According To Hoyt

*Crossposted from Mad Genius Club.  [I actually want to make a post about Cassandras and how tired I am of them, but I woke up late and devoted time to cuddles and talk with husband, so… so… I’m not up to writing it now, and it would take the rest of the morning.  So I’m stealing Cedar’s post. And since she’s drawing a lot of idiots at MGC, ya’ll can go over there if you feel a need for troll chew toys – Sarah]

I said earlier this week I’m not naturally snarky. That doesn’t mean that things don’t rub me wrong and get me angry. And I am very angry right now. I have been watching a swelling tide of articles about people who are attempting to use language as a weapon. They have grasped the old saying “the pen is mightier than the sword” wrong way round and they don’t have a clue about what they are doing with it.

It starts with this. A professor is accused of racism for correcting student’s papers. The students, unhappy with this relatively mild critique of their work, staged a sit-in, even recruiting a nationally-known author to partake with them. One wonders if she read their papers and was tempted to whip out a red pen, or if she just saw the red flag of racism and charged. I have heard of students crying when confronted with a poor grade, but this is ridiculous. Suck it up, kids, we all make mistakes. You’re supposed to learn from them, though, not throw temper tantrums. Oh, and the papers? These are graduate students in an education program, writing proposals for dissertations. I would think spelling corrections on your life’s work would be a kindness.

Then this article hit me in the face like a cold, week-dead fish. I had kind of ignored the person who commented on an article I wrote a while back (The Genderless Mind) who told me he thought gender was a social construct. Sorry, no. You are born one thing, or another, and it’s not a choice. Biology is inescapable, my dear child. Stop trying to manipulate the language to fit what you want it to say. You can be a special snowflake in your own writing, while the rest of us try not to giggle out loud at your pretensions. Surely you don’t think you are the first rebel generation?

Another case of manipulation came to my attention gradually. I’ve known for most of my life that the uses of “man,” “mankind,” and “he” were falling out of favor for what they were intended, as general words for humanity. Unlike many other languages, English hasn’t got feminine and masculine endings to words, so we compromised on those, which now, it is said, means that we are promoting men over women. Oh, grow up. Anyone who isn’t looking for a reason to be offended knows what they mean, and it’s a fifty-fifty split between men and women on this planet. But now, there’s another word I keep seeing, and I finally had to look it up. “Cismale” is, evidently, a guy who was born that way, likes it, and stays that way. Often linked with gendernormative, another nonsense word, and fascist, when used by internet trolls.

This is where the double-edged sword comes in, and starts to cut those who are so enthusiastically grabbing onto these concepts. You see, normal people think of themselves as male, or female. People who opt to change their bodies to match how they see themselves in their own head don’t want to be called abnormal, they too are working for “male or female” and by creating all the odd terms, the perpetually peeved are othering them, as well. Division only creates barriers, fear, and suspicion. There’s enough of that already.

All this is confusing to everyday people, who all shake their heads and back away slowly when you come near them, and now you know why. You’re making those who want to live normal lives suffer, so you can throw your temper-tantrums. I really liked this from a recent discussion of cismale, “we offered a class called digital photography. What do they call it today? Photography. When something becomes normative, the adjectives, modifiers and prefixes disappear. At least they should. Its a matter of clarity. It is obvious that heterosexual behavior is normative. When you add a modifier to a normative word, you are not adding clarity, you are destroying it, intentionally.” So if you are confused what to call someone, try male, or female. Anything else is a cultural construct, and useless for any intelligent discussion.

Coming back around to the first article, the little boy who cried wolf is obviously no longer read aloud to children. Perhaps it has been replaced with a little girl who embraces her hairy moon-howling brother (and does he sparkle in the sun? Oh, mixing my metaphors). Those who decry racism with such vigor are not only diluting any real issues, they are often committing the very act they accuse. Whenever I see the term “person of color” I cringe. When I look at a person, I see a person, not a color. This, I believe, is the idea. If we are all equal, then why do people like this persist in twisting language to suit what they want to say, which is that the poor people of color can’t fend for themselves, they must have assistance to get that equality? That blog post is so wrong on so many levels it isn’t even funny. It’s like one of those comedy movies that is so stupid I have to hide my face and plug my ears if I’m not allowed to leave the room.

Writing needs to be about understanding language at a level that enables our readers to understand it as well. I enjoy learning new words as much as the next person. I don’t enjoy watching language become a vehicle for the agenda du jour, driven by ignorant people who are doing more harm to their own causes than they can possibly comprehend. It’s obvious to the rest of us that they are, like Winnie the Pooh, “of very little brain,” and it is time to put our foot down and say no. The tantrums need to stop, and until you have learned what that word really means, please don’t use it.

*Sorry to be so ridiculously late.  I still haven’t had time to go back and “reconcile” what I’ve written so I couldn’t go where I wanted and had to go where I wouldn’t increase the damage.

The ear infection is gone and I hope the late sleep today cleared the rest of the tiredness from it.  So hopefully I can devote the rest of the weekend to working on Through Fire, and then when that is done I can go over the edited Witchfinder, and fix it and send out the early copies to the subscribers (who will get the fully revised ones later, too.)  And I can send copies out for review also.  It’s very cold in Colorado but younger son’s college didn’t close, so if you can spare a prayer that he doesn’t come to grief driving in this, it’s much appreciated.  We’re supposed to remain freezer-locked till Sunday, but after his classes and a quick run to the store, we’re going to stay locked in and warm, and hopefully safe.*

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

For previous chapters, read here

Gods, Kings and Tricksters

Wolfe Merritt, Manufactories and Properties Manager for the Right Honorable Earl of Savage.

The Lady Helen gathered her borrowed clothes about her and looked sullen.  She spoke in a much younger voice, “But I don’t want to be in the myth world.”

I took a step towards her, wishing to help, somehow.  Something in her face was unguarded and lost.  The fierce daring girl was gone, and even the girl I’d sensed in her room, the confined and well behaved girl who longed for escape and adventure.  All that was left was this young girl, seemingly stripped of all defense and pretense, protesting in a disconsolate voice, like a child facing something she can’t quite face.

“You must see it’s better than the interior of that horrible beast,” I said.

“I see no such thing,” she said.  “At least there you knew what we faced.”

Hannuman gave her a curious look.  He seemed to be considering something, as though internally making imaginary moves on a chess board the rest of us could see.  I didn’t like the look in his eyes, the laughing devil aspect of him.  I tried to imagine the game he was playing, but how is a mere human to follow the mind of a creature that had lived… perhaps forever.

I’d never really understood what the pagan gods were, but Mr. Mayhew, the pastor in the church near my mother’s house, used to say that they were forces or impulses, of both nature and the human heart.  As such they couldn’t be said to have been born or ever to die.  They were just things, impossible to understand, and powerful, though not like the only god was powerful.

But that talk was so similar to the talk that Mr. Mayhew had had with Wolfe when he brought his wife home, that there was no guessing if the pastor himself understood the difference between elves and gods, and all the other supernatural forces.

He didn’t know what to tell the Lady Helen because to be quite blunt he also didn’t want to be in the myth world.  But if she were going to go to pieces now, it would make it more difficult to escape.  And if she did not go to pieces, yet she wrung her heart when she looked at him in a piteous way that demanded he take her out of here.

Meanwhile, Hanuman, ancient and unknowable was making his own rules and playing his own game, and there was nothing that Wolfe could do to anticipate.  He guessed that they’d been brought here on purpose, and while there might be a certain relief in knowing he hadn’t unleashed the trickster’s monkeys on the world, yet there was also fear, because what would happen to them in this world.  And why had he brought them here?

“Why did you bring us here?” Helen said, looking at Hannuman, and now a peevish note added to her voice.

In that snap he seemed to make his decision.  He bowed low to her, and said, in a voice that was oil and honey, “Why, milady,” he said.  “to give you the place you should have.  To make you my wife.”
Helen jumped back as though burned and made a sound that was wordless refusal.  But Hannuman grinned and bowed lower.  “You must admit, milady, that in this place and at this time it is highly unlikely that a better offer will be made to you, and highly unlikely that anyone else will want to marry you. And here, I am a king, god of all of monkey, prince of tricksters.  If you marry me you’ll belong here, and all your needs will be attended to.”

“Beware, lady,” Wolfe said, and stepped in front of her; in between her and the monkey god.  The words had been wrenched for him before he could think, and now he thought that she might think he was intruding, and given her temperament, might run the other way.  He said, his voice strangling in his throat, “Marriage with them who are not quite human is always a mistake.”

But the lady had recovered her footing.  She stomped on the grass and said, in a tone of great disdain.  “I have not the slightest interest in marrying him.  Why,” Her hands went to her waist, “Does every supernatural creature wish to marry me?  He’s better than the fish-man but not by much.”

Merrit could see the monkeys gather around, though, some in human form and some as monkeys.  They’d looked amusing before, but now they looked somewhat scary and… odd.  Like they had a light turned on inside them that lent them an eery glow.

“You’ll marry me, my dear,” Hanuman said, sounding amused.  “And you’ll like it.  Or at least be grateful of it.”

The monkeys were gathering.

Wolfe Merrit hadn’t dared pray, not since that day long ago when his wife had left.  He’d never thought of it, again.  He’d set himself outside human laws.  He’d violated the separation between man and magic.  And he’d brought a poor innocent into the world.  The homely comfort of the village church had become as alien to him as the face of the moon.  But now he closed his eyes, and he thought, intently, in the direction of that God he hadn’t approached in far too long, “If I’ve ever done anything right, Lord.  Just once.”

And then, knowing it probably would come to nothing, he prepared to die defending Lady Helen.  He knew what the Monkey had meant, and what could be done to make a woman happy of an unwanted marriage.  He might not be able to prevent it but he would ensure he wasn’t alive to see it.  There were things the eye could not endure, nor the heart – not without breaking.

“Deluded mortal,” the Monkey king said, in a tone of amused derision.  “Get him, my monkeys.”

There was movement and Wolfe, wishing he had a weapon to hand, found himself taking a fighting pose.  He felt a hand – paw? – touch his arm.  He gritted his teeth.

“That will be enough of that,” a female voice said, vibrant and clear like a clarion call.  “Enough of that and a bit more besides.  You have overstepped your power, Hanuman.”

Shocked, Wolfe turned in the direction of the voice and blinked.  It was Betsy.  Or at least, there was in the face the remnant features of what had been Lady Helen’s maid. But they had… grown up?  Become glorified?  The clothes had altered too.  Where there had been the fantastical clothes that the monkey had lent them, there was now a gown to the ankle, flowing in a way no normal fabric ever flowed.  The feet were in sandals.  And across the woman’s shoulder was slung a bow and a quiver of arrows.

She glowed.

Wolfe felt like he was dreaming, but knew it was all as real as anything here.

This is not a post about SFWA.  It mostly isn’t a post about SFWA because I haven’t belonged for (I think) two and a half years, and had shrugged off in despair long before that.

It’s not that I don’t get the rumblings of exactly what is going on there.  I do.  Tons of my friends are still members, and honestly, I’d laugh over the whole “is raising the rate targeting minority writers.”  I’d laugh, but it’s too sad to.  It’s also inevitable.

I’m not a labor historian.  I don’t have time to research this topic in depth, because as you all know, I make very little money from this blog (and honestly, to my subscribers, I will do my best to provide more goodies, particularly reading stuff in the subscriber page.  I’ve been terrible at it, because the idea was to put up what I was prepping for indie publishing, and, other than novels [and I’ll send final eversions of those out soon to those subscribing above the $100 level] I haven’t put anything up in a while, between getting sick and trying to finish in contract work.)

I’m sure I have labor historians among my readers and if they want to point out inaccuracies, that’s fine, though at the level I’m going to be generalizing there are always inaccuracies, but those aren’t usually relevant.

I’m going with both my 30 year old knowledge of labor history from school, and my knowledge of general history and conditions.

If what I understand is true, organized labor flourished when unskilled and semi-skilled laborers, available in great numbers, joined together to demand living wages which would not otherwise be paid.

There are certain holes in the logic and reasoning there, because this is presented in schools as a “shoulder to shoulder” and “everyone together” thing, but it couldn’t have been.  Take for instance high-immigration, early 20^th century NYC.  If the union guys were striking there would always be fresh replacements off the boat, and why didn’t the bosses hire those?

As anyone who has tried to run the tea stand at a book sale knows, getting everyone to “stand together” against their self interest has all the functional practicality of a hard candy computer.

Of course, I know more that I wasn’t taught in school.  I’ve heard from friends whose parents were in, or refused to join unions, about threats and even violence against those who wouldn’t stand shoulder to shoulder.

More, from sometime in the thirties the unions were infiltrated by communist front groups.  This meant they had ready muscle when needed.

But even before communists were around, unions, leagues, trade-associations, were always a thing of force and forced conformity.  They were in fact not so much an association of happy-go-lucky fellows who all happened to wish to better their condition, shoulder to shoulder, at the same time, while singing beautiful songs, but sort of a micro government within a trade – capable of making things happen because they could bring on the force not only against the people who might be exploiting the work, but against their fellow workers, too.

The apprentices in Elizabethan England were feared because they were quite likely to riot and break their masters’ equipment.  Not to say that they didn’t have reason to.  If you worked in the conditions they did, you’d riot too (though consider that it’s not that strange in early emerging industrial economies, and that young men flocked to the cities to apprentice, because it was better than living in the country.) They rioted in groups, despite the fact that a lot of them were hanged.  And it might have helped their living and work conditions, who knows.  I mean, those who survived.  The ones who were hanged were definitely out of trouble.

Of course, apprentice leagues and labor leagues also offered security to their members by coming down hard on anyone who tried to practice the trade without being a member.

Pratchett captures this beautifully with the thieves league, who are the best police the city could want, since they will kill any unlicensed thief.

At the same time the smart labor organizations certified their members, and had levels you went through to be considered for certain jobs, which, if kept true (and for a long time they were, though with service workers now… never mind) provided the employer with a guarantee of quality.  If you were hiring a level three whatever, certified as such by the union, you knew he would be able to spaz the whatzits at a very minimum.

At any rate, in the States the heyday of labor movements seems to have been in those times and places where the abuses were great and the labor force otherwise powerless, so that they had to stick to the union as their only hope of survival. The union provided a bolster against competition, certification levels, and often loans or help when you were unemployed, in a time when social services were otherwise lacking.

Well and good.  Against that framework, one endured the threats if one went against the union and also vague rumors of stuff happening to scabs and line breakers.

I’m not going to argue on whether unions were needed, or whether those things they secured, like the 40 hour work week would have come about anyway through competition and the free market.  Maybe they would have.  Or maybe not.  If one starts arguing what might have happened if one hadn’t done x or y, one can convince oneself that if the US had sat on its hands during WWI and let Europe become the Kaiser’s problem forever, we could have avoided a great deal of trouble in the twentieth century and not have ended up with a world much different than it is today.  On the other hand that type of backwards projection never accounts for you know, the German going ahead with eugenics programs in Europe (which could very well have happened, given the ideas at the time.)

And though normally things move towards greater power/well being for workers, I do know – I have reason to know – that employers will exploit employees (and contractors) when they can. And that abuses will go unpunished and will spread, if there is no effective workers’ organization.

The problem we have is that the labor organizations as constituted are actually counterproductive or totally ineffective.  Take, for instance the Teachers Union, which seems to mostly forbid the firing of ineffective teachers and mandate the jumping through hoops to even take the certification exam.  It is counterproductive both in results, and by lowering confidence in its certifications and levels.  It might succeed in raising the salary of individual teachers and in keeping them in jobs, but it is ultimately killing the golden goose, by forcing people to find alternative methods of schooling their kids.

Then there are organizations like SFWA which are about as effective as wet tissue paper.  The reason for this is that they are in the exact opposite situation of that in which labor organizations are effective.  Or not quite, but close enough.

Let’s take the situation as it was before indie opened up the market.  You had six big publishers and a WIDELY distributed labor force, with not only varying but unclassifiable levels of attainment and ability, not to mention areas of focus, connections, etc.

What this meant is that the things SFWA SHOULD have been doing, it couldn’t do.  Because most of the leaders – if not all – were working writers, it couldn’t do things like class action suits and demanding to see the accounting of the big houses, because the leaders would be out of a job forever. There were very few employers and they all talked to each other.

Ask any working writer about his statements, and they’ll roll their eyes.  I have a house, for instance, which still hasn’t reverted two of my books with them, which has quantum print runs.  No, seriously.  The initial number of books printed changes according to what they want to claim in the statement.  (Yes, as soon as Dan has a week he’ll do an analysis of the incongruousness in those statements and I’ll publish it here.)  When I mention that house to other writers, they say “Oh, yes, they’re famed for this.”

But has SFWA ever taken a stand and questioned their statements?  Heaven forfend.  For one, the publisher is a member.  For another, well… none of the leaders or the members want to be sidelined forever.  And the way books are bought, writers never have job security.

Then there are the schreklish clauses that have crept into contracts, including the funny, funny ones that give the publisher the right to anything you ever wrote under any name, including your own blog.  What you hear is that they are “standard practice” and you have to sign or walk.  Where is SFWA in that?

Well, again, there are only six (now five) houses and the leaders and membership work for them.  And keep in mind that a writer can be fired for any reason or none, under the excuse the book did not sell (without taking in account cover, distribution or anything.)

Would you, if you were SFWA, stick your neck out?  I wouldn’t.  I didn’t, when I had to work for publishers-other-than-Baen.

Then there is what happened to the pay rates over the last fifty years, but like Mark Twain in Connecticut Yankee, when he starts with “And if the peasant had a daughter” I weary of telling this stuff, because, really, what could we do about it? Also, some things are too dreary to even tell.

The only stick SFWA ever wielded was to consider publications either pro or not, based on what they paid.  It was a weak and ineffective stick by the time I came on the scene, since there were so few and so short lived magazines that beginning writers worked for what they had to.  (Yours truly made ¼ of a cent a word for more than a year.)

And then we got indie.  And the shell cracked loose.

What we have now is almost exactly the opposite of a situation in which unions help.  Instead of having a few concentrated employers, a large and uneducated workforce, a geographically concentrated area in which strong arm tactics and strikes work… you have a largely educated work force, which can choose to work for itself and is spread all over the entire world.

How can a professional organization demand higher pay – from whom? – help with job security, or otherwise secure better conditions for its members?

It can’t.  It was never particularly effective at it, because the conditions weren’t right for its model.  And now it can’t at all because the conditions are the opposite of the ones in which they could be effective.

So they really can’t do anything but ONE thing – the one arm of force left to them is force over their own members – hence the continuing purges and fights over discrimination which become more fantastical and strange as the saner membership flees (and yes, scary as it may seem for a writer I come close to being sane as a brick.)

But, since, due to spread out work force they can’t use physical force, the only thing they can use is shaming, mau-mauing and verbal bullying.  Which by definition favors the insaner members.

All of which brings us to the sad state of labor.  Because where SFWA has gone now, everyone in any profession that doesn’t manipulate heavy materials or require physical presence is going.  That is, everyone in the white collar professions (and a few of the blue collar, as automation progresses and can be remote-controlled.)

Have we gone to a post-labor world? Are organizations of people in the same profession outdated?

I don’t think so.  First of all, abuses will happen and a lot of them will be in legislation. The doctrine of first sale being changed by law will destroy the ability of any writer to make a living in electronic media.  We need to know what’s happening.  We need to make sure lawmakers know what they’re doing and how many people they’re pissing off. We need organization and numbers to carry this off.

Second because even the most haphazard and distributed profession (I won’t claim mine is, but surely we come close) needs a way for members to contact other members and learn of new opportunities, fast in a new world in which distributed information, personal networking and staying abreast of fast-changing technology.

Also, in a profession, like ours, in which I THINK at this point a majority of practitioners are childless and aging, and in which, due to the nature of the beast, many of us go through periods of unemployment that doesn’t count as such legally, a mutual beneficial support organization is not without merit.

And that too might not be a bad model for other unions, or whatever you want to call them in the future – an organization that helps people find job opportunities (I always knew that in writing, but apparently studies have shown the biggest difference in any profession – bigger than your competence – in how well you do is your social network.  Who you know), that points them at ways to acquire new skills, that arranges for help in dire times, that allows you to communicate with other people who might have your problems very quickly and to form the equivalent of a flash mob when your interests are threatened.  That might work.

As would warnings about organizations that have shady practices and doubtful contracts (though frankly that never worked very well with SFWA.  Oh, sure, they went after egregious places like Publish America, but the shady practices of the mainstream went untouched, because, of course, members had to work for them.)

If this glimmer of an idea of what the future might bring I have is true, where even present-in-person jobs go to contractor models which means that people relocate in wildly fast rotations all over the country, having the local equivalent of a professional welcome-wagon might not hurt either.

It’s just an idea.  And it might never work for SFWA.  G-d knows, I don’t have time to do anything, not even help the people who are trying to do it, and also, frankly, the individualists are failing to organize, while the crazies are just interested in insane stuff.

But it might work for other professions.

Because the era of shoulder to shoulder, to the extent it ever worked is gone.

Outside of the most basic service professions, you can’t strike and force the hand of the employers (and at that level, like fast food I’d question striking in this particular economic climate and with automation JUST at hand.)  And in any white collar profession, you’re not going to manage to exert physical force on your members (and if you did, it would be terrible public relations.  People believe the shoulder to shoulder about unions, see.  You practice violence and you won’t be a labor hero but a villain.)  All you’re going to manage is finger pointing, shaming and mau-mauing, which in turn will encourage the worst crazies in your group and drive everyone else away.

If you cling to the old model, you will in fact eat yourself.

My guess is that trade associations will emerge in a more functional form more or less spontaneously, but that is probably because I don’t want to get roped into designing one, and besides even with design, this is not likely to happen in the next 30 years – that is the extent of my working life, more or less.

And yet, as sure as the fire will burn, there will be abuses and those least powerful will need protecting.

I can’t do anything – or much – other than push towards what the needs are and what we need, and hope that a hundred unorganized, voluntary organizations pick it up.

And ignore the old model.  It might not know it, but it’s a dead model walking, and the unpleasant eructations emerging from it are just what you expect from a corpse.

UPDATE: For Something Old Something New Post on writing, please go here.  I posted here by accident.

There is a lot of talk about role models, and in fact, it is the justification for a lot of otherwise unjustifiable preference given in hiring or in book buying or whatever.  “Women must have executive role models”  “Women must know they can—”.

I was never absolutely sure what difference “role models” made particularly in books.  I understand we need more females in (physically) heroic roles, so that women know they can slay the dragon and rescue the prince (and what kind of a ninny is waiting for you to rescue him, I ask you, and what use would you have for the poor sap?)  Is that true?

I don’t know.  In these things I can only judge by me and mine – I am one of those odd (and fairly strong) women who never really thought it was much fun to sit around in the pretty dresses and wait for the prince in shiny armor to come and rescue me. Of course, I also didn’t want to rescue him, unless you know, he was injured or disabled.  I wanted… I wanted to saddle up and have grand adventures, and when the notion of romance came into it I wanted a man who would be right there next to me, every inch of the way.

Now when and where I was growing up, there wasn’t much of that for girls in books.  Some.  Enid Blyton girls weren’t sissies.  (But were still girls, even the tomboys.) And there was this book now and then that had a lead female I liked (most of them Heinlein women.)  But most of the books were written for, by and about men.

Did I feel inferior and neglected?

To be honest, I never gave it a thought.  The characters I liked were the characters I liked.  The difference of a quarter pound between their legs didn’t seem to matter much to me.  I might not have wanted to be Captain Morgan, but I wanted to serve in his crew. (I figured there were already some undercover girls there.  Well, it was good enough to dream upon.)

And at any rate, what kind of person can only read about people they can “identify” with?  I wanted to read about people more exciting and accomplished than my geekish, fumbling self.

Did I ever feel offended there weren’t more “inclusive” parts for girls?  Oh, please.  I think women feel offended (even now when there are tons more) because they’ve been taught offense is empowering.

No?

Then why aren’t my sons traumatized?  Oh, sure, when Marsh was three he told me he wanted to be a girl, because girls had all the adventures.  But then he observed the world, saw it wasn’t true and that passed.

And heck, both of them loved Buffy even though there wasn’t a role model for them.  And I’m fairly sure one of them is an Honor Harrington fanatic (that one doesn’t share his reading habits with me so I could be wrong, but I see the books that move.)

Clearly they can move past the fact that a character or two doesn’t have the same anatomical configuration or inherent inclinations they have.

So why shouldn’t girls be able to?  Why should girls need PARTICULAR role models.  If you tell me it’s to overcome centuries of historical oppression, we can’t be friends anymore.  The girls alive today weren’t alive then.  Heck, their grandmothers weren’t alive then.  They’ve never been oppressed a day in their lives.  They’ve been pushed, cajoled and mollycoddled into exceeding in non-tradtional fields.

“But” you say “Women will still prefer to marry and have children.” Or “Women will still underperform in STEM” or…

Ah, but see, then what you are at war with isn’t oppression.  It’s biology.  Statistically speaking, more women will want to stay home with babies than guys.  Statistically, more men will want to do math and play with big, dirty machines.  This is the result of millennia of evolution and it’s called optimization.

Now, statistics don’t tell you that any particular girl can’t exceed at STEM or that a girl can’t be a hellion (guilty) ready to take to the field in defense of the weaker ones, and in search of adventure.  No, what they tell you is that there will always be a statistical bias pro one of the other of the genders.

You can’t stop it no matter how much modeling and indoctrinating you do.

It’s not the way humans work.  You can break humanity, but not bend it that far.

And as for characters who model this or that to change society (eleventy!) that is the silliest pipe dream of all.

In the last several decades we’ve been assailed by a Monstrous Regiment that exists only in books: foul mouthed young women, who sleep around, cuss like sailors, can out-fight any man and are, generally speaking… uninteresting.  The best of them are interesting, but we know they’re not real.

Has this changed society?  Well, I imagine some young women feel guilty they can’t beat the living daycrud out of guys with their bare knuckles and that at the end of the day they rather LIKE guys.

I sympathize with them.  I always felt vaguely guilty I wasn’t like the pious little girls of the Countess of Segur’s Victorian tales.  Didn’t make me more like them, it just made me feel I’d somehow failed them.

In the end kids will find their models where they find them.  Your little girl might very well identify with the big burly starship captain, and this is not a bad thing, since even women can use the masculine virtues of honor and duty and care for those dependent on them.  And your little boy – who probably will never confess it – might see his model in a devoted nurse looking after people through a plague at the risk of her life.  That’s all right.  He’ll grow up to be a compassionate man, who understands there are many sorts of valor and some involve silent sacrifice.

Role models? Pah.

What I got out of reading was something more than role models.  I didn’t need a character to be a female to identify with it.  I got the sense of all that could be said and done, and dreamed.

And even though the character of this book was not female, I identified fully with him.

I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword,. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get u feeling brisk and go out and break some lances, then pick a like wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilting of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.

I wanted Prestor John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. – Robert A. Heinlein

I still do.  And I don’t need to know other women have dreamed these dreams to make them valid for me.

Any young woman — or young man, for that matter — who needs to know someone of the same anatomical configuration has done this, so she/he can dream of it, is a poor creature, longing only for second hand dreams and the crumbs that fall from others’ imaginations.

Fortunately I think they’re as mythical as the Roc’s egg.  I think they’re the imaginary creation of bean counters who either never dreamed or have forgotten how to.

I think real young human beings of either gender are limitless in their dreams.  And will continue to be.  They can pretend to appease their elders, but their true nature is not so easily changed.  And that’s a good thing.

We had house guests and it threw the morning schedule off.

Give me two hours to catch up with normal routine and there will be posts here and at MGC.

Sometime ago one of my facebook friends posted pictures of classical art that had been altered so that the women in them – mostly figures of Venus – conformed to the new “preferred body type.”

At least two of the figures looked disgusting – as in, so thin that they bordered on sickly.  Twiggy arms and legs.  I mentioned this.

Someone immediately chimed in to the intent that there was no shame in our culture preferring athletic bodies to sedentary ones.

Where to begin?

First of all most of the Venuses (though not all) in the classical paintings don’t have sedentary bodies.  Yes, they have curves, but they look perfectly toned.  Look up Boticelli’s Venus if you don’t believe me.

Second, this person insisted that he’d seen many women like this in his own gym, that well-conditioned healthy bodies looked like this, and of course, we were just making arguments that it wasn’t fair, but beauty was never fair and blah, blah, blah.

Beauty isn’t fair. And I’m not making claims that my current body should be considered wonderful – it’s been out of kilter since I spent six months in bed, during my pregnancy with Robert.  Between that and one of the more severe cases of pre-eclampsia the doctor told me she’d seen (I was retaining more than 50 lbs of water.  I lost forty pounds via catheter the first two days. My joints were permanently changed.) and the post partum depression that ate the following year and that (while I was still active, we moved twice and prepared a house for sale in that year) made my eating and exercise very odd (there was the day of the twelve meringues.  No, I’m not going to discuss it) and a complete break with my habits before, I’ve never quite found my balance.

Which doesn’t mean that I come by my weight honestly, or that it is a sign of present (or more than a month or two, while the balance of my mind was disturbed) gluttony or sedentary living.  This year has been terrible for my walking, but normally I walk at least three miles a day, and I do a lot of physical work around the house.  Also, although this might strike people as odd, I don’t eat the world.  In fact, the worst that can be said for my eating habits is that they’re very weird.  I prefer to grab small snacks on the run, and hate having to sit down for at least a meal a day, though I do it because I think it encourages family cohesion.

Could I be thin again? Sure.  At various times in my life I’ve lost weight though never to close to the weight I was when I had Robert.  During one of those periods, my doctor tried to advise me on weight.  He said, if I just ate 1200 calories and exercised half an hour a day, I’d be back to a size seven.  No, I didn’t listen to him.  I didn’t listen to him because at the time I was eating 800 calories and exercising two hours every morning.  That’s what it takes to lose weight – very slowly, but never below about a size 14.  How is this even possible?  I don’t know.  I know that we’ve come to the conclusion that there is a lot more to weight than calories, and also that about three years ago I found out the caesarian was botched in a particular way that not only makes my hormones a mess (and caused people to diagnose me as menopausal starting in my mid thirties.  And no, I still am not, fully.) but also, likely, makes my body convinced it’s in some state of pregnancy, though not exactly.  I don’t know what that does to my body.  Neither does anyone else.

However, every time I see a new doctor I get told the same thing.  Not “dear lady, let’s work together to find out why your weight is insane.  Let’s try this, this and this. If that doesn’t work, then let’s figure out this and that.  Oh, and let’s run blood panels and figure it out.”  No, it’s always “if you just ate less than 2000 calories and exercised a bare minimum, the weight would drop like a dream.”

This gets old, not because they want me to lose weight.  I want to lose weight. It gets old because they treat it like I’m sinning and if I’ll just follow the moral and decent rules, my sin will shed from me.

Okay – I want to lose weight partly because it will make clothes fit better and easier to wear and because, well, d*mn, I used to be gorgeous (and didn’t know it) and though I realize I’m much older, but I’d like to be passable again. I’d like to lose weight before I’m 80.

However, two points: first, women in my family, on my dad’s side, looked much as I do now at my age.  We have family pictures.  Consider they lived in a society with no convenience foods (not that I use those) and mostly off fish and veggies with some rice and that mostly they worked on their feet, tending subsistence farms and cooking and washing by primitive methods. But their body types – accounting for the fact most were shorter than I – are indistinguishable from mine.

The other point is that I’m not out of shape.  Okay, okay, this year I am.  When I have respiratory stuff and go out of breath and cough at any exertion, I cut back on my exercise. And yeah, I feel icky about it, not least because when I’m not exercising I don’t sleep well and that has other effects.  So, part of my plan as soon as I feel better is to get back in shape, and I hope to start that over the holidays. However, out of shape for me means I feel somewhat tired after walking three miles at a fast pace, not that I can’t walk around the block without getting winded, nor that I can’t carry clothes from the basement two flights up without gulping for air.  (Unless I carry three baskets at once and run.  Which I do sometimes.  Sigh. You see, I have this inner teen boy.  He does crazy stuff.  That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.  Yes, it scares the cats.)

Again though – this is not a defense of my body.  My friend Kate says we Odds are as strange in body as in mind, meaning that we have shapes rarely seen in nature.

I could stand to lose fifty or eighty pounds. And when the kids are out of the house and we don’t have to sit down for a meal, I might manage it.  Also, cutting carbs keeps me from gaining massively, (I’ve been low carb for four years, and I don’t gain as fast, though I still gain, mostly seeming to be related to hormones) and maybe cutting dairy (which I haven’t managed because I eat on the run and like cheese sticks) might — who knows? — do it. I’ve heard stories.

But that is not the point.  I just laid it out so you understand that I don’t expect anyone to consider my body a model of attractiveness, because frankly I don’t.  I don’t look like Boticelli’s Venus, and heck, Rubens might balk.  As far as I remember my female ancestresses were little and round and I’m working on that as I get older, too.

This is not about the unfairness of beauty or of our standards of beauty.  All standards of beauty are unfair and they always were. Women in the renaissance couldn’t have clear skin that easily.

What I’m talking about is the person who came back with the whole notion that these were “athletic” bodies and that you know, anyone who took the trouble to exercise would look like this, so implying that anyone who didn’t was in fact neglecting her appearance AND her health.

At some point, and I can’t find it with a quick search, Instapundit or maybe Ace of Spades linked a photo essay of gold medalist winners (in the Olympics.)  These people were by definition in peak condition.  About 10% of the women conformed to the body type that’s considered “beautiful” – and I’d have thought they were unhealthily thin, but I clearly was wrong.  Some of them – and not the weight lifters, either – looked almost as I do.  All were in peak condition.

(Part of my issue with any weight measures is that I put on muscle at a distressing rate for a woman who doesn’t want to look like Attila the Hun.  I laughed at the description in Monstrous Regiment about the woman who could carry a pig under each arm, because that would be me with very little effort.  Even when I was a size seven, I weighed about 30 lbs more than people expected, and doctors kept telling me I should be thirty pounds lighter, even though stripped you could see all my bones without an x-ray and I hadn’t been that weight since I’d grown to my adult height. OTOH I could always beat the “guess your weight” games in carnivals!)

I don’t have any problems with the current standards of beauty as standards of beauty. The only person I want to please would like me to lose a few pounds, but loves me anyway.

As some of you know I draw and since I can’t convince anyone to pose for me, and if I brought in young women to pose it would annoy the neighbors and corrupt the boys (er… or amuse them) I use model cds.  This one is my favorite.  Healthy, pleasant looking young women, right?  No problems with it.  There is one book, which I can’t find now, where the models look anorexic.  I can’t find it because I don’t use it.  But that one is okay. In fact I find the live models series, which has more realistic body types a little embarrassing.  I really don’t need to see 60 year olds nude.  Yes, there’s beauty in the human form of all types, but I’m enough of a prude to feel embarrassed.

What I object to is the assumption that if you don’t fit the very skinny (more than the virtual pose 3 models) standard of beauty, you’re somehow flabby, out of shape, and well… a sinner.  “You should be taking better care of yourself.”  “You shouldn’t eat so much junk food.”  (Unless you count the occasional string cheese stick, I eat none.) “You should stay off fast food” (what all two times a year?) and “You should exercise at least half an hour.”

I believe the current preference for smaller bodies IS part of the exteriorization of the thought that we should not be better off than others.  It’s the same as the preference for spare interiors, something that started in the early twentieth century with guilt over WWI and a turn to egalitarian ideas.  Each age has the aesthetics it deserves, and no sane woman tries to fit those (I’m not for natural Barbie, either.)

To me it’s all pretty much academic, since I took myself out of that race decades ago.

BUT the whole conflation of beauty with health (and heck, we know that’s not true) and of failing to conform with sin bothers me, at a level I can’t begin to describe.

It’s entirely possible that I’m desperately unhealthy.  I do keep getting sick.  I think that’s mostly because I lived under great stress for a dozen years.  I mean, what will shock you is how often Dave Freer and I are sick with the same stuff at the same time.  What we have in common is stress, nothing else.

However, the fat or lack thereof is not a good indication of this.  My ancestresses all lived to their late eighties or more.  And they were, by our standards, rotund.  (It’s unlikely I’ll live as long because of that truly awful pregnancy and also because of a certain respiratory fragility.  OTOH who knows?  If we don’t destroy our medicine, there is hope.)

And yes, I do realize that “you don’t fit in” has ALWAYS been a sin. Might be the only “sin” society recognizes.  Much of what was wrong with the virtual theocracy of the middle ages is that no matter how good or just a religion might be, when it becomes an instrument of social cohesion, it’s going to view external things as marks of sin.

But part of the problem we have right now is confusing moral feelings and feelings of social cohesion with science.  We feel uncomfortable when people don’t fit, and we try to show they’re wrong “because science.”

So, the fact that I consider some of the twiggy bodies in the pictures as icky bothered someone who had to defend them as “athletic” (bah.  I could carry one of them under each arm and run one mile.  I don’t think anyone with those arms and legs COULD run one mile.) and healthy.  Because, social cohesion.

And the fact that most doctors have bought this one size fits all thing too kept me from seeing new doctors for over ten years.  Because I didn’t want the lecture.  Telling me “you’re aware you’re overweight” is stupid, unless you think I’m mentally retarded.  And telling me to eat under 1200 calories and exercise half an hour a day is fine, but if I tell you what I’m actually doing , don’t say “impossible.”

Dave Freer once told me that every zoo keeper knows that animals – sometimes animals of the same litter – have widely different dietary and exercise requirements.  The only place this isn’t recognized is human biology, where if you aren’t getting the same results as anyone else, you must be a sinner and evil and a glutton.

You figure it out.

I have grown resigned to the fact I have the type of body that makes me “woman, strong like bull, pulls plow in field.”  In my mind, I wanted to be the long slim English beauty type.  But in my mind, I’d also like to have a talent for music and not transpose digits when doing calculations.  I can do a little towards it, but not that much.  And btw, I’d be more likely to manage those last two, given my heredity, than the first.

So, why is this whole thing bothering me so much?

Because our medical establishment has bought into “one set of guidelines” and “one healthy body type” and “one way to obtain it.”  … and if the government enforces their control over our health, a body type that’s not “Athletic” might consign us to inferior or even no treatment.

After all, if we don’t take the trouble to keep ourselves in shape, why bother to heal us?

That is what is wrong with central control of medicine.  But it’s also wrong with viewing deviating from social “ideal” as a sin.  And believing in one size fits all.  And again, this is what is wrong with medicine that aims to ideals not individuals.

How to fix it?  I don’t know. To begin with, let’s not handle our health care to bureaucrats.  And then we can work on convincing practitioners of medicine that one size does NOT fit all.

* No, I haven’t read the book yet, but I’ve bought it, thanks to Kim Du Toit who has infected me with Evelyn Waugh who — for whatever reason — had escaped my reading before.  ATH is CULTURE.

Sometimes I think the person any of us knows least is the one that looks at us from the mirror every morning.

One thing I’m coming to realize – having been felled by another ear infection – is that it’s quite possible this cycle of sickness and getting slightly better then getting slammed again, before I can even meet deadlines, is caused by my short attention span.

Short attention span? You say.

Well, I didn’t realize that was my issue, until I’d been married about five years and Dan, during an argument, told me he hated my habit of wandering away from conversations at parties without even an excuse.

I’d never realized I did that, but then I started noticing.  Yep.  Things get “boring” and I wander off.  In fact, I have the same issue with staying in line.  If I’m not alone I – still – leave poor Dan stuck in line (or one of the kids, but that falls under turnabout) and go do something or look at something.

At our favorite thrift store, this usually translates to going and looking at the jewelry counter, even though I have no intention whatsoever of buying any jewelry.  In grocery stores, I’ll read all the tabloid and magazine headlines even though I’m so non-media-oriented I’m likely to have no clue who these people are.

If I can’t move away, I go inside, and start rearranging thoughts and ideas.  You know what I mean “Um… I wonder if I took that character from here…”

This is the real reason I can’t be without a book to read, and when my mind is too fried for anything else, I read comic books.  And the reason the ONLY way to get me to exercise is with an audio book while walking outside, or something interesting to watch inside.  (And most stuff that is on TV is not interesting enough and I start making excuses to end the session early but the truth is that I’m bored.  The last thing to keep me on a regular indoor exercise schedule was Foyle’s War. This is why mostly I walk three miles a day, outside, even when it involves putting on the padded leather coat.)

So, how does my short attention span cause me to relapse, or just catch another sickness before I recover?

Because I get bored, but my mind isn’t quite up to the effort of writing and applying itself (though curiously, this time, it’s getting there.)

So, I do the next best thing, and start cleaning the house, or pushing furniture around, or refinishing something.  Because I got bored and I can’t stand to be bored.  (When I tell people my big issue with being on low carb – though I’ve managed it for four years – is that I’m not someone who eats meals, I’m a snacker, they look at my girth and wonder if I’m out of my mind.  Well, that’s actually hormonal and heaven knows what.  The metabolism tilted out of balance when I was in bed six months in my first pregnancy (because G-d has a sense of humor) has never been normal since. Though I confess until audio books, I could only go walking if I got someone to go with me, so it wasn’t regular.  (It has been regular unless VERY ill for three years, though.)  At any rate sitting down and eating bores me.  It’s better if the guys are being amusing, but I usually still need a book on hand. I need to be careful the book isn’t too interesting, or I’ll eat just to keep reading, too.)

Yes, I know, several people have told me to acquire a computer game habit for those times, but here’s the thing: very few computer games hold my interest and most of those are puzzle/matching games.  I’m not visual, and the same thing that keeps me from paying much attention to TV makes games not riveting enough (and yes, I know the state of the art.  My sons play them.) Unfortunately if I find a game that is riveting enough to play for extended periods, I’m likely to become addicted.  Which is why I’ve played very lightly ever since I lost two years to Tetris.  (Laugh, go ahead.)

Anyway, none of this is a whine just I realized yesterday, as I decided it was a wonderful time to do three hours of ironing, that I was overestimating my strength, and that I’ve done this before.  I simply wasn’t well enough for it.  So I ironed enough shirts for the guys for the week, but didn’t keep ironing.  And when I felt like taking a nap I did it, even if it felt difficult as hell because it made me feel guilty.  And then I went to bed at eight pm, and got up at around eight today.  I’m trying not to feel guilty about this.  I do, of course.  An ear infection even if it’s a reprise of the one that I caught/caught me in October should not lay me this flat.  But I’m also starting to think the cycle is because I push myself, and not even out of some heroism – though blowing deadlines upsets me, and I keep trying to dig out, of course – but because I get bored.

So I’m trying to discipline the inner child (not THAT way) and take things easy, though I think – as I said – that I’m well enough to write today.  (Might entail a nap in mid day, though.)

And this brought up, as I was making tea this morning, that we don’t know ourselves.  And what we see of our fellow men from the outside might not be true either.

During one of the worst possible times of our economic life, right after the tech bust, when Dan had been unemployed six months and we were wondering where to find the next job, a relatively close friend told us he wasn’t worried about us because we were “lucky” – we always came out right.

Maybe we ARE lucky, but from inside it doesn’t feel that way.  Oh, you can look at my career and how I managed to break in when the midlist was falling apart, not be one of the “pushed” darlings, and yet continue working all through the horrible years (which I understand still continue) when most writers in my position got a book or two and then were never heard from again.

But I was there, from the inside.  There was some luck in for instance Dave Drake introducing me at Baen.   That was unexpected and very, very lucky.  BUT at the same time, there was the other stuff – that kept me working at the other houses.  There was the summer of the seventeen proposals.  (At the time these consisted of outline and three chapters for each.)  There was another six proposals, when I was asked to submit for the project in which I got assigned Jane Seymour, proposals I didn’t even count in those seventeen, (and which I’d completely forgotten I’d done, till just now.  Oh, frabjus day.  Other than Jane, I have three chapters and an outline I can use for all of those.  Ah! Yes, I’ll still need to research, but I think I have research notes still with those, too.  Not that any of this will happen until I finish the books for Baen and also the four Shifters, Bowl of Red.)

At that time I was in a discussion group and someone was lamenting her series had just died and her agent wanted three proposals for three different series, within the next six months to see if one stuck.  This person was saying she couldn’t, she just couldn’t.  She wasn’t a machine to generate three different SERIES in six months.

I marveled at it, because I’d just done all those proposals.

I’m not saying that to brag.  I know there are different types of writers – those who work only in one universe, often the first they thought of – and those who work in many.  I confess that working in many and in various genres is a particular kind of madness, and that at various times people have attributed to this any issues they see in my work.

Might be true, too, but here’s the thing, the issue is my choice is not between writing a lovingly plotted book over two years, or writing three books very fast, in three different genres.  There is no choice.  Part of the issue with my writing to contract – I’ve found – is that I stop myself writing anything else, even shorts, because I feel I “owe” the book.  But that, inexplicably, then blocks me on the book and slows everything up.  The quality is not … perceptibly different, except that books written more slowly take more editing.  Noah’s Boy took me almost six months (plus three earlier last year, when it fell apart on me and had to be ditched) but A Few Good Men was written in a week and revised in another.  (Though the first paragraph was written six months? A year? Before.) I don’t know how much difference there is between the two, quality wise, (how could I?  I might in ten years) but AFGM was much easier to edit.

So I can block on a book and write it over two years, but the writing time will be about a month, unless I have to ditch several false starts.

The point here is that I have to work in a certain way, because I am who I am.  In some ways, I’d prefer to be the type of person who is methodical and slow, and researches everything in advance, and has bibles for her worlds, and produces two books a year rain or shine.  Much easier than the wild jags of three books in a month, then silence for six months, then…  Or blocking because I’m under contract and can’t allow the safety valve of jumping around genres.

Much better too, to be a grown up of the sort who doesn’t go and over-exert while recovering from illness and therefore gets ill again.  But that’s not my choice.  My choice is to know what I am, instead, and to try to control the wild creature inside when she gets bored.  Lure her away with something more sedentary and calmer “Look, kid, you can design covers.  Pretty covers.”  Not, mind you, wonderful, because I’m fairly sure this last lapse/relapse was brought about by the insane idiot learning to do createspace editions by working 16 hour days, but better than letting her hare off and remodel the bathroom.

This is not an extended whine.  I’m fifty one.  I’ve got used to the fact I yam what I yam.  I just have to live with it and work around it.

When dealing with some of her own character issues that she couldn’t change, my grandmother was known to sigh and say “We don’t make ourselves.”

And this is ultimately what I come to. We don’t make ourselves.  Sometimes we don’t even know ourselves very well.  And people outside had no chance of getting it either.

Our friend thought Dan and I were “lucky” – not panicked enough to look for work – both writing and a job for him – so desperately that we were bound to find something.

And my first reaction to the lady whining about writing three proposals over six months was to say “buck up.  Why are you whining?”

But for her that might have been an Herculean task.  It would be for someone who needs to “live” in a world before they write in it, and I know people who need to do that for years.  It might be an impossible task.

And this is why most government social programs – you knew I was coming to it, right? – are ineffective, and also possibly why they oscillate between permissiveness and harshness.  Because people tend to assume other people are like them and it depends on who is in charge.  If I were in charge of social relief, I’d be mildly puzzled at people who don’t even try to dig out, and I’d try to chase them up slope.  People like me probably invented work houses.  (Fortunately I have zero attention span, so I’d institute wo- houses.  There would be this system, designed to do… something, but I’d be off to the next project.)  Though of course, because I know – I KNOW – how different people can be and because I hate the blunt force that is government, I’d just have these places where you could get fed when you hit rock bottom, but where you could only stay for x amount of time.  Not ideal, mind, but possibly the best that could be done, like the best that can be done with my mind is writing a lot of books at the same time.

On the other hand people like the writer who was having trouble doing three proposals, would overestimate how hard things are for people, and would be all therapeutic and nurturing, and end up with a lot of life-long welfare cases.

Because some people are self starters, some people are starters, and some people never start – though they might work well enough if told where and when to do it, and kept on task.  (I don’t like that last.  It’s ripe for abuse.  But some people need it.  “Structure” the schools call it.)

If our own close friends had a view of us as “lucky” instead of “scrambling”, how can the government access what type of person you are and what you need to dig out of a hole?  They can’t.  Or to figure out how you got in it? – note how long it took me to figure out I was circumventing my own recoveries – or…

It always ends up devolving, in any top-down system, into people who think you’d be exactly like them, “if only” which usually translates to “if only you were working ‘properly’” – i.e. how they do. Or if the system were working properly.  (I think part of the issue, if you are envious of the “rich” is that.  You view the “rich” as lucky.  Are some of them lucky?  Oh, sure.  Right time, right place, right contacts.  But most of them – those who aren’t crony capitalists – also did something to deserve their good luck.  Desperate work, or blood, sweat and tears, or wild creativity.)

But none of us from the outside can tell how ‘lucky” someone was, or what they “should” be doing.  And anything that is centrally administered and from the government ends up devolving into a pseudo moral code – with deviation a sort of sin.

(I have more to say here, about body types and centrally regulated health care, but that has to wait till tomorrow, because this is already too long.)

And when you depend on the public purse to pull you out of a hole, you’re vulnerable to the public view of how you operate.  Even if it’s not sane or accurate.

It’s like living under your parents’ roof, you have to live under their rules, even if you turn out to operate in a very different manner.  Only when it’s the government, it’s much harder to move out of the basement and get your star trek posters off the walls, and sometimes the rules themselves prevent it.

So – you don’t know yourself.  And your friends might have a totally inaccurate idea of who you are.  So, why would you trust a government bureaucracy to know better than that?

*Sorry this is so late.  Last night I had issues loading Kate’s post so I went to bed and thought “I’ll put it up at six tomorrow”.  Well, it’s nine my time and I just rolled out of bed. :/  Yeah, antibiotics working — stop glaring.  I really don’t get ill on purpose! — but I guess there’s a sleep thing that’s needed.  Oh, and Kate’s con books are here.  And yeah, she desperately needs new covers.  It was one of our very first one.  The second is slightly better, but still needs help.*

When I started being published, I started discovering problems I never thought would be problems. Not the sensible problems, like what to do with that teensy trickle of pennies that writing brought in. No, I’m talking about the flat-out, mind-bogglingly weird problems.

Most of these relate to the Con vampire universe, and the way that ‘verse leaks like a busted sieve. I have seriously lost count of the number of times a throwaway gag line turns out to nail someone’s personality and situation – when I don’t even know the person. It’s that bloody scary.

Chatting about this with friends, one of them suggested it’s precognition. Except I don’t believe in precognition. It, however, seems to believe in me, and believe hard enough to make stuff happen.

It’s got so I’m wondering if I need to bring holy water to the next con I go to in case I meet any editors there. Because I’m getting scared that they really are demons. Minor demons, sure, but the amount of petty evil I’ve heard from editors at cons is… well… worrisome.

Trouble is, I’m not a believer in the strictest sense, so I’m not sure holy water would actually work for me. But I swear if I ever see Jim at a con, I’m running so fast you’ll see the dust cloud (and believe me, at my weight and fitness level running is not something that happens).

If that’s not enough, I’m discovering avatars of my characters in places I never thought to look. Everyone here knows that the fiction separating our gracious hostess and Natalia Bosting is thinner than tissue paper, and of course the family is the family (this was by Sarah’s request I might add – although I’ve managed to get that more accurate than is comfortable in ways I didn’t know anything about at the time), but I’ve recently met Lil’s avatar (who can reveal herself or not as she chooses) and despite denials I have my suspicions about Raph. Let’s just say that angel is flexible.

Since before this woo-woo shit started happening to me, I would have said I was the least psychically inclined person in the universe, it’s seriously disturbing. I don’t know how it’s happening. I have no idea how I can manage to accurately do writer-voodoo on people I’ve never met, and in more than one case never knew existed.

It’s creepy. And it’s got me… not quite scared to go to conventions, but worried about what I’m going to encounter there. I mean, this is a gathering of Odds letting their Odd out to swing in the breeze as it were. Most are both highly intelligent and fractured in some way (yes, that includes me). If you believe in that kind of thing, it’s sort of an invitation for unfriendly sorts to drop by and join the party.

And being unfriendly, such sorts tend not to want to leave when the party’s over.

I’ve been at cons with people who left me wanting to scrub all over with bleach to get rid of the feeling I’d been doused with slime. There have been other people who left me certain that I did not want to be in the same room as them ever again. It was a bit like there was no “there” there… On the surface there’s nothing wrong with these people. But they give me the horrors, and I don’t know why. (I am not naming names. I could be wrong or oversensitive or something. And damn it, I don’t believe this kind of shit. I just also can’t deny what it felt like).

All of which leaves me with an interesting and disturbing dilemma. The more I do in the con ‘verse, the stronger the effect gets, and the weirder the side effects.

So, do I load up with blessed jewelry from any religion that doesn’t explicitly prevent outsiders from enjoying the benefits? Do I pretend nothing’s happening? Or do I run screaming into the night?

Nah. Not that last option. It’s too bloody cold out.

 But who buys books just because they have a strong female lead? No one I know, and when I asked a small group of female authors, the immediate, visceral response was, well, unprintable. The trend to write women as improbably physically strong, with the morals of a bunny in heat, and the brains of a gnat makes most of us who are actually strong women froth at the mouth. It was pointed out to me that most people consider “that twit from Pirates of the Caribbean” a strong woman, and at that I blinked and stopped.

 Athena in Darkship Thieves is so strong she needs Kit as a governor. Bella in my story needs sort of the same thing. Not governor as a ruler, but someone who gives them a check on their respective temper and magical power. Otherwise they would run out of control, burning out and doing great damage they would regret too late. Sometimes having someone you can trust utterly is a very good thing, and in modern books, that person is never a male. Which is a damage to our society that is incalculable. If we fear and hate the other sex, we lose that which can make us stronger, the ability to pull together in harness. Because that’s what’s missing with the feminist reaction, knowing that both are wrapped up in it together.

 My Evil Muse (who inhabits the same body as my First Reader) keeps coming by and dropping ideas in my ear. The Left tends to want only the women in books to do anything good, because all men are brutes only good for sex and muscles. Men are to be feared because all they want is sex, and sure, that’s fun, but only when I want it and never with any commitments attached and oh, by the way, you males aren’t even allowed to look at me, or I’ll scream… the breathless feminist proclaims. Just look at the nonsensical harassment claims that proliferate on the internet. How strong is that, really? The last time I was being hit on, and couldn’t just laugh it off, I dealt with it by making it very clear I was with someone else, and the man backed off. It wasn’t that I needed a protector. It was that I had back-up. But he is much more than that. Confidante, friend, warmth in the night when I have bad dreams… And I give much the same to him in return. It’s a partnership, and that’s what I was trying to capture in Pixie Noir. That a strong woman and a strong man might need one another to succeed.

Snippets of Pixie Noir, here.

No, I honestly am not abandoning, Rogue Magic, but it might be on hiatus another couple of weeks, simply because I need to do reconciliation stuff, and halfway through another book, plus dealing with the onset of the holidays (which is much like a fever) I haven’t had time to.

So, I thought I’d give you a really quick update on the state of the writer, which you can sort of scan, as you run off for your black friday shopping.

First, No Will but His keeps selling and selling and selling, even though I don’t yet have my own paper version out and you have to dig to find it.  This is good and bad: good because of course I like making money.  Bad because it means in 2014 I’ll need to take a month or a couple of them and do refresh-research and write the other wives of Henry VIII, for my very own little mini-series.

I wonder if the reason it sells so well relative to everything else is that it’s tangentially romance (I mean, she does lose her head!) or because of reflected interest from the Tudors series (which I loathed, but never mind.  I’m not a TV person.)

Plain Jane the book I wrote under a house name about Jane Seymour is still selling too and has now paid me as much in royalties as the initial advance (or more, I haven’t paid attention recently.)

So, there is a strong impetus to write dead queens.  It should also be easy, since I know the time period fairly well.  It’s just more work on the slate.  OTOH maybe five of those, this time new and without a “mainstream” edition will allow me to hire an assistant and help resolve my fatal time deficit.  It’s worth a try.  (This one is only making me about $100 a month.  Not sneezing at it and not bad given its handicap, but you know… I hear these things are exponential, and maybe 5 books will mean $1000 a month. Worth a try, right?  So, on the slate.)

The musketeers are selling fairly well too, and I need to get sixth book finished.  Am not sure how to relaunch the series, so I might as well throw it out there for those of you like me who are sitting around and doing all your shopping (the little there is) electronic.

Should I just issue the book as I do my old ones, or should I bring it out with fanfare and send out ARCs for reviews, or just drop it out there and let the fans find it?  The chances of its getting a review in one of the mystery mags are — I think — low, but maybe Forbes will review it?

The same goes for Witchfinder.  Given my double plus ungood — and widely vented — opinions, let alone working for PJM I suspect my chances of getting a review in Locus, or even PW, are slightly less than a snowball’s in hell — and I don’t even mean a GOOD review.  OTOH this is the first “real” novel I’m bringing out indie, and part of me is insisting I should go ahead and send out ARCs (which means that those who advance-paid would get e-arcs before Christmas, btw. And then the book later, of course.)

I have the cover in hand and the edited manuscript, so I just need time to go through it, and to get the cover lettered.  So … at the rate things are here, two weeks are about right.  But that would delay the “real book” release to March, as opposed to bringing the book out before Christmas.

Is the ordering I’ll get from bookstores for the paper book worth it?  How many fans find books exist via the trades, as opposed to having my name on perma-search, as I have Pratchett and F. Paul Wilson?

I honestly don’t know.  I work in isolation from the trades, but I wonder if there is a significant bump?  Sound off on what you think, and not just “I want a book for Christmas, you ‘orrible, ‘orrible, teasing writer.”

Other things — I’m working on Through Fire and having issues not making Simon unsympathetic.  He’s twisted, but really, he’s fighting for (his own) survival and has pretty much always been.

And later on today I’ll put up subscriber content and hopefully upload a new novella to the sales channels.

Right now, I’m going to find an iv for caffeine and try to figure out how to pass for human, so I can get to the point where I CAN write.