According To Hoyt

So I was reading about Henry VIII (No, I truly don’t get this, but not only is No Will But His selling better than anything else, I have, the sales are accelerating.)

While the Baen books still have priority, I’m going to try to – G-d willing and this week being atypical for the year (I am better, thank you, and no longer living in the bathroom) – find enough time this year to write the other queens.  (On the good side, I’ve done two of those books.  One took me 2 weeks and one 3 days, so…)

But it’s been years since I read anything about Tudor England and there have been new books.  So I’ve been reading about Henry VIII because frankly I haven’t been up to reading fiction this week.

Anyway, so every author agrees Henry VIII as a young man was a true renaissance man, good at everything and so very good looking.  And every author wonders what dread disease caused him to turn not just into a murderous tyrant, but a stupid murderous tyrant in old age.

Except if you dig in you find that when his dumbest moves were made was after he’d killed his two ministers, first the great one and then his apprentice.  (Wolsey and Cromwell.)  Which brings us to… was he really that brilliant or were they great at manipulating him.

But surely – say you – he composed music, he wrote poems, he wrote theological dissertations, for crying out loud.

Except that Thomas Moore put the finishing touches on the “theological dissertations” – were they “finishing touches” or book doctoring?  And at least one book casts doubt on whether he had the same kind of help with his music and, let’s face it, his sonnets to Anne Boleyn are remembered because of their very unfortunate romance, not because he was another Thomas Wyatt.  (And for all I know Thomas Wyatt helped him “with the finishing touches” too.)

While I read, I started getting this incredibly familiar feeling.  “They tell me he’s a genius, but there’s really no proof and no one would dare have said anything else in writing because he was an absolute monarch.”  It could be argued in that way they fed the ego of a man who was just a man till he became, ultimately, a monster.

And while we’re at it, when the same forces apply in a supposed democratic republic that applied in Henry VIII’s absolute monarchy, something must be done.  I’m just saying.  We’ve seen this movie many times from Henry VIII to the Sun King to Kim Il Jung.  It always ends in blood.  And it’s rarely the blood of those responsible for making the people suffer.  I’m just saying it’s time for America to be exceptional again.

Oh, and while on that, when Henry VIII died he left England near bankrupt.  I was snorting with laughter at an author who couldn’t understand why Henry VIII stayed “protestant” – in the most Catholic way possible – after his first two wives died, instead of submitting to Rome.  Sigh.  Apparently this is an historian who believes the ledger part of the reign isn’t history.  He couldn’t go back to Rome because he’d dissolved the monasteries and pillaged their wealth in land, houses and rents.  DUH.  And then he still took the kingdom into penury.  Good thing he didn’t have a printing press he could run at will to create fiat money, uh?

And speaking of other people who have been told what they wanted to hear or what other people wanted to be true until they’re drinking their own ink and completely out of touch with reality – here’s a few more examples:

Like all monsters of legend, Bill Blasio is attacking New York City.  Only the Castro-admirer was elected to lead it.  Yes, I know most people there drink their own ink, too.  They’re too wealthy and comfortable and think reality no longer applies to them. But there is something wonderful and special about the city.  Try to go see it before it becomes Detroit.

As for the Ship of Fools in search of global warming, who got stuck in ice – no matter how much the tv stations hide it and no matter how much they call the occupants “tourists” the gig is up.  It’s like the summer of recovery, guys.  You’re telling people digging out from under snow they’re having a heat wave.  Your climate refugees failed to show up.  Most of us know we’re not stuck in a tropical paradise.  Oh, and most of us know, too, that the Earth was much warmer than this before, sometimes when there weren’t humans.  You can indoctrinate people going through the schools, but in time they get out and the scales fall from their eyes.  And sometimes, if you push hard enough, you create people like me, who went through a much more biased system than even you have managed. Sure those who are like me will be one in a hundred, but all the same, think on it.  Consider telling the truth now and then.

But this – this is an example of drinking your own ink that leaves us absolutely breathless.  I’m linking to the Chicks on the Right Holy Mother of Whack, instead of to the original article.  You’re free to read that, but TRUST me, you’ll be dumber for it.

I’m not going to go into EVERYTHING that’s wrong with the original article – a cry for psychiatric help if I ever heard one – but will just point out the person seems to think of evolution as a god.  However we’re formed, we can tell for if it hurts or not that it is or isn’t meant to be used in some way.  Older son who is a fully trained biologist tells us that the hymen is actually a “seal for freshness” not in the sex sense, but because it keeps most disease-causing germs away, until the woman is of reproductive age, which increases the chances she’ll reproduce and pass on the gene for it.  (This btw, explains why women in the middle ages were kept from strenuous exercise, which is known to rupture the hymen.  They didn’t have antibiotics.  Another myth of male supremacy exploded.  Sad.)

The sad – truly sad – thing is that this psychological cry for help is not that individual.  For instance, while on a panel with one of the glittery whoo has who later plunged into the SFWA kerfuffle, I watched her try to articulate the same argument.  She was CERTAINLY sure that men only had sex with women to impregnate them (wait, what?)  And that this was the primary purpose of rape.

Don’t get me started.

When a significant portion of the population gets this far away from reality and CAN live, our society is so wealthy that most of us can afford to be like Henry VIII completely divorced from reality.

The question is – can it go on?

I think it can, but I think that the gods of the copybook headings will make a comeback tour before we’re on the right course again.

WELCOME Instapundit Readers and thank you Glenn for the link!

*By the time I went to bed last night, I was over this… I thought.  I had dinner with no ill effects.  Except I spent the whole night feeling as though I were either seasick or drunk — a disconcerting sensation when neither of those conditions apply.  I am also running a fever.  So, having managed to crawl off my bed to put this up, I’m going to crawl back into it.  Meanwhile, the incomparable Sabrina Chase is your guide for the day.*

Hi, I’m Sabrina and I’ll be your Science Guide today. I am a gen-u-wine Mad Scientist with a PhD in experimental physics.  I’ve only electrocuted myself a few times and the scars have healed over nicely.  For your own safety, please keep your manipulative appendages inside the tram at all times and do not touch the blinkenlights.

 

OK, Science Fiction. There are a few crucial categories, and I’ve set up my own view and how to write about each of them. I love science, and science fiction is lots of fun to read–but can be intimidating to the non-specialist when it comes to writing. Not to worry! There is hope.

 

1) “Diamond-hard” sf (Andy Weir’s The Martian, Asimov, etc) OK, maybe this one you should worry about. You do need a really thorough grounding in whatever field you want to base your story on. This type is very rare, and even more rare if you insist on a good story too. Scientists who know their stuff may not be able to write themselves out of a wet paper bag. (A non-fiction example of someone who can is Ignition!. Hilariously funny history of rockets and the guys who blew them up.) Also, the things scientists think are fascinating tend to bore nonspecialists to tears. (“They found five-fold symmetry in a real crystal! Woohoo!”) Now if you *do* have specialized technical knowledge, *and* a good story idea that makes central use of this knowledge, knock yourself out. Just make sure your mother/mailman/parole officer can understand it too.

 

2) “Soup of the Day”.  It’s not cheating, it’s specializing! Pick *one* topic to specialize in accurately, and wave hands in an artistic frenzy for everything else. (SA Corey’s Leviathan Wakes features heavy emphasis on correct sublight intrastellar ship mechanics, effects of thrust and momentum, and a truly spectacular accident when a ship’s rotational gravity stops rotating, but goes completely to town with quasi-sentient proteins and vomit zombies). Or try solar physics, and a ship that could possibly enter the outer surface of the sun (David Brin’s Sundiver). Again, focus on *one bit of science*. Then add some handwavium, talking silicon trees, and hot monkey sex and nobody notices the duct tape. Read up on your chosen topic, and if you feel that is still not enough, contact researchers in that topic with specific questions. Especially if you have done your homework and ask reasonable questions (don’t mention chemtrails…) researchers will at the least point you to some useful papers or books. They may even indulge their own speculative fancy to your benefit, if you are lucky. Scientists love sharing information about the things that fascinate them–but remember this is their day job and they might not have a lot of spare time.

 

3) “Turn the Volume down”. Science is everywhere in this kind of SF, but as a nice background hum rather than the main stirring soundtrack (this is what I try to do in my books). Understand basics like conservation of momentum. Human survival in a vacuum. Basics of radiation. Basics of thermodynamics. The big thing is you DON’T need math. This is not about calculating orbital trajectories–you just need a good feel for what is rational. The rest of your made-up science in the book should be like magic in fantasy–internally consistent, and with some sort of cost. My faster-than-light drive in the Sequoyah series is totally made up. It depends on artificial gravity (which can fail in a badly maintained ship, providing Drama) and is affected by anomalies (I was inspired by supermassive strings speculated to exist in interstellar space) that function much like reefs for sailing ships. Navigation is important, and so is the relative motion of stars in the galaxy (you did know everything is moving around like stirred cake batter, right?) That gave me ways to demonstrate my main character’s skill, problems to overcome, ways to fix them, and so on. Note that I am NOT an expert on superstrings, or galactic dynamics, or gravitational theory. I read a general-level article somewhere, or read Kip Thorne’s book (see sources below).

 

Recommendations:

Read around in some science topics and note down things that make you say “ooh, that’s neat!” Don’t worry about jamming it all in one story–you are developing a Junk Pile of useful stuff for later. I probably don’t have to mention it to hard core Human Wave types, but try and be aware of agendas. We all know about Global Warming, and anti-vaccination nutbars, but there can be some esoteric food fights lurking in the shadows as well. (Herschel senior thought people lived on the surface of the sun, Einstein was famously allergic to probability theory, Pons & Fleischman thought they had created fusion events in a pyrex beaker.) Not that you can’t have fun with controversy, just be aware that There Be Dragons and you will get irate emails.

 

Sources:

-Cartoon guide to physics for the basics http://www.amazon.com/Cartoon–Guide–Physics–Larry–Gonick/dp/0062731009 (they also have chemistry and genetics and statistics, but I haven’t read those)

-Feynman lectures for more details, but they do contain scary math and greek letters. (free online http://www.openculture.com/2013/09/the–famous–feynman–lectures–on–physics–now–online–in–html5.html )

-sites that have the latest cool stuff for general inspiration http://phys.org/ , http://www.livephysics.com/ , http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/

-Kip Thorne’s highly entertaining book on gravity and black holes http://www.amazon.com/Black–Holes–Time–Warps–Commonwealth/dp/0393312763

I am starting to feel really bad about not giving you ya’ll a chapter, but really, seriously — no, truly — until I go back and edit these are very hard to write and to make my life complete, I have whatever the kid had.

The good news is that it doesn’t seem to be norovirus — at least the younger kid has stopped upchucking.  OTOH older kid fell yesterday and I don’t feel so good.  I don’t seem to have a FULL version of it, but it’s still making it damn hard to concentrate for any real creative work, including writing the long overdue chapter.

If this changes by tomorrow, I shall post tomorrow.  For now I’m going to do the cat box (yes, it IS a constant thing.  Sorry.  And then I think I’ll go nap, because it’s that kind of day.

Part of the “being sick less” resolution is to try to rest when I needed it so the crud doesn’t drag on.

Okay, that’s it.  Head is empty and fuzzy.  More later if I find brain.

So much for the New Year thing on not getting sick, though to be fair, what struck me was just mild sinus/with earache (and seems to be resolving itself.) Younger son, OTOH woke up on the first day of the year with what I hope – knock on wood (there are indications that way) – is a 24h bug and not norovirus.  The main indication that way is that none of the rest of us seem affected and we do live in each other’s pockets.  Also, he was getting better by the evening.

Of course, this is an example of a resolution you can’t keep as such – you can endeavor to live a healthy life, but you can’t keep the bugs from infecting you.  So, on with the endeavoring.  And meanwhile, I had the weirdest nightmare.

First of all, I dreamed I was running for political office – which, while not impossible, is highly unlikely – and second I dreamed someone had data mined my blog and everywhere, including on bill boards on the side of the road was “Sarah A. Hoyt thinks the Earth is flat.”  This was based on half a sentence, taken grossly out of context.  No one reading the actual post I’d written could think I believed that.  In fact, no one reading the first part of the sentence could think I believed that since the first half was something like “I looked out the window and saw a pig flying by, so I think…”  However, all the blogs were full of it, and all the billboards and all the radio stations, and jokes were being made about the science fiction writer who thought the Earth was flat.

Which made me realize something.

The big power of the industrial media complex right now is the power to destroy.  They no longer have the power to burnish the image of their darlings, or to make us believe counterfactuals.  I’ve said this before, and I mean it.  If they had the same sort of control over the streams of information/entertainment that they had back in the 40s they would have pulled off their stated goal of making this administration the second coming of FDR.  In fact, the more we learn about FDRs effect on the economy of the nation, the more that seems distressingly likely.  If they’d had even the type of control over the media that they had back in the early 90s, we would too believe this first lady is a beauty queen, instead of rolling our eyes at the covers proclaiming this.  (No?  We did believe that Hilary was efficient and intelligent, which considering she advanced in life the old fashioned way – by marrying a man who did – was quite a rasper.)

They can no longer do that.  And either they caught on that their “Summer of recovery 1 and 2 and 3 and 4” was becoming a fodder for giggles, or they’re losing heart.  Yes, we all know people who believe that this administration halved the deficit (to be fair most of those people believe in unicorns, too) and we all know people who believe that the economy is getting better and that there is no inflation (those usually require advanced degrees, because no one can believe that much nonsense without training up).  But influence the general opinion, they do not, and they keep getting smaller and smaller bang for their buck.

Those are the good news.

The bad news is that there is something that they can still do and do quite handily. Heinlein observed in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that it’s much easier to make people hate than love.  Our media has lost the ability to make us dote on their darlings, but they can still turn public opinion against anyone they choose.

It’s not very rational; it’s not very sane; they don’t even try to make it plausible.  Instead they tell a big huge whopper – Sarah Palin made rape victims pay for the rape kit, say – and then keep repeating it, making jokes about it, using it as a throw away line by late-night comedians you know “Oh, well, of course she’d have cut the deficit.  The American people would need to pay for its own rape kit.”

And suddenly it’s everywhere.  Part of it is coordination, of course, and part of it is the willingness of marginally attached left groups to jump in on the buzzword of the day, which happens not through conspiracy but through the fact that these people desperately want to be cool and be like the cool people they see on TV.  The right – and certainly the libertarian right – has nothing like it, since most of us by the time we arrived at our opinions had decided that we had to stand against cool and societal approval, but that some things were more important.

Witness the whole “Binders full of women” they deployed to prove that Romney was against women.  The incident is likely to make your head hurt.  What he was saying, of course – and the expression isn’t even that infelicitous just a verbal short cut – is that he’d asked to be brought the files of women who’d not been promoted, and got whole binders full.  (It serves him right, for trying to create his own affirmative action instead of JUST aiming for meritocracy, but never mind.)  Next thing you know this phrase “binders full of women” was being deployed to show he was “anti-woman” and the idiots of code pink were marching in circles wearing binders.  And most of the people who just heard the phrase “binders full of women” never had any clue of the context and were convinced he was either keeping women in binders (!) or thought women’s resumes should be kept in binders and not considered.

It was in fact the exact opposite of what he’d said and it was all accomplished by never explaining, never saying anything, just repeating “binders full of women.”

Meanwhile the DNC was running with “We all belong to the government” a phrase that would genuinely skiv the average American voter, but since it was never mentioned, nor was the convention shown in its pale and old glory, but the media assured people that it was diverse and there were tons of “people of color” (as opposed to transparent people, I guess) the public believed without having seen.  Which might make them blessed, but certainly DOES make them stupid and blinkered – as they’re finding out.

The power-to-destroy is being deployed earlier and earlier.  For instance, I noted an accusation of plagiarism against Rand Paul which, when traced down, amounts to “he didn’t use proper citing procedure” – which, pardon me, these days keeps changing and even I am not sure I can use it right even though I have a literature degree.

The end result of this is to drop the people who would even marginally be interesting to the base (Paul is saying he won’t run and I’m not sure I blame him) leaving us with the one the left fears less.  That one they spare until the general election and then they unload on him.  At any rate, not much is needed since the base is usually cringing.

Mind you, it’s never really bad stuff – like, say Clinton’s serial record as a sex offender WELL before he ran for president, or Elizabeth Warren’s using of racial preferences to which she’s not even remotely entitled, or … any of that – It’s stuff like “binders full of women” or using the word “niggardly” or something else into which they can read penumbras and emanations of a hatred for women or other races or another designated Marxist victim group.

They are aided in this by the right’s – and for the purposes of this Libertarians are very much the right – wish to distance itself from anything that might sound even vaguely off.

Look, the left doesn’t do this.  Point out to them that Elizabeth Warren is Faux-a-hontas and first you get the “well, she truly believed it” then you get the “there is no proof she used it to advance” and then you get “she did much to raise consciousness…” and then they reset and are back to “you’re racist because she’s a Native American.”

The right, OTOH would jump away from everything like that, like a shot, and then start piling on and driving the person out of the party.

I have a theory that this is a leftover cold war reflex.  During the cold war the left managed to paint the right as being for the rich, because it was against the distribution of wealth.  (Instead of the distribution of wealth ipso facto favoring a large government and an “upper class” that gives bennies to the benighted, just like in feudal times.  In fact the whole concept of redistribution IS feudal. Why would the government give YOUR money to anyone else, unless all money belongs to them and “we all belong to the government”?)  From this came painting the right as anti-other-races (completely airbrushing the fact it was the left who endorsed slavery – same as it ever was, I guess) and all the other image of the stodgy/old fashioned right.  It took them forever and near monopoly of the information/entertainment complex to build that image.

And now the right reacts to it as if it were ever true.  So faced with a politician who is less than perfect (ah!) the right recoils and piles on, to prove they’re not like that.

Which reinforces the left’s sole remaining ability – the ability to destroy.

There is also the fact that we have very little ability to fight against it.  The “accusations” themselves are the sort of thing you can’t fight against.  Trying to explain that Sarah Palin never said she could see Russia from her house puts you in the position of trying to explain a joke.  “A horse couldn’t have walked into a bar.  The doors aren’t wide enough.”  It doesn’t work.  In fact, the more stupid and widespread the accusation, the harder it is to counter.

Even the Tea Party, as a widespread phenomenon that most people know someone who belongs to, has got the tarnish job.  It took them forever, but by dint of repeating the “ignorant” and “fanatic” they’ve got most people believing it or half believing it.  (A couple of false flag operations helped that along.)  And part of it is that the right willingly goes along with it, again.

So what to do?  Well… The only thing I can think of other than stop jumping every time they make jokes about someone being a frog is to fight fire with fire.  Is there a stupid meme out saying that so and so said something totally out of context?  Find the stupidest things Obama has said (And I don’t mean corpse- man, most people don’t care about mispronounciations.  Unless your target is college professors.  But “you didn’t build that” is pretty damn dumb, as are his recent scolds on “inequality” while he flies around in private jets to glam vacations) and make a meme, and flood the net.  And when they push their meme at you, push right back.  Just a sentence.  No, it doesn’t need to be impeccably sourced, no it doesn’t need to make sense, even.  It just needs to be catchy.

Will it work?  I don’t know.  But it’s worth trying.  It’s worth trying because in the last two elections the left has used their power to make people hate and cringe to select their opponent.  And if they do that again in 16 it will be enough.  It will do for us.

I know I keep saying to be not afraid and that in the end we win they lose.  I still think that is true.  But I also believe our country (and by extension civilization) can go down for a one or two generation count, and we can live our great-grandkids such a mess to rebuild that what we have right now will seem like a golden age.

Just because tech and history will eventually go our way is no reason to put down our weapons.  Just because they control most of the channels that can be used for propaganda doesn’t mean we can’t counter it.

Be not afraid.  But keep fighting.

I know you’re going to tell me that the New Year is an arbitrary day, a chance of calendar, but humans live by ritual and symbols as much as by concrete things.  If the world were all logic and what matters logically, we wouldn’t have any special dates, and no one would ever do anything extraordinary because “it’s just the practical that counts.”  And no one would attach any importance to the myths and stories.

I don’t know about you Tovarish, but me I use the rituals and the dates and the symbolic turning points as a fixed point off which to rappel and change my direction.

I don’t often do New Year’s resolutions, mostly because I view them as “things to break” and these aren’t quite so much resolutions as things I say are changing and will endeavor to change in this direction.

This means if I don’t do it on the 1^st of January I didn’t break them already, but I’m starting to tack my ship in that direction, and it will get better as it goes.

You see, there is a dreadful weight of inertia to human life.  Things-as-you’ve-always-done them become established in your mind and you end up doing them the exact same way over and over again, even if you hate it.  It’s kind of like trying to swim in a soaked overcoat.  And in this case, the habits formed during this year are the kind that, like that soaked overcoat, will be the end of me, if I don’t change them.

So I’m going to hold onto this here buoy of the New Year and try to change my direction in the following ways.

 

–          I’m going to try to walk three miles a day, even if it’s very cold.  This is why G-d gave us padded leather overcoats, after all. No more wimping out on the “Argh, I’m freezing” escape clause.  There will also be an appointment with an endocrinologist (don’t ask) and I’m going to try to eat by the method of “It was out when I walked past the kitchen) since I have it on good authority that living of cheese sticks and the occasional spoon of peanut butter is bad for me.

–          I’m going to try to write no more than 4 original/non repeat, not link-fest links for this blog per week (other than the chapters) and fill in the rest with stuff the huns will enjoy.

–          I’m going to try to write all the blog posts for the week in advance on Friday, so they don’t impinge on the other writing.

–          I’m going to try to change my subscribers’ content at least once a month (there’s new stuff up, btw)

–          I’m going to try to finish Through Fire and Darkship Revenge in January.

–          I’m going to try to finish The Musketeer’s Confessor in February.

–          I’m going to try to go to officeish at least 4 days a week, to facilitate the above goal.  (Trying to write while running this madhouse is for the birds.)

–          I’m going to try to take at least one drawing course, because it feeds the soul.

–          I revolve to read at least two new novels a month (no, I’m not that slow, but I read a lot for research/re-read a lot. New stuff tends to suffer.)

–          I’m going to try to be a better friend and more assiduous correspondent to the various ones of the huns who are regular correspondents.

–          I’m going to try to get the rest of my back list – Musketeer’s Inheritance, Musketeer’s Servant and (revised) Heart of Light, Soul of Fire, Heart and Soul – up for sale, both paper and ebook.

–          I’m going to see about getting Basset’s antho done, even if it’s by barflies for barflies.

–          I’m going to try to get permission to do a fan-story antho for the shifters (if Baen doesn’t want to publish it in paper, they can publish it in webscriptions, and Goldport will bring it out in paper.)

–          I’m going to try – very hard – to take my indie stuff if not as seriously as Baen, at least seriously enough that I finish A Flaw In Her Magic and A Fatal Paws (the first orphan kitten mystery) at last.

Yes, that’s a lot of stuff, but most of it is in various states of completion, and I really think that if I’m not hampered by the dead weight of the blog, and if I can stop getting sick, it WILL get done.

I look back at 2013 and wonder if it’s me or the rest of the world that went mad.

 

First the personal: we spent most of the year wondering if the main income of this household would still be there, all the while knowing if he lost it it would be hard to find another, even as, from every magazine and newspaper – for years in a row – we are assured that we’re on the brink of a recovery.

To be fair, most of them say we’re on the precipice of a recovery, and perhaps they have read the dictionary definition of precipice, and just think we haven’t.

 

prec·i·pice

[pres-uh-pis] Show IPA

noun

1.

a cliff with a vertical, nearly vertical, or overhanging face.

2.

a situation of great peril: on the precipice of war.

 

We seem to be among the lucky few because our proposed doom has been postponed for at least a year maybe two, unless we all hit the cliff together – and in that case, well, we’ll be like everyone else.  “And we’ll all go together, when we go/and we’ll all go together when we go/ with the currency diluted/and our sovereignty disputed/yes, we’ll all go together when we go.”

Meanwhile, of course, this lays an obligation on us to write like demons, so maybe, just maybe if/when the main breadearning proposition fails, there will be lots of little others to take their place.  The kids are starting to pull their weight in writing.  Dan is making time for it.  He/us are also trying various other gambits.  I still think our future is multiple small streams of income.

“So, will we go over the precipice?”  — Who knows?  But even if we do, life tends to go on.  Look at places like Zimbabwe.  So, shut up and keep rowing.

 

Grandma used to say that “Where bread is short, everyone argues no one is right.”  Given how much groceries have gone up and salaries haven’t (good thing that food and fuel are no longer counted towards inflation, uh?) Much of the year can be explained in that vein.

There was for instance the amazing insanity of the SFWA glittery hoo-has trying to create a storm in a B Cup by accusing men of sexism for being men.  One wonders if they think the world would be better populated by castrati and women only.

I really wish we’d bring back single-gender schools.  Why?  Because any woman who has attended a girls- only middle school will not have any sort of illusions about a society composed of females only.  “Peaceful because there are no men” my sore big toe.

And to the extent that SFWA seems determined to kick out anyone who isn’t “different enough” (in a purely genetic way, of course, because diversity of thought is evil) I can see them fast becoming like the middle school I attended: Nasty, full of gossip, a place where no loyalty nor honor apply, and occasionally and unexpectedly unbelievably violent.

 

Then there was the shut down, because the republicans wanted to delay the onset of the Deathstar… I mean, Obamacare.  That was a moment of total surreal confusion.  “Wait, the people who’ll suffer the most from this craptastic “law” are the ones wanting to implement it?  The ones who have the most to gain from its implosion want to stop it?”  There was the Park Service taking orders to harass the citizens who pay their wages because Befehl its Befehl.  There was the news stations ASSURING us that the Republicans had lost from causing the shutdown (I’m still not convinced this bears any more relationship to the truth than the jobless figures do, or the inflation figures, either.)

But it turns out they’re drinking their own ink (no, seriously) and think that they really thought that their law HAD to work, because it was ideologically correct, even if it makes no sense, doesn’t apply to the real world, and can’t do anything that it said it would do…

The prognosis on this for 2014 is: I’m going to drink heavily.  But not as heavily as they’ve been, and not their ink.

 

We will pass over, with averted eyes, the bizarre notion of us becoming allied with Iran and getting them the right to enrich uranium, and the other… oddities of a foreign policy that’s come completely unglued from reality.  Never mind.  This too shall pass.  Hopefully without taking us along in a radioactive burst.

 

So, everything is in a mess, and so …  And so we forge on. This is no time to get wobbly.  They’re the ones that create the mess, and we’re the ones with broom and mop, who come in and clean up.

In the way these things work, this means we win, they lose.  Because if all you have to offer is chaos and destruction, you’ll never (duh) build anything lasting.  Maybe this is why the great statist empires, from the one that was supposed to last 1000 years, to the one that was supposed to bring in the Homo Sovieticus last a maximum of 70 years and reduce everyone and everything to sh*t.  Odd how that happens, uh?

Not to say I’m willing to give them even 70 years over the land of the free – no.  This is where we settle their hash once and for all, hopefully with a minimum of unpleasantness.

Be not afraid.  We win they lose.  But the times ahead WILL be interesting.  That I guarantee.  Fortunately, you ain’t seen nothing like us yet. And neither have they.

 

 

*You know him as Kilted Dave and what the fancy title means is that he’s one of the poor souls I’ve convinced to give me at least one post a month.  Yes, I’m still taking guest posts from the rest of you, but you’re under no obligation to do one a month, while the poor saps souls in the raiding party are on the hook for that.  So, without further ado, I’ll let him introduce himself.  (And Raiding Party is, of course, in keeping with the Hun theme.)*

I’ve been instructed to introduce myself. And to make it amusing. Very well.

I am called the Kilted One, the Blurred Barista, the Red-Bearded Pirate, “Hey, You,” the Scourge of God, and (my favorite) the Magnificent Bastard.

I come from a long, long line of scoundrels, ruffians, and assorted barbarians (sometime within a generation of the Battle of Hastings, I have an ancestor called Thom the Saxon). Those arbiters of all things cultural – the Hellenes – gave the concept to their conquerors/conquered the Romans (it was a very confusing assimilation for all involved), and they applied it to – so far as I can tell – all of my ancestors, as far back as anyone can find. Gaul, Pict, Gael, Celt, Scot, Angle, Saxon, Dane, Norse. Without expensive tests whose legitimacy has recently been called into question, it seems clear I am the penultimate product of as shady a gang of ne’er-do-wells as you’ll find this side of Tortuga (not the one in the Caribbean Sea; the raucous freehold occupying the hollowed out moon of a nameless planetoid hurtling ’round the white dwarf companion of Ultima Baengari, binary system famed in story and legend. I would say more, but we haven’t the time).

I am the proud holder of a degree in that most useful and least marketable of (in)disciplines: philosophy. My BA in BS has served me well in the decade since I made off with it. I learned early on that nobody likes philosophers (much like prophets in that regard, but more on that later) so I figured a term of enlistment would provide adequate recompense for my profligate education. After six years nowhere near a mast (boy and man), I discovered the Navy had no more interest in my high-minded mannerisms than did that bane of all thinking people, Academia. No really, listening to static and not seeing the sun for weeks was pushing me rapidly toward doing something precipitous. Well, those, and bureaucratic nonsense I have since learned is standard.

But now I’m free: free of obligation, free of trousers and free of that gods-be-damned hole in the ground. Free to starve to death on my own merits. Fortunately, behind every man stands a woman, prodding him in the back with drawn bayonet. And Mrs. Dave, aka Sarah the Younger, aka Sarah the Blonder, aka Mischief, aka A Trial To Me, aka the mother of my as-yet-unborn spawn, does her share of prodding. I just wish she’d take the batteries out of the prod. But seriously, Mrs. Dave is a gracious lady who allows me to pursue my writing with only the simple understanding that I’ll clean her house, cook her meals, father her children (in various stages of potentia) and generally prove to one and all that I’m more or less civilized. Also, it brings closer the day when I’ll keep her in the manner in which she’d like to become accustomed.

When it comes to the lies I tell for a living, I seem to have fallen into a peculiar niche. My prose isn’t so much purple as it is a shadowed lavender, and my protagonists seem to barely know what they’re about. I’d blame this on a relative lack of experience, but I’ve got several hundred thousands of words (some of them even in sentences, no less) in multiple works spread across several (sub)genres. The published works are, on the one hand, rural fantasy (that peculiar subgenre of contemporary fantasy that doesn’t happen in a city) and on the other hand, something I think of as a cross between fairy tales and Lovecraftian quasi-horror.

I have other projects in various states of disrepair and decay, to include steampunk, second world fantasy, space opera, a couple of post-apocalyptic adventures, pulp adventure, and military SF. I come by it honestly, as – at age seven or so – I picked up a nifty book on my father’s shelf. The book had a dragon on it, and I thought, “cool.” Eventually, I hit a point where, halfway though half of the books I picked up, I thought, “I bet I can do better than this.” After the Navy and I called it quits (always nagging, calling at odd hours to check up on me, issuing orders she knew wouldn’t be obeyed) and I had my aforementioned sugar-mama (Hi, Dear! What’s that knife for?), I’ve shuffled off to the bucolic countryside for a life of lit-RAR-y leisure. It is the most pleasant thing, staring deeply into candle-flames until early in the morning, sleeping until nearly noon and then slaving over nearly two hundred words, polishing them until they fling back the rays of the setting sun. Romantic, non?

[Editors’ note: Help STOP This grinning idiot won’t write the bloody stories STOP All we get are weak daydreams STOP Send red meat and whiskey-soaked gunpowder STOP Use the FTL matt-trans for Krim’s sake STOP Don’t know how much longer we can hold off the entropic drain STOP]

Sorry, where was I?

Oh, yes. Our hostess has asked me to go on a bit about my ambitions and what I want to get out of writing. It’s pretty simple, really: I want to write good stories, and mostly, get paid for them. Simple, and as easy as any other trained skill. Which is to say: not at all. At least, not when you need to know what you’re doing. So I’m working on that part. For a given value of work. Yes: working on that, as well.

Along those lines, I do have a few writers whose work I study, and of whom I’d be delighted to be called derivative. Larry Correia, besides being a Wise Latino and a friend, has a way with words that draws the reader on. I think I managed to avoid staying up until the sunrise with Warbound, but then only because I firmly left it in the other room. Had I taken it to bed, “to finish the chapter,” I’d have been doomed to finishing it in one sitting. As I’ve done with all the rest of his books. I’m firmly of the opinion that the best compliment a writer can get is, “you bastard, you kept me up until the wee hours on a school/work night!” That is what I want out of writing.

I keep Sarah the Wiser’s (you heard it here first, ladies and germs!) work in mind, and that of her spiritual forefather, RAH (pbuh). Our hostess has a manner of pacing that I wish to emulate, though it’s double tough to cut out the boring bits (but I love that sentence! I neeeeeeed iiiitttt!) Mad Mike’s gift of gab, as what translates into his writing. Oh, John Ringo, No’s seemingly magical ability to take anything and turn it into gold. The Mad Wizard’s way with plausible-seeming high technology. Col. Kratman’s insouciance toward the opinions of his fellow humans, as well as his and Mr. Drake’s ease with military history and the filing off of serial numbers of the same. Dozens of others, whose names and qualities escape me at the moment. There are even those whose work I do not wish to emulate, but from whom I learn something every time I read them. There are even those who simply serve as a negative example. Too many to enumerate, and I’ve not the energy to give them press. Maybe later. If you behave.

When it comes to the more rollicking discourse we tend to enjoy here, I have opinions – as should have become apparent by now – even strongly held ones. I am, however, a naturally retiring individual. I don’t particularly enjoy interpersonal conflict, especially over things on which I lack certainty. Trained in the Socratic Method as I am, and indoctrinated in the professional paranoia of the intelligence community, I’m sure of my lack of knowledge and wisdom in most arena and disinclined to advertise the fact.
Moreover, I often lack the patience for the cut and thrust of online debate, and as physical violence is somewhat frowned upon (re-institute a Code Duello!) and I mislike shaking in impotent rage, I’d liefer play the diplomat to the rest of the Huns’ savagery. ‘Tis more fun that way.

Oh, as regards prophets and philosophers.

There are generally two kinds: fore-tellers and forth-tellers. Often, these are two responsibilities of the same person. What we do here is – hopefully – both. We speak truth. Not to power, thank Bob, we’re not nearly that far gone. We tell it like it is. The world is thus, and we’ll say it to your face. Doesn’t matter if you want to believe some figment of a brain-sick, maundering freeloader of a demagogue. And people don’t like that. They don’t like being told their deeply cherished foolishness is so much dross.

Which is why we’re clever about it, ’round here. We dress it up all fancy-like; hang it round with rocket-ships and battle scenes, romances and betrayals and any other scores and scores of literary devices that strike our fancy. That’s what Human Wave is, after all: truth cloaked in pretty lies, falsehoods, fictions. The kind we like to read, and reread and read yet again. The kind that inspire us to look at the messes around with hope, rather than despair.

Or at least with an eye on which parts of it to plunder and which to burn. Until the next raiding party, you hoodlums, keep your blades sharp and your pens sharper.

I don’t suffer from triskaidekaphobia.  Mind you, the main reason I don’t suffer from it is that normally I’m too spacey to count things or remember what day it is, otherwise I probably would.  This is because, as a writer, I have every superstition ever created, and invent a few new ones every so often, just to keep in practice.  This is the logical result of (at least on the traditional side) my not being able to see direct result from my efforts.  (This is not a criticism of my publisher, it’s the nature of the beast, which reports about a year after the fact, so I don’t know what publicity worked, etc.  Also I have little control over things like covers and distribution which are almost as important as the quality of the writing for how well a book does.)  It is apparently a normal affliction of writers.  Anyway, so I don’t suffer from a morbid fear of the number 13 which is a good thing because this has generally speaking been a horrible year.

It hasn’t been anything big and easy to point to, though, so that I can say “I’m sorry, I caught the gnats, so I’m going to take the rest of the year off and crawl into bed for a three-month sleep.”

Instead, as has happened a couple of times before, this year became a never ending circle of working for a few days, getting too ill to work, rinse, repeat.

Fortunately too, we’ve identified (I think) most of the problems.  One of them has been bedevilling us for seven years or so, and I need to get it permanently fixed, but even partly fixed has shown me that the intake vent in the basement was a bad, bad idea.  Closing that seems to have cut down on the level of respiratory issues, though, of course, after years of irritation my respiratory system is fragile.

We also found that writing weekends away help.  Mind you, this is expensive, and so we had two the whole year.  But I found I can do in two days the work that normally takes me a week or more.  This is proof that part of what is slowing me down (and possibly getting me sick) is doing too much at the same time.

Which led me to examine how much I was doing, and it really is a case of the straw that broke the camel’s back.  I was fully busy with my traditional career (average 4 books a year) then I got the indie stuff which is work of a different kind, at least for now (I’m mostly putting up back list, for now, which only involves some editing, not actual writing.  In fact, what’s holding up what I call the “Darkship cycle” in short stories is the need to rewrite a lot of them since they’re almost 20 years old.)  They involve learning to do covers, learning to format text, the intricacies of the various outlets, etc.  It’s fascinating, and, in a way, fun, but at the same time, it both EATS time and seems to “feed” from the creative side (as do art and cooking.)

Then I’m doing articles for PJM.  I feel awful for having deserted Classical Values this year, but I REALLY couldn’t find the time.  But I do articles for PJM and I started the year by trying to do a blog tour (that collapsed fairly quickly because I JUST couldn’t, but still I must have written around 20k in that.)

Then there are short stories, some for Baen anthologies and some because to be blunt when you get to my point in my career, you owe favors.  So… I was writing five thousand words on a SLOW day before I sit down to “write” real stuff.

The end result was that around September the whole thing shut down and I didn’t feel like writing at all.  My contributions to PJM were almost impossible to keep up (and I ended up with a lot fewer) and even this blog was an effort.

As you know, I’ve made plans to offload a bunch of that work.  There will be a guest post (fixed) once a week, and some weeks there will be two.  Saturdays will be “Blast from the past” posts as well as promo posts, which Free Range Oyster is compiling for me.  Sunday (other than today) will be a link fest of sorts.  That leaves me three posts and two chapters which most of the time I SHOULD be able to finish on Sunday evening.  Or at least it’s doable.  And that will take the pressure off the rest of the week.

Of course, early this coming year, there will a load of unrelated work, because we MUST get this house ready for staging for sale.  We also must find somewhere to rent while selling because (to be blunt) you can’t sell a house with four cats living in it.  I’d like to say that will be easy, but it won’t.  Right after we moved here, I got on the four/six book a year schedule, which means we haven’t even FULLY unpacked, EVER.  So… there’s a ton of stuff to go through/get rid of.  There’s walls to paint.  There’s stuff to decide to put in storage…  It goes on.

And meanwhile I still owe Baen two books — half written — which I need to finish ASAP.  And then I’ve promised fans the sixth musketeer mystery (and some of them are bugging me already.)  And there’s stuff I WANT to do for indie.

It would help if external crisis avoid us this year.  Part of what made 2013 hideous was that we were in uncertainty about Dan’s job for most of it.  As a cashier told me yesterday “These days those of us employed are in living fear of losing our jobs, because we all have friends who’ve been unemployed for years and years.”  That — knock on wood — barring some unforeseen event of the kind that gets us all in trouble, seems to be safe for the next year.  Just the stress off my mind will probably help with health, too.

I’d also prefer — I’d like to say I very much wish — my friends try to stay healthy through 2014.  If you could?  It would be a great favor to me.

And now, I’m going to shut up, go take a shower and work on Through Fire.

I will have a post from one of the people I’m bringing in as permanent rotating guests (aka the raiding party) tomorrow.  I’ll have a “compilation” of links about the year for Tuesday and some sort of “resolutions” (AH) on New Year’s.

The chapters will resume first week of January.  Meanwhile, go pet your cats or something.  Years ending in 13 are very hard on cats (everyone knows that.)  So, go do what you can.

 

No, the chapter isn’t going to happen.  Look, guys, it’s my anniversary and I got up late for reasonsthataretotallynoneofyourbusiness and I still haven’t had time to go over the background of Rogue Magic, which means I feel like I’m not able to continue the plot coherently.  (The funny thing is that I need to do this even when I write a book in three weeks and not a chapter a week.  Around the middle I need to re-read and markup and reorient, or I lose the plot.)

But I was over at Mad Genius Club where my perceptive friend Cedar Sanderson is taking her pet peeves for a walk.  And the first one prompted me to write this.  Cedar writes:

Why are there no more small stories? I don’t mean short stories, although I have just finished reading an excellent collection of crime stories by Frederic Brown that were perfectly small, and wonderful to read. No, I mean stories that aren’t about saving the world (from the last humans, of course), or the universe (ditto those evul hoomans), or about the last two people on earth (who should totally not reproduce, because Malthus). I ran across an article that is geared more toward films and games, but it applies to writing, as well. Perfectly wonderful tales can be constructed over no more than “whodunnit” to hark back to my reading this week. Dave Freer’s Crawlspace, if you haven’t read it, is a lovely story of rats, aliens, and murder in the wake of war, set in the Rats, Bats, and Vats universe. Even had I not already been a fan of the setting, I would have enjoyed it, and wanted more (I do, I do!). So why are we obsessed with the epic, the grand scale, the supremely awesomely apocalyptic view of the world? Genevieve Valentine writes,  “The truth is that some stories are folk tales, not sagas; a tighter focus doesn’t make them inherently less worthy, and their stakes are no less crucial to the story for being closer to home.”

Cedar is young-in-writing (in person too :) Almost young enough to be my daughter, though not quite.)  So there are things that have escaped her notice.  I read that paragraph and I thought “Why, hon, there are no small books because writers were trained out of writing them.”

Look, don’t believe me?  Read any of the books on how to write a blockbuster or a breakout book or whatever you want to call them.  Every time (and twice on Sunday) the idea is “put the universe in peril and also involve the most important people alive then.”

This is called a “big book” and the big six decided, G-d alone knows why (though maybe their psychiatrists also know) that only big books were worthy of becoming bestsellers.  This meant that, in the circuitous self-fulfilling prophecy of late-stage-push book marketing, they only printed enough of/put enough books out there for purchase, if you wrote what they termed a “big book.”

I always had my doubts about this.  My tastes, I’ve long ago discovered, are not always (or most of the time) congruent with New York Publishing.  For instance, no matter how many times they insist on telling me that Agatha Christie is declasse and has nothing new to say, I like her mysteries.

In fact, I like her mysteries because they’re not about saving the world, but about the private fortunes and lives of people who matter only because they are human.  One of my favorites, which I was just reading, is The Hallow which is about very private people in private settings.  In fact, it is a one-off for me.  It’s a Poirot mystery, and I much prefer Miss Marple.

Or take Georgette Heyer’s romances where the most important thing at stake is who gets to marry whom.

Then there’s Brother Cadfael where, granted, the English Civil war is mentioned and is the background of much of what happens.  BUT it doesn’t bring Matilda on stage to contest the throne.

Science fiction and fantasy have some more justification for saving the world.  We do get into that sort of head space where the planet, the world, the biosphere is at stake — but even then take one of my very favorite stories The Werewolf Principle by Clifford Simak (the first person to tell me how and what I stole from that book for DST gets a prize!) is ultimately about family and two people’s happiness.

All of these books, though, are in various degrees derided by the powers that be.  All of them, too, except maybe Simak (but heck, The Door into Summer was a bestseller and it’s also about the pursuit of private happiness) and that has to do with his heirs and reprinting rights, are perennial best/good sellers.

Which means clearly it is possible for people to like a book that doesn’t involve great personalities and world-shaping fates.

So why is it that the houses became convinced otherwise?

Well, I don’t think they did.  Oh, maybe the young ones, because, you know, that’s what had sold in their lifetime (because it’s what got on shelves.)  BUT int he beginning, I think it was driven by the desire to “make a difference” that became a paramount measure of quality in the sixties.  (For reasons known only to my subconscious, I almost spelled that sissities.)

It’s a penumbra and emanation of Marxism.  Since all writing does is amuse, it falls into danger of being a corrupt capitalist “art.”  Unless, of course, it fights for justice and socialism and stuff, which then aligns the artist with “the workers” and makes him worthy.

This nutty idea then mutated into stuff like “you must include important people and social issues.”

My second agent was insistent that I should use Queen Elizabeth as a character in All Night Awake, which deformed the entire book.  He kept talking to me about one of his other clients who had written about racism and class-consciousness in Victorian England, and it kept making me think “Wut?” because surely we know this about Victorian England and frankly, pissing on the shoulders of the giants you’re standing on, does not in any way make you better than them.

This is when I started having doubts about this concept.  After all, most of the stories I enjoyed weren’t “big” by modern publishing standards.  So, should I even be writing, if I had to write things that weren’t me?

It was at this time that Kristine Kathryn Rusch told me to ignore that stuff, and write what I needed to write.  And I did.

Oh, some of my stories involve saving the world — or the multiverse.  I suspect the Magical Empires series will a lot of times (but not always.)  DST involves revolutions and such, but I’m not sure it’s saving the world.  It’s more like our struggles.  You know, you save/restore liberty for one generation…  And the stories are still about people and their private struggles/desires.

I suspect that the big indie hits will come from this sort of private story.  (In fact I have two cozy mystery scenes outlined and, hoping to Ghu I don’t get sick every other week in 14, once I finish books for Baen, I mean to do one of those, and the Tudor Queens, and…

But it’s going to take a while for things to reassert themselves.  You see, writers, misgivings or not, have been TRAINED to think in terms of big-book.  It will take time and the success of some “small books” for balance to reassert itself.

 

A) Now, some housekeeping — only two of you sent book publicity to Free Range Oyster who is compiling it for me to put up, so we’re not putting up a post on that today.  So, come one come all, send your self-publicity to the mollusc at his screen name at gmail.com

B) Witchfinder really is going to be taken down, today or tomorrow (hey, I got up late) and then those of you who pre-paid will get an email directing you where to go to download a copy in your favorite format.  (After I go over the copyedits — so sometime next week, since I have to do those three pages at a time, or I glaze.)  And then it goes to printing so I can send out review copies.

C) I will continue Rogue Magic and Elf Blood, but these holidays have been very unsettled and weird, and it might not be till the first weekend in January.

D) My friend Alan Lickiss is back in the hospital and struggling.  Prayers, good thoughts and general healing intentions much appreciated.

 

I’m just not up to doing Rogue Magic this morning.  No, I’m not exactly sick.  Okay, fine, I seem to have caught a very mild cold over Christmas.  Slightly stuffy and feel like sleeping rather a lot.

I’m not going to sleep a lot.  I’m going to work on Through Fire, and later today start going over Witchfinder’s edits.  (Word of warning, Witchfinder WILL be taken down tomorrow or Sunday, all but the first two or three chapters.)

The indie sales have picked up and stopped scaring me, though I’ll confess earlier this month they had a weird pattern in which ONLY No Will But His was selling, but it was selling a copy a day.  Still panicked me, because what if nothing else sold ever.  (Oh, shut up. Like I’m the only crazy one.) But by the 15th, the distribution was the normal 20 to 21 titles sold, some with one copy, some with multiples, and the novels outselling the short stories by a mile and a half.

I have mastered Create Space (preens) so there will be printed copies of all these soon.  So far only Death of A Musketeer has gone live, in tpb.  Btw I have the first defective copy I ordered (loooong story, but there are a few obvious mistakes I missed online, including random capitalization attack in the blurb.)  I meant to take it to the Huns-giving but forgot.  So, next time we all get together (When shall we all meet again) I’ll have it as a fun giveaway.

My Create Space books are being designed with JASC paintshop nine, (When Corel bought it it took it more scrapbooking and away from “poor man’s photoshop) and GIMP and Word.  It works.  Yes, I could get Photoshop and Indesign, but considering how INTIMATELY I know these other programs, the ramping up for the possibly better programs is SO much work as to be not worth it.  I’m following the rule of “Would you be better off writing?”  The answer is “yes.”

I will be talking to Toni, btw, about putting up webscriptions versions of the three musketeer mysteries now out and also Witchfinder when it’s ready.  I’d talked to her about it before, but I’m not sure exactly where it stands.  (My fault.  I got sick.)

This year has been largely a waste through getting sick, but the blog lightening up — even if I’m still blogging most of the time — SEEMS to be helping that.  The common cold isn’t very serious, and might just be tiredness, to be fair.  (I spent last week doing massive cleaning downstairs, and it does pull me down.)

Hopefully once I get things rolling properly health will recover and 2014 is “the year I finish things” and stop with the getting sick cycle.

I’ll try to do a chapter of Rogue Magic tomorrow, and then Sunday will be the roundup of news — possibly with an end of year thingy.  Monday is the introduction of the first member of my Raiding Party.  Tuesday is my New Year’s Resolutions.

I’ll find something for Wednesday.  And then we’ll figure it out.  Needless to say I’m still open to guest posts that aren’t from members of the Raiding Party, for when I find myself like today quite out of brain.  So, if you’ve sent me one and I’ve spaced it, ping me again, and if you haven’t, come up with something.

And now I’m going to go shower and dress and do the cat boxes which smell… like catboxes.