalling that people with a college education can’t unpack it.  Repeat after me: The past is another country.  Not only do you not know how you’d have reacted to the suffragette movement if you lived in that time (rather irrelevant, really, since if you lived in that time, you wouldn’t be you) BUT you have no idea if they were right for their time and by their lights.

Now before you go screaming around the echo chamber that Sarah Hoyt believes women shouldn’t have right to vote, let’s register it for posterity that Sarah Hoyt has her doubts on universal suffrage regardless of gender.  It’s a horrible system.  It’s just the best one we’ve come up with so far.  The average woman is no dumber or less equipped to make a voting decision than the average man, and at the high end, women are as equipped to do it as high-end men.

What I’d like say, though – and what I’d like you to listen to, if you can remove the wads of indoctrination blocking your ears – is that just because women’s suffrage won and the results (except prohibition) have been pretty good, they had no intellectual way of knowing that at the time.

First of all you’re assuming that suffrage is always an universal good.  I will grant you our history – which they didn’t have – seems to show it.  Societies where more people vote tend to, if nothing else, decay into tyranny slower.  And it’s possible we might avert it altogether (maybe.  History hasn’t weighed in.)  However, at the time this was not clear.  I like to joke that in the Portuguese civil war my ancestors fought and died never to have a say in their governance again.  That is to say, they fought and died for the guy who wanted to be an absolute monarch.  (Yes, there are other things there, including local and hereditary loyalty, but–) It’s a funny line, and it works for us, but it is just a joke.  I don’t presume to judge their choice, and neither should you.  Why?  They remembered the French revolution and, btw, the British one.  They had grandfather-handed-down memories of mob rule.  Their choice of the king and stability might have seemed the best at the time.  NOT mine.  I disapprove of any dictatorship.  But theirs.  Their best choice, at the time, not knowing the future, and armed with what they did know of their people and place which are stranger to me than any culture on Earth today.

Quite possibly it was the same with female suffrage.  The women you were talking about are not the women of today, with contraceptives and education that make them close enough to men.

Look, you go to war with the weapons you have, not the ones you hope for.  The suffragettes fought for the rights of women as they were, not as they are.  The women they had at the time were not us.  Education in the upper classes schooled women towards subservience (at least if what we know is true, and I’m not saying it is, we weren’t there.)  The lower classes are a lot more opaque.  We study them through excavations of middens and sometimes surviving oral history.  However, we can assume in the first throes of the industrial revolution men and women in the lower classes, both, were NOT equipped to be informed voters.  Add to that the fact most women spent most of their lives pregnant.  I’ve been pregnant.  I’ve researched pregnancy (to figure out what the heck happened to my mind then.)  There is an hormone whose sole purpose is to make you fat, contented and stupid.  And yes, it says that in the literature.  More importantly, when you’re pregnant and you feel your body is coping with all it can handle, you’ll take the path of least resistance in everything else.

This means that women who thought – at the time – about other women getting the vote and shuddered might have had a point.  They foresaw disaster if women got the vote, and – THIS IS VERY IMPORTANT – though we know they weren’t right (the minor thing with prohibition excepted) THEY HAD NO WAY OF KNOWING THAT.  Anyone who’s been through college should be self-aware enough to realize that.  The past is determined, the future isn’t.  We are their future.  They had no way of being sure how things would go.  They were entitled to their doubts and their second thoughts and by having them they showed NOT that they were puppets of the establishment, but that they were thinking human beings.  Even if they were wrong.  Hindsight is twenty twenty.

Now of course you’re saying “But Sarah, they were voting against their interests.”  Stop it.  Stop making me roll my eyes so hard they’ll fall on the floor.

What you’ve just slipped into, whether you realize it or not is “Argument by Marx.”  You probably don’t realize it, because even though lately the establishment has got a lot more bold and started making self-satisfied noises about neo-Marxism (it’s like stupidity.  Calling it neo-stupidity makes it sound so much better) it’s permeated all thought and all teaching for decades – unexamined, unthought-about.  It’s in the bin marked “unexamined foundational beliefs” which in your ancestors’ time held the idea of G-d creating the universe, something that permeated all thought, even that of self-conscious atheists.

And it is the other thing that is wrong, wrong, wrong about that comment.

The comment presupposes what some of their comrades (da, tovarish) said more boldly.  That by saying it is men who are getting the short end of the stick in our society and by standing in front of the feminist mob yelling “stop” I’m a “gender traitor.”  It does this by equaling me with Victorian women who were against their “gender”’s rights.

This is pure Marxism.  It strips me of me and my circumstances in life and what I want, and reduces me to one salient characteristic: the fact I was born with a vagina.  It is one of the most dehumanizing and demeaning theories of history ANYONE could come up with.  And Marx did.

Take your Victorian anti-suffrage woman.  She lived a pretty contented life, and in her experience she didn’t need the vote.  And if you’re going to say “but what about her sisters?”  Her sisters probably had similar lives.  If you mean other women in general, a woman of that time and class remembered the French revolution and was likely to have a sneering disdain for all lower classes.  These were not her sisters.  And the lower class men were not her brothers either. The whole idea would seem absurd to her.  Before you condemn her ask yourself “Why shouldn’t it?  What reason did she have to think of herself as belonging to any group? Why should she fight for more than what guaranteed the best life for her and her immediate loved ones?” (Bringing up nonsense about “false consciousness” and “group betrayal” is not thinking, it’s tourettes.  You’re assuming again that Marx was right. This is some leap of faith since his ideas have yet to work on real people.)

Now, take me.  Yes, I have a vagina.  I checked this morning.  It was still there.  BUT I have a lot of other circumstances in my life.  I have two sons, for instance – sons who’ve seen systematically discriminated against in school starting with the type of work required (group work is deadly for boys.  It’s also dominant now) to the style of teaching (most male brains learn more visually and kinetically.  Most teaching is verbal)  WHY would you presume I’m more interested in bullying males and getting more and more benes for my as yet non-existent female descendants, rather than in fighting for my sons to have at least the same basic treatment as their female peers?  Or, presuming I’ll have female descendants some day (I could have all granddaughters) and I can’t know, WHY would you presume, since I have kids and I don’t know what the future will be, I would want anything beyond “equality under the law?”

Leaving all that aside why would you presume I have more in common with a single woman working in a factory somewhere in the Midwest than with a married man with sons who writes articles for a living a hundred miles away?  What earthly sense does that make?

And before you lecture me about how Marxism envisions people as belonging to several interest groups – thank you muchly.  I was raised in a country that was going head over heels for Marxism.  I studied Marx in several classes.  I also had the dubious pleasure, a few months ago, of reading what earnest Utopian American Marxists in the seventies viewed as the ideal system of government.  It was bewildering and vomit-inducing.  They wanted the country organized into “soviets” (in real soviet, country organizes you) each of them representing an interest group to which you “belonged” in some way.  For instance, take me (please) I’d be in the women’s soviet, the Colorado soviet, the mother’s soviet, the Latino soviet and – presumably – the intellectuals soviet (Okay, for minus three seconds, after which I’d be in the Gulag soviet.)  Each of these would elect representatives.

And none of these would represent anyone.  For these to work, it presupposes that you have more than a marginal interest in common with other people in the same group.  Heck, even if you put me in the “Portuguese immigrants soviet” I’d have barely nothing in common with most of them because for one most don’t come from my part of the country and very few write or read SF (Okay Larry Correia, but he’s third generation.  Also, I’d be more likely to be with him in the Gulag soviet.)

The essential failure of making individuals go through groups with which they share a characteristic, is that ultimately groups are too amorphous for the representative to represent anything but himself. The last irreducible group is one.  Which is why our system establishes rights of the individual and equality under the law.  ANYTHING else, no matter how “progressive” it sounds is a shambling step back into the mists of tribalism and irrational group think.

(And yes, I realize to group people by region as we do has its issues too.  OTOH if your city is razed, it kind of matters to you.  But I’m not saying that representation in other ways can’t or shouldn’t be considered.  I’m just saying multiplying the number of “representatives” and subtracting from the individual is not a step in the right direction.  And that groups aren’t as obvious as you think.)

The only place where it is appropriate for me to “think as a woman” or fight for an issue “as a woman” is the type of situation as in Arab countries where women AS A WHOLE are subjected to prohibitions in driving, working, learning or dressing the way they please (and no, it couldn’t happen here.  NEVER to that extent.  It’s the result of complex forces of culture and history.  Correction: It couldn’t happen here that fast and without some serious foundational changes.)  That fight has been fought for me already, and I’m guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Oh, yeah, and equality under the law.  And I will fight for those for EVERYONE, man, woman or yet undiscovered sentient being.  Yes, even against a group to which I nominally belong because you think I do.

And now that we’ve gone through why that comment was stupid and irrelevant in general and in particular, let’s talk about why it was wrong as a comment to put in my blog…

Having unpacked the levels of unthinking and unreasoning repetition of college-learning in that comment, we can now stand back and be amazed at the staggering arrogance of it.  To wit, the person making it assumes that a) I’d never heard it.  b) I’d never studied history.  c) I didn’t have the ability to reflect upon my situation in the light of history.

Given that this is the blog of – forget formal education – someone who is addicted to books, interested in history, and who has written historical fiction, the hubris in that comment is staggering.  And it shows something else.  It shows the desperate need to count intellectual superiority over anyone who disagrees with you, without even giving it a moment’s thought.  (None of these people said something like “I’m surprised someone like you didn’t realize” – no, the presumption is always that I never thought in historical or self-reflective terms.)

Make a note of it: if this is the only type of argument you can marshal – one size fits all and regurgitated from college classes – and if you think it will win the discussion, you’ve already lost.

Last week, a well known (to me, though not personally) blogger, blogged about the inequality of races in science fiction and fantasy (and gaming.)

While humans can be anything (and are) from treacherous to honest, from traders to warriors, all other races come with assigned professions and psychological traits.

Knowing the blogger, I thought it was one of the most “serious-funny” things I’d ever read, and at the time, possibly because I was still coming up from being feverish, I wanted to write a post about how this could be cured by assigning certain writers of these imaginary races to write sf.  However, I’d pinky sworn not to poke fun at a certain writers organization, or at least, in my mind, I’d pinky sworn not to do it unless I had something serious to say and that post I WANTED to do fell under the heading of pointing and making duck noises.

So I sent the link to Kate, queen of the take down, with the idea she’d do something like that.  I forgot two things: 1) the tongue-in-cheekness and the subtle subversion of the article might not be obvious unless you knew the blogger from other posts.  (Not that the post wasn’t over the top, but we’ve been getting such over the top “real” opinions that it’s impossible to tell.  I mean, in times when you have to check whether the article you’re halfway through reading is in the Onion or the NYT, it’s important to give your friends context.)  2) I didn’t forget this, because I didn’t know it.  With my being sick, I’d missed the fact that Kate was on half her medicine.  See, Kate is narcoleptic and takes meds to counter that, then meds to counter the meds, then other meds to counter the meds that counter the meds.  Now, for the first time in many years, Kate’s doctor ordered her medicine wrong and she is not functioning as she normally does.  (Kate is generous and says this has nothing to do with the great revolutionary remake of our health care system; it’s just a doctor’s mistake.  She might be right.  OTOH seeing the madness that has engulfed my own health care network – for instance my doctor of 17 years can no longer afford private practice, so he has joined a group which has upended long standing care arrangements and made this last illness interesting – I suspect it is one of the ripples.)  So her post on Mad Genius Club went on the assumption that this article was on the same level as the ones calling for the end of binary gender in science fiction. IOW, it was a misfire.

Which all things considered at least in terms of my writing on it might have been better.  This is because over the last week I’ve been unfolding the blog post in my head and getting several important lessons out of it, that apply both to fiction writing and out of it.  Not that I disagree with the original blog post.

What the blogger – Tam – commenting on Kate’s post said is that all her post was trying to point out is that humans are inherently and instinctively racist.

We’ll unpack that first.

She’s right, of course.  Part of what every linguist finds out when poking around on the background of every language is that whatever the word for “people” is it applied at one time only to that tribe.

We’ll put that on the shelf there, and return to it later.

What she didn’t point out is that it’s not so much “racist” as “tribal.”  That is a further unpacking, and further undeniable.

No?

Well, most of those primitive tribes were, to outside eyes, completely undistinguishable from each other.  In fact (through swapping or kidnapping or acts that come in the wake of frequent wars) most such tribes are closely related over a wide area.  So, calling yourself “the people” while your cousins over there are “Those brute animals” is not so much racist in our sense, as tribal.

Race is a nineteenth century concept, and in many ways an erroneous one.  The excesses of race division/distinction have been somewhat curbed since then.  Nineteenth century books are likely to consider every different country in Europe a “race” and to refer to The English Race, The French Race, etc, in all absolute seriousness.

These days we know that most of Europe (again, wife exchange, kidnapping and the fortunes of war, and immigration) is related to each other.  So we limit the idea of races to more obvious physical characteristics, which are harder to ignore or subsume.  (I’ll just note that those are often also fairly arbitrary.  For instance, Reverend Wright not only would pass as Portuguese, but in Portugal would be considered “White” with not a blink.  Also, recently, while doing covers for a Naked Reader romance novel, I got told I couldn’t use a certain couple, because it signaled “person of color” as the female in the romance.  Guys, she looked exactly like one of my oldest friends and distant cousin.  But apparently to American eyes, she read “Black” or at least close enough.)

So, humans are naturally tribal and left to their own devices draw distinctions between “our tribe” and “not our tribe” even if none exist.  This comes, of course, from our being social animals with a tendency to form packs or bands.  It’s very important to bond with your pack or band, and to do so you must have something to compare yourself against “those people over there, who are not us.”  (In fact, the warring comments to Kate’s post, even after she said “oh, I completely missed it, didn’t I” were a perfect example of dual tribalism. People attacked Tam because they thought she belonged to “the other tribe.”)

We’ll put that on the shelf next to the “natural racism” thing – people are actually naturally, instinctively tribal, and they use group-identification systems that can be arbitrary or come entirely from external behavior, to distinguish “We who are people” from “those animals over there.”

When I went over to Tam’s site, part of what amused me was the commentary, which involved a lot of serious chest beating over world-building and how writers are failing when they make mono-cultures all over a planet or mono-behavior over a culture.

It amused me, because I thought the post was only tangentially about world building.  Though it is about world building too, and that is where it connects to the hoo-ha (ah!) about binary gender oppression and having more writers of (genetic but not ideological) variety and all the nonsense going on in our field (which is only tangentially related to these actual ideas which are just being used a cudgel for supremacy – as in, watch out this week for a post called “How like a serpent’s tooth.” ;) )

Yes, it is true that many writers will imagine a mono culture in every race and a race/culture in ever planet.  Yes, this is incredibly lazy and annoying, but there is a reason for it.  A craft reason.

I’ve raised two writers.  As writers, I’m still raising them.  And a couple of years back, I had occasion to bring out something I used to tell the kids when they were little and throwing tantrums, but as a writing criticism.  “What do you hope to accomplish by doing this?”

It went something like this – my oldest son was tired of all the “humans in furry suits” and “forehead of the month” aliens and when writing about alien pirates, he made them as authentic as his training in biology and chemistry allowed him to.  The pirates are single-celled organisms that speak by secreting chemicals.  Worse, he tried to make their psychology fit that.

The result is what I’m sure is a lovely story… with zero audience.  The pirate is too alien for anyone – least of all me – to put oneself in the creature’s mind.  And even if we did, we’d have no more interest in his dilemmas, suffering and triumph than we do in the dilemmas, suffering and triumphs of a grasshopper.  It might be interesting from the point of view of biological study, but as a story?  There is no engagement.

This is why “unrealistic aliens” is an obsession (to complain about) of sf fans and writers, and yet even the most “realistic” ones come from the point of view of humans.

Because humans are “racist” and “tribal” and as such are interested, mostly, in the fortunes and affairs of those they consider their race/species/tribe – go too far from that, and it becomes unreadable.  We’ll put that concept “Humans want to read about others like them” on the shelf next to the tribalism thing.  We’re getting quite a collection of ideas.  Don’t worry, I’m going to put them all together at the end.  Possibly in a mud pie.

But, you say, what does that have to do with monoculture over a species or planet?  Why can’t humans get into stories where there are more than a culture per planet/race?

That, my dears, is because of the exigencies of story telling.  I know this is hard to remember, particularly when story telling is really well done, but story worlds aren’t like the real world.  They simply lack the complexity and contradictory nature of the real world.  Your real self receives a lot of impressions, some of them confusing.  Your brain is among other things an instrument to filter story out of reality.  Story is how humans make sense of the world, isolating experiences that mean something from those that don’t.

Say you’re sitting at your desk and you smell smoke.  Now, if you’re not alone in the house, and you also smell bacon, your story is “Oh, John is in the kitchen, making bacon.”  But if you’re alone in the house and smell smoke, particularly if it has that ‘electrical’ smell, your story is “Fire.  Must check and get out.”

But the whole time, as you smell the smoke, you might be making the bed, shooing away the cat, you might feel cold, you might be sneezing.  Those aren’t important bits of “story” they’re just things happening.  They’re not part of what you tell the firefighters/police/insurance when you explain why you’re in the middle of the road, in your pajamas, clutching a cat.

In writing, you isolate the relevant details.  You might throw in a couple of the others for verisimilitude, but you can’t put in too many, because then you don’t have a story, you have soup.  That is, your reader has no clue where the story starts or whom to follow.

“Young”, often thoroughly professional writers, often start a story with scene setting.  City streets, traffic, this car, that person…  Often for 10 pages.  And by that time they’ve lost the reader.  The reader is looking for the thread of the story and the character they’ll follow, duckling-like.  All this other stuff is ignored as “not part of the story” at best, and at worst confusing, as he follows each hopeful lead with “is this the thread?”

So, what does that have to do with mono-cultures and mono-acting races.  Nothing.  Everything.  You see, the same discipline applies throughout the novel.

Almost every writer who is now a professional has somewhere in his drawer what I call a “thousand elephants” novel.  That is, a novel where he or she tried to mimic the real world by making the novel “real” and ended up with a cast of thousands (and a thousand elephants) and a novel that made no sense.  My own was my third – written—novel and to call it soup is charitable.

There’s only so much space and so many threads in a novel, and most subplots, most references, even, should support the main plot.

Say you’re writing a fat fantasy, there might be room to mention that people think all elves are blah, blah, but in fact that’s a cultural overlay and many of them are blah blah – but then you return to your plot, and the elves you’re going to show (unless their eccentricity is a major factor in the plot; or elves AND eccentricity thereof are a major factor in the plot) are just standard elves, which is what people will remember.

Same for the mono planet.  When your trading ship lands, you might say that equatorial Gnroxes don’t act like these polar ones, but UNLESS that planet is the sole location of your novel, you’re not going to go into much detail, because then you’d have to set up the conflicts and geo politics of a planet that is NOT the subject of your novel.

So, novels are reality viewed through a highly simplified lens, and to try to mimic reality decreases the readability of the novel to the extent that you actually do mimic reality.

We don’t read reality, we read novels.  We’ll put that on the shelf, too.

Unsaid, is that novels are written to be read.  And ideally, at least in the world as is (the first person to come in and moan about capitalism gets punted with a baseball bat.  Capitalism is simply the way humans choose to trade – it exists even under systems that repress it.  It just becomes twisted.) novels are written to be bought, paid for and support the author.

Which brings us to…

Bringing it all together and tangential application to the professional association that shall not be named, but more closely to the madness that has been tearing through our field (and I understand through gaming, too, among others.)

Humans are tribal creatures, who find it easier to read/be interested in people like them – people they can consider “people.”  Even the most “enlightened” human who has overcome “racism” or “tribalism” is a member of a tribe – it might be a tribe of belief or the spirit or whatever.  Not saying there isn’t a benefit in a “tribe” that can include anyone and which values things other than skin color or geographical location.  There is.  I’m just saying it is still a tribe – which identifies itself in some way, usually by shunning and casting out the “not us.”

And novels and games and stories are simplified versions of reality designed to be sold/bought for entertainment.  Yes, there can be other reasons to write and read a story – enlightenment being one of them – but if you’re not amused/entertained/captured, then you’re not going to pay much attention to the “message” either.

Which brings us to the call for more post-binary gender, more “diversity” (of genetics but not of opinion) more—nonsense.

Nonsense because most of humanity is still binary gender.  Most of humanity, depending on location and continent, is one color or one genetic type.  (With mix, of course, but it’s not mix they’re clamoring for.)

So if you write a novel people can’t get – either because you overcomplicate the imaginary races and get caught in side issues that have nothing to do with the plot, or because you refuse to identify the gender of the characters, or because there is no clear hero/villain (no one to cheer for, no one to hate) your purpose, which I assume is to enlighten and educate, will be lost.  Because in the end we’re human.  Yes, this imposes certain limitations on our reading/writing/understanding.  But human is all we have.  If we destroy the humanity in us, there won’t be anything else to take its place.  Best to write for humans, and if we must slide in the story about the rogue gold mining elf, the tree dwelling dwarf, or whatever.  But don’t try to make it the dominant trope, or you’ll make the story impossible to read except by those already committed to your cause, whether that be larcenous, ugly elves or post-binary gender, or “diversity” (of skin color.)

It is perhaps interesting the same people complaining about the terrible tribalist oppression of main-stream culture are using that complaint as a tribal badge.  That tribal badge says “I am one of the enlightened people, and I belong to the intelligentsia.”  Sad that they don’t know that’s all it is, and think that they can force everyone to behave as their tribe wants, without destroying humanity.

Because they themselves aren’t behaving the way they say they want.  Just using different markers to identify “We’re people.  Those others are not people.”

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — has been removed.  I do promise to go through the copyedits as soon as humanly possible and send the advance copies to those who pre-ordered.  You’ll know when that’s eminent because I’ll remove scattered chapters from this blog.  I do hope to manage it next week, but I’m not promising as I’m still finishing a novel under contract to Baen. Meanwhile, if you donate $6 and note it in the field, you’ll get advance-subscribed to this novel.  I do, however, understand it can be a long time to wait, and if you want to, do so.  I will continue to post chapters here, roughly one a week.

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

Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage

 

My charmer – and she was a charmer – was so sure she was putting one over on me that I decided not to fight her.  I didn’t even hold it against her.  After all, everyone needs a little hobby.  And women are likely to take the most unnecessary pet if you actually tell them they’re not very good at their favorite art.  Take m’ sister Honoria, God rest her soul, she was very fond of water color painting, but all her watercolors were like everything else about her: colorless, indistinct and giving you a feeling that something was badly off.  However, the one time I was stupid enough to tell him that, didn’t she half create a ruckus, and run to mama and tell her that I was being cruel.  Cruel.  I ask you.  If I wanted to be cruel, I’d have told her she was a scheming little piece and should think shame on herself.

Now I think about it, maybe I should have told her just that.  After all, might have stopped her falling in love with a dragon and dying.

But Ginevra Mythborne was not Honoria for which thank the Lord. —  Besides the obvious social faux pas of incest, well, what I mean is, if I were sleeping with one of my sisters, which I would not, because Mama wouldn’t half go off in a distempered freak, and besides, I’m not such a cursed rum touch with that.  What I mean is, that sort of thing, likely to get you cutoff from society.  Unless your society includes some of the less restrained Roman emperors. – I meant to marry Ginevra if I could.

I blinked at the thought, since I’d never come upon it.  Not that way.  I’d thought of bedding Ginevra, as who wouldn’t, given what she looked like, but it had never occurred to me I might want to marry her.  I was surprised for a moment and wondered if I’d run mad, but the truth is that Ginevra achieved the near-impossible.  She was the only female who’d never bored me.  Indeed, I doubted she could.  So, of course wanted to marry her.  Stood to reason.  Secure myself, permanently, the escape from boredom.  Besides, of course, her being a charmer.

Problem was of course, would need to survive long enough to marry her.  I could just imagine mama’s reaction, and it made me smile.  She probably expected me to marry some prim and proper debutant.  As though I’d wish myself on one such.

I encouraged Ginevra in her opening the portal to fairyland, fully expecting it to be a trap as cunning as that bomb that someone – Gabriel?  His double? – had planted in my pocket.

I was almost disappointed to see that the coordinates were indeed taking us to Fairyland.  When some woman is as cunning and enterprising as my fair one, one expects her to come up with something more… creative.

But then I’d noticed she’d put specific coordinates on her fairyland arrival.  Which seemed unlikely if all we were going to do was get Gabriel out of a mess, what?

And then there was the arrival.  She might think I didn’t know it, but I registered her little jump of surprise, like she expected someone to be here, who wasn’t.  Interesting then.  What had she meant to happen?

But she was a good enough actress she didn’t betray herself, and instead we wandered down the magical path that always greets one in fairyland.  I kept an eye on her without seeming to.  Something I remembered, from stories about Fairyland, it seemed to be that sooner or later there you walk your own path, and it might not coincide with anyone else’s.  Fairyland is a devilish place, somewhere between real and existing only in people’s minds.

She didn’t betray herself until we heard children laughing, and sounds as though of children at play.  And then she grabbed hard at my arm and jumped a little.  Whatever her trap had been, this wasn’t it.  In fact, this had surprised her.

It surprised me too, because though I didn’t know much about the Darkwater’s estate, I knew enough to recognize the piece of it that suddenly appeared in front of us.  What I mean is, it was difficult not to.  I’d attended that cursed engagement party between Honoria and Seraphim, and had contrived to take two… eminently approachable ladies behind that glassed in forcing house.  Twice.

There was the forcing house, and, in front of it, a little paved area, which someone must have designed as a child’s play area, because there was a little table and chairs.  The children playing…  I blinked.  For a moment I thought it was Seraphim, but then I realized it must be his youngest brother and his twin sister, Caroline.  I’d never paid them much attention, but the children had  a look of them, only aged about six.

And behind them, dressed in severe black, and looking like he would like very much to pass as a servant was…

“Gabriel!”

He looked up and blinked at me.  “I beg your pardon,” he said.  “I don’t–  Or at least, perhaps I do.  Jonathan?  Blythe?  You must be looking for Seraph–  For Mr. Ainsling.  He’s away right now.”

I blinked back.  I’d heard that the king of Fairyland had split and that his human half had gone into hiding, but damme, what kind of gudgeon seeks refuge in watching over infants?