Being American – A Guest Post by Eamon

Our gracious host asked me to write a guest post expanding on a comment I made on America Aeterna so I’ve put my shoulder to it, and scrabbled at the hard ground, and here it is:

It’s 9/11/2013 as I write this. It’s become a complex anniversary, one that does not pass easily. Nor should it. It should burn in our blood and resonate in our bones. There’s an unquenched anger compounded by recent frustrations underlying this day. And there’s a pain, when we turn long enough from our daily concerns to see, a compelling pain that won’t leave us. A pull toward the sound of American cries.

But I want to talk about hope, here. There is hope. A dark hope, to be sure. Stained with more than a little smoke, and tears without number, but hope it remains. Walk with me now, the next bit is a little bleak, but I see a glow over the ridge before us. Fix your eyes ahead.

There is a strain in American thought these days which regrets the violence visited upon our culture and our people, but are helpless before it. A belief that it’s horrible and wrenching and hard, but we can’t act in the face of it. This strain is spreading, insidious and cunning in its maneuvers.

Many individuals adamantly defend their right to self-defense and go on to explain how they’ll only exercise that right for them and theirs. Faced with violence, pain and horror they’ll turn away because it’s none of their concern. There are police who say that their number one priority each day is going home safe each night. Confronted with a threat to the innocent, they’ll hesitate and delay. Some in the military have sought to avoid deployments, because it’s not their fight. Faced with an attack against their country and their brothers and sisters, they step aside saying they didn’t want this war.

This corrupted thought is being abetted by many who seek power. They deny American exceptionalism, decry our cultural foundations, and seek to destroy our national soul. Some do this because they seek a ‘higher’ purpose, an ill-conceived greater good. Some because they’ve been taught to hate the very things that brought them to life and prominence. Still others are hollow and cold inside and believe everyone else must be as well.

These misguided ‘leaders’ seek to promote this helplessness in the face of attack, and encourage this turning from the suffering of our fellows. They want this crippled narcissism to continue and spread. Perhaps because it leaves them free to accrue more power. Or they plan to break the American spirit and bend it to their ideology. Maybe they feel broken and hopeless and strike out to render all else the same. Many, no doubt, act on the sincere belief that this is the right path. That reconciliation with the world and our better nature requires us to set aside these ‘arrogances.’ That it is penitence to suffer these incidents and when we’ve suffered sufficiently we’ll be welcomed into the enlightened community.

The dangerous strain in American thought is abetted by others, who hold to the deadly philosophy of low expectations. “This anniversary is supposed to be significant?,” they ask. This has happened before, and worse, and will again. Others before us have mis-stepped and others after will again. Outrage now is pointless because history is long and you cannot rise above our collective past. This and more they say.

These seek to undermine our anger, and pain. And most of all they seek to undermine that pull.

But there’s that glow, beyond the ridge.

***

There’s another strain in American thought. One I think runs deep in our blood and curls about our soul. One which regrets the violence visited upon our culture and our people, and is angry before it. One which believes it’s horrible and wrenching and hard, and we are equal to its challenge.

This strain is in the foundations of our American culture.

To reprise my comment on America Aeterna:

There is a deep, in the bone, tradition in the American military. It is an informal pact. It underlies why, and how, sane and rational people walk into horror of their own free will. We will come for you. We will send many to save few. I may die, but I will walk into that hell to pull you out. And the man beside me will drag us both home. It can be tempered, by the mission, by the needs of our nation, by our deference to civilian authority, but it must be tempered. The urge to act is innate.
…The in the bone tradition was not born in the military. It comes from a strain in our culture, from the heart of being American. Firefighters and Police and Citizens rushed to the Towers. College students walked into the recruitment office during Vietnam. Teachers and mechanics and bakers stormed the beaches of Normandy. Farmers faced down the mightiest empire in the world.

It is this strain that runs through the heart of educators who run to the sound of guns to stand and die between violence and their children. It is in the blood of the people who rush the madman before he can take another life. In the bones of the police officers who flock to the call of distress to interpose their bodies between violent disorder and civilization. In the souls of the military when they shove down their doubts and fears and shoulder the sword and shield of our nation.

I believe it is this strain that prompted Sarah Hoyt to say:

When an American is cut, everyone who is an American at heart bleeds.

And why she felt pain watching the Iran hostage crisis and the failed rescue, even as she sat in Portugal.

It’s not a geographical thing, nor a matter of birth or genetics. It is a deeply American philosophy that calls out to those around the world who would be of us. Those who are American in their bones and blood and soul. Who, despite rabid individuality, feel the call to face violent horror visited upon their fellows with resolve and to step toward that horror in response. Not in retribution, but to stand beside those fellows and do what must be done.

Those who follow this strain of thought feel that pull toward the sound of American cries. That pull comes not because we are invested in nationalism, but because we are invested in individualism. Our founding, our Constitution and our culture are replete with the fundamental understanding that the individual is the unit of value in our society. It is this understanding that shines forth around the world and draws people to our shores. It is this belief that each of us, in ourselves, is worth fighting to defend that gives the desolate hope. It is this truth that threatens the foundations of tyranny.

Seeing this, many nations give service to the idea of individual value, but their actions reveal a different truth. Many play upon our reverence to manipulate us; many co-opt our values to lessen us. They show the truth of their character by attacking the innocent and spilling the blood of their own people. Then they call on us to abide by our reverence. And we do. They take combat to the non-combatants with brutality and without regard, and then dare us to fracture our own foundations by responding in kind. And we do not.

Through all of this we hold to that truth. And through all of this, that light shines and nascent Americans around the globe feel the pull, and they know the promise.

Those who follow this strain of thought believe the promise that should have been made in Benghazi was this: You stand. We’ll have fighters overhead soonest. Behind them our bombers prepare. Behind them we have birds in the air bringing special operations personnel your way. Behind them the Airborne and the Marines. Behind them the light mech, and the heavy mech and the infantry. Behind them the American divisions muster, starting now. Pushing toward you, as we speak, churning the water to froth, the American carrier groups. Behind them, running deep, our submarines. Behind them the Coast Guard secures your home. You stand, we will come for you. And know this while you stand: if you should fall before we reach you, before your blood dries on that fallen soil we will stand in your stead in that very dust. We will own the hallowed ground where you lay, even if in the doing we must lay down beside you. And we will bring you home.

Some will call it jingoism. And perhaps they’re right, if you see this as a reverence of the state, of nationalism. Perhaps they’re right if you believe this pull we feel is because our national pride has been hurt. Or our leadership has been embarrassed. But, if you understand this pull…if you understand from where inside you it comes and toward whom it pulls you… then they are wrong. And it is not too late to hold to our promises.

We will come for you.

Okay, guys, please don’t hit me, but I think I need to take a week off on Rogue magic.

The reason for this is that I’m finally writing Through Fire total immersion — really going on it.

Novels are weird.  Sometimes I can write two at the same time.  Sometimes I HAVE to write two at the same time.  And sometimes, the voice of the character is so immersive that I can’t do anything else.

Zen is proving to be that sort of character.  She fought me in getting into her head (no woman was EVER more deceptively named.  She makes Athena tame and well balanced, while having a good bit of Kit’s reserve and protective instincts.)  And now that it finally clicked and I’m writing/rewriting (some portions will stay, just rewritten) at speed, I can’t pop back out to do stuff.  I can do non-fiction but not fiction.

In fact, this made this week very frustrating because I had a short story overdue, and it was for someone I like in the field and with whom I’ve worked before.  I wrote it three times, but it still read “flat” and “by the numbers” to me, because my head just couldn’t shift to be THERE.  Finally, on Thursday, I made an enormous effort and recast the story again.  I still have doubts, but the editor liked it.  However the effort from doing that, left me feeling like I’d been working in the fields all day. How?  I don’t know.  It was all desk work.  But I felt SO exhausted at night, that I ended up being more than half ill yesterday.  It was like I’d taken it upon me to climb a mountain or something, with no preparation.

So, yesterday I cleaned the house and redid two covers.  I’m going to put the books up and I’ll let you see them when it’s up.  Well… some of you have seen them.  Let’s just say I’m finally satisfied with them.

And this morning I tried to convince myself I COULD do a chapter of Rogue Magic.  But I think it would require the same effort as writing that short, and it would stop all my other work.  And see, I REALLY want to finish Through Fire, because it’s very loud right now.

No, I’m not giving up on Rogue Magic (though I might take a break tomorrow on Elf Blood on MGC too.  We’ll see how I feel in the morning and where I am in Through Fire.)  And I apologize for this being really choppy — I’ve just been sick, and now I am possessed by a book.  I promise there will be make-up chapters later.

Meanwhile I want to apologize to my subscribers for not having put up new material.  What I’ve been writing is mostly for Baen, and it’s not that I’m afraid they won’t like that I’ve shown it to you in advance.  What I’m afraid of, frankly, is critique.  At this stage, when I’m wholly immersed in the book, the wrong QUESTION can send me spinning down a path that makes no sense, if you’re just reading the book after it’s printed.  Yes, I promise to make it up to you guys later, too, including with some posts on the future history.

For now, let me shower, do some quick publishing, and then sit down and write the demon-book.  (Well, what would you call an entity that possesses you.)

And not as a teaser, but as an explanation, here is the beginning (and yes, there are typos and bad word choices.  Don’t fret your head about it.  It will be gone over with a fine tooth comb before I send it in.)

Breach in The Wall

 

When men forged weapons of metal, they did it by putting them through fire repeatedly then beating them almost to the breaking point, then putting them through the fire again and again.

There are times I wonder if that’s what’s been done to me.  Not that I think this is true precisely.  It’s just that we, humans, tend to think of ways to justify the weird turns of our destiny.  Since mine is odder than most, I often try to find a reason and a point.  It would be easier, I think, if I could believe in any divinity or even a pre-ordained destiny.

Since I don’t, I’m not absolutely sure how to start this story.

I could start with that moment when I stood in front of the mirror, trying to find a way to disfigure myself, or to make myself look, at best, average, and the armed man by the door said, “You’re going about it all wrong.”

Or I could start when I left the small and forgotten colony planet where everyone knew me, and where everyone thought they knew what to to expect of me.  Or I could start when I shot my husband.  But no.  That last still makes my heart turn within me, with thoughts of what might have been.

So I’ll start with the ball.

It was the first ball I attended and, though I might be wrong, likely the last.  The place where I grew up, an asteroid colony started by refuges from Earth, had never run to balls or grand state occasions.  Oh, we had a cultural center and sometimes there were dances there.  But it’s not the same.  You see, we had no government.  At least we had no official government.  And for the sort of ball that starts this story, a government is needed – something that controls central resources and can do things in style.  I’d say more than that was needed too: a sense of hereditary splendor, of being the last of a line entitled and accustomed to this sort of thing.

Perhaps even more.  Perhaps for the grandeur and pomp of that first and last ball, a sense is needed of decadence and falling glory.  That ball had all of them.

It took place in the ballroom of what used to be the palace of the Good Men of Liberte Seacity: a glittering room formed of molded dimatough from its glistening black floor to its softly shining white walls.

Within it, enough people assembled to form a hundred couples, all of them dressed in fantastical finery.  There were outfits that seemed to be spun of butterfly wings, and those that seemed to defy the shape of the human body.  And there was clothing that harked back to the fantastical age of empires almost seven hundred years before – long, sweeping dresses and molding outfits in thing that were better than velvet and silk. My own dress was made – I understood – of a form of ceramic. Though it felt like satin to the touch, its dull black glimmer shone with pinpoints of light, as if stars were caught in its depths.

Liberte Seacity had been formed by a banker’s consortium at the close of the twenty first century, and like the other seacities it was supposed to be a refuge from high taxes and excessive government controls.    Unlike other seacities, it had never been designed to have any industry, any useful output.  Instead, it owned other seacities – Shangri-la, Xanadu and, later, several European territories – where the workday business took place.  Liberte itself had been designed as a resort for those at the pinnacle of that long-vanished world.  It was built in terraces, all carefully landscaped gardens and idyllic beaches, like a dream of an Arcadia that never was. Its inevitable utilitarian levels, where valets and maids, law enforcers and garbage collectors lived were hidden, out of sight.

Approaching Liberte from the air, as I’d first seen it, one saw it only as a sort of white and green confection, something like an idealized wedding cake.

The palace of the Good Men was the topping on the cake: white and full of columns and terraces, built with an airy grace that would have been impossible without poured dimatough and sculpted ceramite, it might have fit a previous age’s dream of a fairy palace, an immortal fantasy.

The ballroom sat at the very top, and its walls alternated with vast panels of transparent dimatough, through which – as the night fell – you could see the sea, glistening in every direction, all around us, blue and still like a perfect mirror.

You could also see the troop transports moored in that sea, the vast, dark menace that encircled us metaphorically as well as in reality.

“Why are you looking out the window?” Simon St. Cyr, ci-devant Good Man of Liberty seacity, who, by a stroke of the pen, had made himself “Protector of the People and Head of the Glorious Revolution,” just a day ago.

I turned.  Simon – who has at least another dozen given names to his credit – stood just behind me.  He was slightly shorter than I, had brown hair, brown eyes and looked unremarkable.  Which I’d come to believe was protective coloring to stop people wondering what he might be plotting.  He put a hand out and rested it on my waist.

“I’m looking at those troop carriers,” I said.

“Oh, that,” he said, contriving to give the impression the glistening transports, each of them able to carry more than a thousand armed men, were a negligible detail like a spec of dust on the floor of his polished ballroom.  “Don’t worry, ma petit.”

I’d not yet decided if Simon’s habit of larding his speech with archaic French words annoyed me or amused me, but calling me “little” was beyond reason, since I had at least two inches on him.  Impatience colored my tone, as I said, “But shouldn’t you be worried?  These people depend on you for their safety.”

He made a sound, not quite a chuckle at the back of his throat.  “And they’re perfectly safe,” he said.  “Listen, those troop carriers aren’t going to do anything, pour cause.”

“And the cause is?”

“Oh, my.  The cause is I have it on good authority they’re mostly empty.  The Usaian revolution is keeping them fully busy, and costing them more men than they can recruit, unless they start creating them in vats, as they did at the end of the twenty first century.  Until they do that, though, the Usaians are giving them more trouble than they can handle.”  He looked at me, and his brown eyes danced with unmitigated amusement, like an adult laughing at the preoccupations of a toddler.  “Listen, Zen.  I wouldn’t have declared the revolution if I hadn’t thought there were next to no chances of reprisal by the ancien regime, the global might of what used to be the Good Men consortium.  I’m a revolutionary, yes, ma amie, but I’m not stupid.”

I gave him a dubious look, but something I’d decided very early on was that Simon was not in fact stupid.  Truth be told, he might be too smart for his own good.  He was certainly very good at keeping Simon safe and sound and knowing the best means of doing so.

The pressure of his hand on my waist increased fractionally.  I became aware of the orchestra striking the sort of melody that indicates the prelude to dance music, and he said, “Madame Sienna, would you do me the very great honor of opening the ball with me?”

I cast one last dubious look t the transports on the bronze-gilded sea, bobbing slightly in the current.  They’d been there for twenty four hours, and they’d done nothing.  Simon had to be right.  He had to. Those transports were air-and-surface.  Had they been filled with troops enough to overwhelm the Seacity defenses, they’d have flown in and landed and taken over, long ago.  They were for show.  For intimidation.  They weren’t real.  I could, at least, trust Simon to see what was a threat to him and what wasn’t.

We danced.

As a guest of the Good Man – oh, pardon me, the Protector – I’d been taught to dance anything that might be played at the ball.  This was a waltz, an ancient dance that had once been scandalous.  We segued from it to the glide, a modern dance that was considered very difficult.  Our bodies moved in unison as though we’d been trained to it.  Which wasn’t true, but we’d been designed for it, you might say.

Other couples joined us.  The dance floor filled with twirling people, as the sun sank completely within the sea and, in the darkness that followed, the troop transports became mere darker dots in the darkness of the sea.

We took a break for drinks and food, then returned to the dance floor.  It was in the middle of this dance that the explosion came.

At first, I wasn’t sure it hadn’t been part of the music, then the concussion of it hit, making the floor shake, and the entire airy palace tremble and resonate, like a platter that’s been hit a blow.  From somewhere below came an orange reflection, like a bloom of light, immediately vanished.

Simon stopped completely, his hands on my waist, and said, “Merde!”

I cast a look at the sea, but it was still all dark, and the darker points of the transports were still there, bobbing on the water.

Another explosion, this one more deafening.  Above us, a glistening crystal chandelier swayed.  Bits of crystal rained down on the couples.  People screamed.

The palace rocked, as a third explosion hit, and Simon wrapped and arm around me and leapt, carrying me with him to the edge of the ballroom, up against the wall.  I could smell him.  Sweat from our exertions on the dance floor had been joined by something sharper that spoke of fear.

He lay on top of me but not crushing me, more forming a defensive cover over me.

“Simon,” I said, urgently, not sure how to ask, but trusting him to understand what I meant.

He pulled a burner from his pocket, and pointed it somewhere over my head.  “It’s not the armies of the Good Men,” he said.

“No,” I said.

A third explosion and from outside the ballroom, sounding like it had come from somewhere beneath, came a song.  It was loud, and inharmonious, and full of threats I only half understood, because it was in the local patois, formed when the city itself had been formed: a mix of archaic French, archaic English, some Spanish words, and a lot of Glaish overlay.  Something about setting fire to the world and enjoying the flames.  Something about the blood of tyrants.

I felt Simon shake.  I won’t say he trembled with fear.  It was more like shock, or surprise.  “Merde,” he said again.  Then in a louder voice, “Jean.  Jean!”  This was pronounced as in the French male name, not the Glaish female name.  “Jean, for the love of God, get her out of here.”

Someone tall and dark, a man I didn’t know but who had crawled up close to us said, “But–  Shouldn’t we—”

“Too late.  Get her the hell out of here,” Simon said.

I didn’t want to go.  I’d been taking care of myself since I was three at least.  I had never needed, would never need some man – much less two men – who were wholly unrelated to me, to take control.

I tried to say that, but I had no weapon on me – stupid, but I’d thought a burner might prove awkward at a ball – and Jean was a large man and was dragging me backwards, at a crouch, along the wall.

I’m faster and stronger than most men.  Most women too.  I was engineered that way.  But strength and speed go for nothing when you don’t know where the threat is coming from or whom to attack.

The ballroom was full of people fighting.  Burners shot this way and that.  I could no longer see Simon in the crowd.  I smelled blood and fire.

Another two explosions, below, getting closer.  The nearest dimatough pane cracked, top to bottom.  The crystal chandelier fell, bits of crystal flying in all directions.

Jean said, “Run,” and grabbed my hand and pulled.  Through what seemed like a concealed door, down a couple of staircases, onto a dark terrace by the seaside, we ran, and into a small, non-descript flyer.  We took off almost vertically.  An explosion rocked us, then another.

Jean said, “Merde.”  It was a popular word.  “We have to come down in the seacity,” he said.  “We won’t be allowed to escape.”

“Escape what?” I said, and then remembering the last, vivid image of the people who’d come into the ballroom.  “Were they carrying heads on pikes?”

“Yes,” he said.

 

 

It will not do.  I can’t write a chapter this morning.  Sorry.  I woke up feeling icky.  Have called HVAC people and asked what in heck they’re doing that they haven’t repaired this thing yet.  I’m going to try to write a chapter this afternoon, but right now, I’m going to clean the house and try to clear my head.

Apologies.

This will seem to be a post about publishing.  It actually isn’t.

Yesterday at Mad Genius Club we had someone get very snooty over one of my covers – which, btw, I know it’s not the best it COULD be.  I’ve seen the work of professional cover designer and I couldn’t do it. Not yet. – completely ignoring what I’d said I was trying to do and say with the cover.  (Long story, but so far as I can tell – and I confess I haven’t spent an awful lot of time looking at the publisher name, though I did look at the covers – the only people still doing historical mysteries are my old publisher Prime Crime.  Being cheap and in a sub-branch they think will never sell well, they mostly seem to use photoshop of buildings and/or figures cut out of paintings.  So, my cover was trying to imitate that.)

The reason my covers don’t look as though they came out of a professional designer is because they didn’t – they came from me.  I’m at best a semi-trained beginner.

So, Sarah, you’ll say, why didn’t you hire a professional cover designer?

Two reasons.  The first one is the vile metal.  Yes, I know.  “If you’re going to do this you should do it right.  You should hire someone.”  It’s a lovely idea except that most professional cover designers are working on SALARY for the publishing companies.  As with everything else, if you find one willing to work piecemeal, they’re likely to either be in a completely different field (there’s a lot of non-fiction book designers, but that’s not the same cues, and they might in fact be worse, since they THINK they know what they’re doing and won’t look) or to be youn’ ones laid off in the current crunch.

Does that mean there are NO good cover designers out there for hire?  Oh, by no means.  Kris and Dean have an excellent cover designer.  On salary.  (I’m taking a cover design workshop with her.)

As with artists (I found one, and hope the cover he’s doing for Witchfinder works out, even if I’m very new at cover direction and he’s very new at covers.  We’ll see.  I know he’ll work for Shadow Gods, but for this one I’m afraid it will signal either “funny” or “young” which the book isn’t.  Though a lot can be countered with cover design, but non funny/YA is new for him) the problem with cover designers is only partly money.  The other part is finding them.  And the problem is related – the cover designers I can find and/or pay for are likely to be just a little better than I, and that advantage might be lost between the things they know that just ain’t so and my inability to explain myself as to what I want.

Add to that the fact that I have to bring out 11 novels as soon as I can, and you’ll start seeing the scope of my problem.  Say I pay a cover designer $250 – a really low price – to do a cover design.  Now multiply that by 11.  Then add in the fact that the two times I tried to hire a cover designer, it got dropped on the floor, and I wasn’t even told that it was no longer being worked on (maybe my instructions offended them mortally.  Maybe they got better work.  I don’t know.)  And consider that my main job is/should be writing, and that riding herd on artists/cover designers takes time from that, which is – after the all – the main way I make money.

There was this publisher – Science Fiction Age – that used to send out rejection letters that started with “In an ideal world this would be an acceptance.”

Well, in an ideal world, there would be battalions of cover designers out there waiting to work for every indie writer, for a very reasonable fee — or any fee.  They would be prompt and courteous and versed in the signaling for every genre and sub-genre and it would be much like hiring out proof reading.

As I screamed back at SFA rejections “This is not an ideal world.”

Some writers start off at a much higher peak for cover design.  My friend Cedar Sanderson, for instance, or Kevin J. Anderson.  (Maybe you need to have a name ending in “son” – how does Hoytson sound, ya’ll?)

While I’m not wholly without artistic training, I have been shorting my art for the last five years (because I’ve been so busy) and as with any artistic thing (yes, including writing) a lot of it is training.  In this case, training the eye.  You can know everything cerebrally, but – I swear this is most of art classes – if your eye isn’t trained, you will still suck.  Most of my art classes were “learning to see.”  And like things that are muscle memory – piano playing, painting, or even running – if you’re away from it for a while, you lose it.  Mea culpa, and all that.  Amanda Green has told me I need to go back to classes and practicing, though I think she meant it for mental health.  Well, I need it for helping to design things too.  And one of the legend-artists of SF tells me that I’m actually quite gifted, (okay, what he told me is that as much as he enjoyed my books, I’d missed my real calling. It hurt a little.) but “gifted and out of practice” still boils down to “amateur.”

So I’m not one of those “comes in with a lot on the ball” designers.  It’s all cerebral, not eye yet.  So it will scream “beginner.”

Does this mean I should either spend the next year going door to door trying to find someone who can professionally design my covers or sit on my hands until I can do it at the “required” level?

Oh, for the love of Bob.

First of all, not all the books that come out of NYC look like “best professional designer.”  The reason for this is obvious.

As in everything else, from proof reading to editing, there are the main people at the houses, who are extremely well paid and who work only for the high least.  And then there are the low-level trainees, who are just learning some of whom are just out of high school/college.

I’m not here going on the “most of what comes out of NYC is cr*p.”  A lot of it is, of course, because they don’t invest money on it.  But most of it is “good enough.”

Well, my intention with cover design is “good enough” – though of course, I aim higher.  But I know where I fall.

In fact, when I audit cover designers – by looking at their stuff on line – most of them are about as good as I am, with a difference.  A lot of them get stuck in one genre.  Like literary.

There was a page of “clever” cover designs going around – I can’t find the link now – for things like 1984 and Metamorphosis.  They were very nice, but here’s the thing: if they weren’t classics and most people didn’t know what was in them, they’d make no sense.  Like the 1984 cover with silhouettes of rats around the front cover.  Would a potential reader of anti-totalitarian books buy it on that?  Probably not.  It could work with a great blurb, but it wasn’t, by itself, a “selling cover.”

Most people out of college try to be similarly clever and “high class”, just like most editors and agents just out of college want to do “literary.”

Anyway, so…

What I’ve been doing is going over to Amazon and looking at the bestsellers in print, then trying to imitate that.  I discard “made famous by a movie” books like GRRM because, well, his series was doing okay before the movie, and now they’re designed to fit with the movie.  And then I look at the genre and subgenre, to see not only what is being done, but what is being signaled.

For instance, I started out with the Musketeer series, wanting the cover to show a scene from the novel.  I tried to draw it, so I could show it to an artist who could then improve on it.  (Believe it or not artists understand pictures better than words.  Shocking.)

Then I went and looked at the covers in mystery-cozy-historical (yes, it’s a cozy in the sense it’s not a hard boiled.)  And got a shock.  What they’re using now – foreshadowed by the last two covers for Musketeers, which seem to be stock paintings, for some reason involving apples – is something evocative of the time, like, a piece of architecture (for Victorian) or a figure from a painting (for everything else.)

To put the scene I wanted to put on the front cover would simply date the books as being abt. 10 years old.

Having determined this, I raided pictures of musketeers from paintings.  I learned not to put the entire painting in, because it gives off a “classical” and “literary” feel.  I still feel the background is not textured enough, but overlaying say a wood cut of the time, no matter how faded, becomes “cluttered” with all the lettering these books have.

The covers still feel cluttered to me, because I’m reclaiming the books.  Having found out that at least half of my readers on either side don’t know Sarah D’Almeida is in fact Sarah A. Hoyt, I am doing them as Sarah A. Hoyt writing as Sarah D’Almeida.  This is a hope to integrate both readerships, or at least a significant portion.  (The musketeers have a “fantasy” feel to them, anyway.)  And I know I’m not doing what professionals do with balance of mass and lettering.  I am sort of at the edge where I can “sense” that, but not do it reliably yet.  Because knowing it intellectually is not the same as learning to see.

So, the book won’t say “High push.”  Well… it’s the reprint of a midlist series.  It’s possible – I still get fan mail for it, five years after the last came out – that doing the sixth book will revive the series, in which case it might very well pay off.  BUT even if it pays off, it will be at around the 10 to 20k per book, not the millions.  (Oh, I’d love to be proven wrong, but historical mystery is one of those genres that has run off its own readers and it will take a while to find their way back. So I’m looking at it as “old faithful” not “gusher of money.”  Frankly neither is science fiction.  If I were doing this JUST for the cash, I’d just be doing Paranormal Romance.  I’m not. — though I might do some in the future, of course.  But never the only thing.)

This is the part where this is not about publishing: I know I’m doing an imperfect job.  I also know I’m improving.

I was never one of the worst cover designers out there.  For one, as an author, I’ve seen a lot of covers.  I can go back to the styles of my youth, because that happens to everyone, and sometimes I missunderestimate what a font says (I think that’s a cultural issue, too.  I didn’t grow up here) but when I started I already understood “the cover is a sales tool.”  I never had that kind of cover you used to see at Smashwords, with the wrong aspect and the letters that looked like a ransom note.

That said, my early covers were pretty bad. One or two, unexpectedly, rose to the sublime.  But most sucked. Fortunately, in the herd of authors putting their back stuff up, they were fairly normal and passed unnoticed.

However, every few months, everyone ups their game, and I look at the old covers and go “OMG” and redo some – I wish I had the time to redo them all.  (That said, I also buy books in the store and go “OMG” at their covers.)

Does this mean I should wait until I get good at it? Or wait till I had the money and the perfect cover designer?

Sigh.

Keep in mind every week those books aren’t out is lost income.  Even if it’s less than a hundred per book per month.  It’s still income.  And every little bit helps.  An imperfect cover out there will earn me more money than the perfect cover in a year or two.  (I can always change it in a year or two.)  And the chances of my even recognizing the perfect cover if a designer did it in a year or two, if I have no experience, are zilch.

As I said, this is the part where it’s not about publishing.  There are things you can only learn by doing.  Writing is one of them.  Cover design is another. (Though if I can find a design course in the local community college, I’ll take it.  Like writers’ workshops it won’t be a magic bullet, but it will probably help.  And I am taking Dean’s cover workshop.)

I could sit around and wait for that time when I’ll be perfect.

Somehow that time never comes, and it’s even less likely to come if I sit around waiting for it (witness what five years of no practice – part of it born of the frustration of seeing my mistakes and not knowing how to fix them – have done to my drawing.)

Look, I feel the exact same thing about writing.  When my first trilogy was published, I knew I wasn’t up to snuff.  I kept expecting people to come along and say “Hey, who let the amateur in?”  Now?  I don’t read it.  I’m sure the thumbs would show all over the clay. They would to me at least.  And yet, people love it.

But then, even though now I think I’m pretty up on my craft, if you force me to re-read one of my books (something I must do when getting back into a series) you’ll see me cringe.  Yes, even Darkship Thieves.

This is merely a sign I’m progressing.  Am I perfect?  Oh, heck no.  I hope never to be.  If I’m still working, I hope I’m still progressing… which means I’ll never be perfect.

So, what is this post all about?

Some things you only learn by doing.  You know those “Might have beens” – try them.  Make an effort.  If what stands between you and what might be is the consciousness of your own failure, give things a try.

First, you’re always your own worst critic (in fact, you should only worry if you think you’re perfect.)  Second, you will improve in the doing.  Third, while it’s embarrassing as heck, some things have to be learned in the public eye and on stage, as it were.  Because I can spend my life doing covers (or writing) and putting nothing up, but the ultimate test (“How does this sell?”) just won’t be there, and my subconscious will treat it as “just play” and eventually I’ll stop doing it. (Like my art.)

If what’s stopping you is that you aren’t perfect, consider that no one is ever perfect.  And you certainly won’t be if you don’t practice.

I don’t know why in certain artistic fields – and in a lot of non-artistic others, like public speaking or even software design – people think they have to be good to start.  In others: painting, music playing, dancing, sewing – people know that they’ll spend years practicing and years as apprentices.  All talent does is give you a leg up.  BUT it doesn’t make you perfect.

You aren’t a good writer?  Try it anyway.  You aren’t a good painter?  Try it and learn in the doing.  You aren’t a good cover designer?  Well, honey, neither is most of NYC.  You can’t explain politics eloquently?  Hon, give it a shot anyway, your voice is needed.  You want to do a podcast and aren’t sure about your voice?  Study what others are doing and learn.  You’ll improve.  You want a date, but don’t know how to approach women?  Well, as Jane Austen pointed out in Pride and Prejudice, that too is a matter of practice.

You learn in the doing.  You don’t do, you don’t learn.

You pays your money, you takes your bets.  Sometimes the paying down is in money, sometimes in time, sometimes it’s in effort.  And sometimes, after all your time and effort you find you’ll never rise above “competent” (if you really put time and effort in it, you’re unlikely to be lower than that.)?

Well, that would be tough.  But  if you don’t bet you can’t win.  And you’re left sitting by the fire with the memories of the life unlived.

What’s worse, you’ll never know how good you could get – if you’d only try and work at it.

 

 

I am  — right now – writing a character who is emotionally maimed because she FAILED to take crazy chances.  What I mean is, faced with a situation in which she could follow the rules and things would end badly or not follow them and have things end even worse, with a slim to non-existent chance of it all ending up well, she took the “follow the rules” and the lesser of two evils.  And she forever regrets the “what might have been.”

This has set me in a mode of thinking about it.  “What might have been” might be the toughest words in the English language, and I bet all of us over the age of twenty have an extensive collection of “what might have been.”  I do, you do, everyone does.

What might have been if we’d taken our meager savings and invested in Amazon, for instance.  (It’s not like I ever had any doubts they’d do well, either.  We just never got around to it.) What might have been if I’d ignored the agents and editors and continued writing space opera and throwing it at Baen, ten years before I did.  What might have been if I’d attended cons when we lived in the Southeast.

Now of my various regrets, most of them I can exonerate myself from.  To have done otherwise would have required either supernatural ability to see into the future – for instance, if I’d known twenty years ago what I know now about ebooks and indie selling, instead of spending my time writing short stories to submit to the small presses, etc, I’d just have done novels, some for Baen and some for the drawer.  But that would have required second sight or future-telling, or something, and though I have the occasional prophetic dreams and less occasional “feelings” (and yes, I’m still having the feeling that collectively we stand before the gates of hell and death is at our side, thank you so much for asking) I don’t actually have prophetic visions (what price the ability to call my younger self?  And besides, she’d ignore me, she’s a stubborn b*tch.)

Then there’s the fact that I look back and go “What was I doing?  Why did I think I could only write a book a year?  What was wrong with me?”  But that’s easy to say now, from where I stand, where I a) have a lot more practice, so book writing is faster, and b) don’t have toddlers around my ankles all day while rebuilding a house that we bought in a condition that needed rebuilding.  (And btw, I’m not saying that the 18 and 22 year old don’t get in the way but I – thank heavens – don’t need to bathe them or feed them with a spoon.)

But then there are other regrets, on the same order as my characters, and stuff like ‘Why didn’t I go to the cons in the Southeast’ fall under them.  I want to say “because I didn’t even know they existed” but that’s only part of the truth.  For one, one of my casual acquaintances back then was a published member of Horror Writers of America and I’m sure he HAD to have told me about the cons, right?  It’s more that I hated going out in public, was even more conscious of my accent than I’m now, and it was all too easy to convince myself not to do it and then ignore them.

Yet, at the time, taking the risk, meeting editors… Yes, maybe they’d hate me, but I have a feeling they wouldn’t.

And other stuff.  I still with that when we found ourselves profoundly unhappy with Dan’s job we had packed the car with cats and the few things we wanted to keep, sold everything else at a garage sale, announced the house for assuming with nothing done and driven to Denver.  People would have thought we were nuts, of course, but financially – not to mention emotionally – we’d have saved two years of h*ll, not to mention untold financial burdens.

Of course, that’s “what might have been” and what about that accident on the way to Colorado, where the escort (!) went off the street in snow and we all died, cats and all?  What accident?  Well, that too might have been, you know?  And it’s good to keep that in mind.

But on the other hand there is no reason not to… How do I explain this?

Pretend you’re a time traveler.  You just managed to come back to here now: your body, but a future mind.  Look around.  What aren’t you doing?  What are you failing to allow yourself to do: creative stuff, interesting stuff, learning stuff.

And then there’s the risks.  Last year Kevin J Anderson allowed to me audit his Superstars Writing Seminar, (which is happening again this year, and the early bird prices are about to go off.)  Listening to people tell the stories of how they broke in, how they had a massive breakthrough, how they got there, how they got attention, just about blew my mind.

I’ve never scaled the heights these people have been to, but I’ve also never taken the risks they have, the desperate all or nothing gambles.  Let’s just say that if I were in debt to my ears, and my lights were turned off, and there was no food in the fridge, I’d take whatever advance they gave me, instead of holding off for a big release.

And maybe that’s a mistake.  Ever since the seminar, I’ve been listening to other stories of great success (not just in writing) and almost every single time the gamble was enormous, far higher than everything I’ve done, than everything I’ve even considered.

And of course, part of this is my obligations.  I can gamble my money (could, if I had any) but not my family’s money and the kids’ educations.

Still, maybe a little more gambling is needed, a little more getting out of my comfort zone.  And not just in terms of “how can I advance my career” but – taking in account the feelings (not good) I have of what’s ahead (very not good) – how can I optimize my chances of surviving and of being able to support my family in the future.

This is where I am today.  My regrets unlike my character’s aren’t huge and irretrievable, but all the same, like Zen, I’m wondering “what’s the slightly crazy alternative I can take?  And how might it pay off?”

Saner blogging tomorrow – and a post at MGC in about half an hour or so.

 

So, I was listening to The Door Into Summer the other day, and as a throw away line on “how language has changed” he has a man threaten to punch out the main character for using “that word” in front of a lady.  I don’t remember what the word was.  (Weirdly, in Portuguese translation, which of course I read first and is still what I always remember, it was “queer.”)

I didn’t think much about it.  Why?  Because I’ve read/heard the book a million times, give or take a hundred thousand.

But yesterday I was reading Lileks Gallery of Regretable Food, and right at the beginning he apologizes (in essence) for making fun of food writing in the fifties because … well, he shows an advertisement for a supermarket, and there are all these baby carts and children parked outside, waiting for mommy and he said something like “Who are we to make fun of them when, in their society, it was safe to do this?”  (This was not news to me, btw, because some years ago a Scandinavian visitor got charged with child neglect for leaving her baby in a carriage outside a coffee shop while she went in.  Apparently it was still done wherever she came from.)

In the same vein – you know I read a lot of Rex Stout and for that matter a lot of pulp SF.  I won’t say that guys are always getting in fist fights, but there is often the threat of one, usually for something done to women and children.  (The most candid of the Heinleins on this is For Us The Living, in which the custom of fist fighting between men has been eliminated with the elimination of sexual jealousy, which is rather, you know, one of those ideas he got stuck in his head and couldn’t get out.  In his defense no one had tried it.  Now, fifty years of that great experiment later, we known added promiscuity doesn’t eliminate sexual jealousy, it just eliminates attachment.  Never mind.)

It’s funny, if you look at the early books, because the women aren’t at all upset by this – though they might get upset if a bigger guy hits a smaller one.  But only sometimes, which is why the Atlas systems commercials worked.  Women preferred the big brutes.

It is only in the sixties, with the rather stern pushing of the “sensitive man”  that women start acting like men fighting over them is some sort of terrible offense, and in fact men fighting at all is the sign of an oppressive patriarchy and stuff.

The culmination of the stupidity of women’s behavior in books and movies since then is the scene in Pirates of the Caribbean II where the woman has ONE JOB and that is to guard the stupid trunk, and instead she’s running after the men telling them not to fight.

Do women behave this way?  Sure they do.  Indoctrination works, and they’ve become convinced men fighting over them – or anything, in fact – is a sign of oppression and brutishness and stuff.  (You say that like it’s a bad thing, honey!)  I have in mind the idiot who was all upset because her boyfriend defended her in public from a drunk, because well, if she were upset she could defend herself.  (No, she couldn’t.  Men and women are different sizes and strengths.  She can only “defend  herself” because she can call on daddy government to put the mean evil man away.  That’s not adulthood, that’s simpering folly.  Daddy government also has troops, and if he turns on her, she’ll have no defense from HIM.  Sure it won’t happen.  Sure it won’t.  And what stops it, exactly?  Are you going to call on another government to punch government’s nose?  You probably think you are…)

It has become a trope to consider men doing this sort of jostling for position, even in defense of women and children as uncouth and uncivilized and, oh, yeah, patriarchal.

I never fully understood why “Patriarchal” is baaaad, but “matriarchal” is devoutly to be wished for.  Unless, of course, you never met any women, and your idea of mothers is a housewife in the fifties, ready to wipe every nose and tie every shoelace.

In fact, there have been very few real matriarchies (I’m not interested in your pre-historic fantasies.  Sex with dinos is more realistic) and those that have existed didn’t last very long, because, well – see that thing where women aren’t as strong or as large as men.  Also, for the record, this causes women rulers to behave in a different way.  For how, exactly, go and read about our cousins, monkeys and apes, in the wild.  Males establish their dominance by fighting, sometimes to the death.  But females – ah, females are something special, and anyone who has ever gone to an all girls’ school will know our species uses the same method – establish their dominance by bullying to such an extent that underling females stop ovulating, due to extreme stress.

The only people who believe a female hierarchy is peaceful and caring are males who look at it from the outside and see the dominant female’s constant interfering and “bless her heart” as a “caring” thing and not the horrible oppression it is.

The problem is women in the US – and little by little in the rest of the world, but not so much – have either bought into or found it convenient to pretend that male view of females was right.  (The women who buy into it tend to be chunky, middle aged, wear home made jewelry and talk about the Earth Mother a lot.)

They pretend that the male form of dominance is just wrong and barbaric, but the female is sainted, and leads to peace and caring.

So – this is where we are.  Men no longer fight in public, not even to defend women.  But women do still bully and push and shove in private, and drive other women insane.

Is society better for it?

I don’t know.  Someone was talking in the comments yesterday about the coarsening of society.

I’m one of those women who never felt much need to have a man protect me, but that was because in the time and place I came of age I was larger and stronger than most men (this doesn’t mean I was Helga.  I wore a size 7.  But, different food and stuff… and most men were shorter and smaller than I.  Also I am and have always been stronger than I look.)  So I not only would stop nonsense cold, but I often protected weaker females (often from other females.)

And I’m not going to tell you I ever found men punching each other out attractive as such.  I can even understand the roll of eyes, particularly with juvenile males, as they fought over nothing at all.

However, it is important to remember that humans aren’t angels.  Whether you believe someone created us or we “just growed” the truth is that we’re built on an ape frame.  And ape societies are established in a certain way.

Now we’ve made it impossible for men to establish their dominance structures but, more importantly, we made it impossible for men to police themselves.  A man can no longer come along and say “Hey, Miss, is this ape bothering you?” without risking the woman turning on HIM.

Is our society better for it?

As Lileks in the intro to his book, I have to say “Who are we to make fun of them?”

Instead of men jostling and threatening each other, we have women appealing to an all powerful government whom they want to guard, protect and look after them.

Again, what are you going to do when your government turns on you?  And what are you going to do if all those cozy things you voted for become oppressive?  The one who pays for you to give birth might also decide you need a forced abortion.  Why not?  Most other countries who have that kind of power have, at some point or another.  The one who pays to keep you in comfort will at some point decide that you’ve lived long enough.

Look, no one is arguing that some aspects of patriarchy could be very bad indeed, when patriarchy was taken to the extreme.  In the Victorian age, a woman could be a helpless prisoner of an awful marriage (though not as much as our literature would make it sound.)

But now women, who still need protection, and who still, instinctively, seek the most powerful male, are de facto hankering for a marriage with government.  Which can be the worst marriage of all, because there is no escape.

And as for aspects of the matriarchy – ask any woman who lives with her mother in law in a traditional society how loving and caring a tribe of females can be.

It takes decades of college education  indoctrination to believe that women rulers and kinder and more caring…

So, now when I read novels and two guys are bandying words (if novels reflect the truth it hardly ever came to actual blows.  A warning sufficed most of the time) over the way one of them was treating a woman or a child, I can’t even roll my eyes anymore.

Are we superior?  How are we superior?  How is it keeping the violent members of society from policing each other making us more civilized?  How is pretending men and women are exactly the same and their relationships are exactly the same even sane?

What happens when you build your entire society on a lie?  The lie that women need no protection might seem to favor women – but if it did, how many women would now be at the mercy of government, and how many children growing up fatherless.

It is always wrong to think of human genders as existing in isolation.  You can’t suppress patriarchy in its place without suppressing matriarchy in its place.  If men aren’t jostling for dominance, they also are not suppressing the bad actors in their midst and the women who think they’ve now become all powerful are in fact handed the dirty end of the stick and left powerless.

This Heinlein quote is wrong only because now many of the starry eyed idealists are female, but the rest stands:

All societies are based on rules to protect pregnant women and young children. All else is surplusage, excrescence, adornment, luxury, or folly, which can — and must — be dumped in emergency to preserve this prime function. As racial survival is the only universal morality, no other basic is possible. Attempts to formulate a “perfect society” on any foundation other than “Women and children first!” is not only witless, it is automatically genocidal. Nevertheless, starry-eyed idealists (all of them male) have tried endlessly — and no doubt will keep on trying.

You might not like it.  You might not think it applies to you.  You might think you’re all powerful and self-sufficient as a female – but sooner or later you’re going to need protection from the bad actors in the male community.

Why do you think it’s better to get it from a bureaucratic society that you cannot hope to stop or even to influence very far than from the decent man down the street?

You can laugh at the punching out matches in old books and movies, but look at our illegitimacy rate, our drugged-to-the-gills young women, our fatherless children, our dropping-out-of-society male youth.

Who are you to laugh at the structures of the past?

Okay, so I’ve rolled my eyes at the ever increasing amount of erotica in my non-erotica reading.  This isn’t a simple matter of “you got chocolate in my peanut butter, yum!”  When you get erotica in my romance, it might be sort of kind of excusable, at least when the erotica is relevant to the plot — it rarely is — well written — it VERY rarely is — and interesting — it never is, not in romances — but when you get erotica in my mystery, I start to go all frowny face.

Look, bub, unless she’s hiding a blade in her vagina and is going to slice the detective’s throat any minute now, I don’t want to hear, see, or be told about what went into her vagina and how many times.  No, Mr. Bond, I don’t want to know what you did with Gold Finger.  Or … never mind.

And when it comes to getting erotica into my historical non-fiction… Well!  Yeah, some people really were history’s greatest sluts, but when you go out of your way to mention that the common people were doing it on the streets, and then to introduce the chapter with a hot-and-heavy blow by blow (sorry, it had to be said) of people doing it on the streets — and the heartrug, and in the garden, and behind the carriage! — I get truly upset.  I read these things for research.  Research, dang it, and unless you are disclosing some new anatomical arrangement or some novel position that existed only in this time and place, I don’t want to hear it.  (“Do the Robespierre.  It will make you lose your head!”)

I’ve classified this as a disease of traditional publishing.  In a panic, unable to realize that it’s political correctness that has killed reading-for-fun, they stampede ahead towards more political correctness, more by-the-numbers inclusiveness (Now  more inclusive!), see the numbers fall, can’t figure out why (people with excellent liberal arts education aren’t made of stupid, but they’ve been trained to appear to be) and then discover that — wow — sex sells.  Even vapid, improbable implied sex with sparkly vampires or explicit even more improbable S & M with cardboard cutouts.

And then they scream like cartoon characters (people with excellent liberal arts educations aren’t cartoon characters, but they often act like them) “More.  More Twilight.  More fifty shades.”  All without realizing that when it comes to badly written romance or erotica a little constitutes a surfeit and like the jokes in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress that are “funny only once” these are “salable only once” or a very few times.

Instead, they take from this that “Sex sells” and then I get erotica in my peanut butt–  wait, no.  In my mystery and while mystery in my erotica (what is this?  A Hemipene?) might be acceptable, the opposite is not.  Or not in massive doses.  (“No, Mrs. Higgins, your removal of your clothes doesn’t distract me from my acquiring of clues to…. Oooh.  Is that a grappling hook?  What an unusual location for it!”)

But this at least is traditional publishing doing what traditional publishing does.  “More, more sparkling vampires.  Bring out the glitter!”

However, this weekend I found a new one and it’s indie.

No, seriously kids.  SERIOUSLY.  These are at most 5k words, are selling for 2.99 — okay, so I sell my shorts for 2.99.  Uh, my short STORIES.  But they’re not improbable copulation with the ancestors of birds!

What’s more interesting these women are MAKING A LIVING from this.

I take back everything I said about traditional publishing.  Perhaps their problem is that they haven’t gone far enough.  Perhaps…

Well, no, let’s recap.  What you can take from this is that NO, that story you have in the drawer is not too stupid to live.  Yeah, I mean that one where the knight gets it on with the ostrich.  Bring it out.  Put it up on Amazon.  Okay, your mom might die of shame, but hey, you’ll be able to pay for a real snazzy funeral.

Am I raging against this?  Well, no.  Seriously, I don’t often get surprised these days, but the fact these area selling just about made my jaw drop on the floor.  On the other hand, it is proof of my belief that no matter how strange your fixation, if you write it and publish it, and keep trying, eventually you’ll connect with people just as crazy as interested in it as you are.

All that agonizing you do over “is this the right thing to write?”  “Will anyone buy it?”  That’s old thinking.  Put it out.  Put it all out.

Why not?  T-Rex does!

*As a way of explanation — do I need to explain? — I have my internet turned off this weekend.  This is a means of trying to finish Through Fire and getting it to Baen this week, so I can write Darkship Revenge, and then bowl of red.  I hear that in the old days, in soccer teams trainers would separate the players from their wives, to make them more keen to play.  I’m not sure how that worked, unless, of course the wives were shipped to a small deserted island and forever out of reach if they lost the match, which I don’t think is likely, but who knows?  I will be responding to comments on the Fire (tablet) which is the only permitted internet access this weekend.  This means of course there will be specactulabulous auto correct errors, like Mucous for Lucius, but never mind.  I shall report on Tuesday on whether this worked, and by then we can decide whether to send soccer players’ wives to little deserted islands or not.  Meanwhile, Ms. Sabrina Chase, she who forges ahead where no indie has gone before — okay, where no hun has gone before — is here to tell us about the joys and wonders of producing your own indie audiobooks! I’d tell you to be gentle with her, but she’s one of you and can dish it out better than you can, so never mind.*

 

*I first met Pam years ago in Baen’s bar where she was a ware slush-reader.  That is, she was a slush reader for Baen and she sometimes came into my conference — the diner, natch — in her human form, to… I guess to realize some of us were worse off than her.  I have also been reading Pam for… a long time.  I don’t remember the first time she handed me one of her stories to read, and I don’t remember what the story was — chiluns, while prepping the Musketeers for going up, I realized I don’t remember a lick of what’s in those books — but I do remember I thought it as promising BUT suffering from contamination from her day job.  The last story of hers I read is much better, and I’m glad to see her making great strides and starting to sell her work on line.  Give her stories a try!  And give a warm ATH welcome — that means NO bad puns.  I know better than to ban ALL puns — to Pam Uphoff, now in her human form!*

Some Assembly Required

Pam Uphoff

 

I write both science fiction and fantasy, so I get to do a lot of world building.

It’s the most fun part of writing.

I like to start small. A single building. A house with a teenager playing a video game while his mom fixes dinner. A tavern, my characters chitchatting over desert. The kitchen of an abbey, with a young man chopping up vegetables. An office, the occupant sitting down with his first cup of coffee for the day.

Then I build the world outward, from there.

The city—or village, or countryside, or underground in Cheyenne Mountain—whatever I need for the story my subconscious is feeding me hints of. Counties, states, shires? Countries, kingdoms, planets?

And government.

Who has power over my characters?

A local government? Regional? National?

How does the President, King, or Conte collect taxes? Very important thing, those taxes, no world is complete without them.

Maybe we should analyze the real world as if it were fictional.

Because I think we all need to start small, and then build our understanding of the world outward.

Oh sure, I read about Syria, and Egypt and all the other trouble spots. I flinch from the pictures of the Boston Marathon, grind my teeth over Benghazi, hang my head in shame at the leadership of my nation. But the main impact of the Federal Government on my world is those checks I make out to the US Treasury.

In the real world, the next biggest tax bites are property and probably sales. My property taxes are collected as one, then split among school, sheriff, drainage district and the precinct. Oh, yes. My imaginary world needs schools, some sort of organized anti-crime organization, water, sewer, and street maintenance and repair. And if the population is growing, all new facilities, roads, and schools.

Creating an imaginary world can give one appreciation for the sheer amount of underpinnings our society has built as it grew and developed. And studying the real workings can enrich and complicate your imaginary worlds. It can make them seem very real. This is how the water system works. Here’s the city workers digging down to the broken sewer pipe and finding the skeleton of a man murdered twenty years ago! Oops. Ahem. Sorry. I’m a writer. These ideas just invade my mind.

When you get your nose out of the newspaper and put aside the considerations of foreign affairs and never ending economic stimulus, the local scene is astonishing.

And if Armageddon ever comes, keeping those local foundations up and running will prevent a lot of the collapse of society.

But in a crisis, everyone pulls together.

This slow sucking decline we’re in, the stress everyone is feeling . . .  That when tempers flare. When houses are lost and people move away. When the widow is reduced to penury, and the youngsters can’t find jobs, people get ugly.

As a writer, I have to show that in my imaginary world. As a member of this real life community, I have to jump in and help, here and there. Defuse a situation, hire a young man to do a job I could do myself, drop off a bag of groceries where it’s needed.

And _then_ go back and read the newspapers. Understand that Syria means that the neighbor’s son is going to be back in danger. That the nephew who’s out of the Army could be recalled. To understand that MegaCorp buying OtherCorp probably means several hundred people right here suddenly without a job. That this or that county or state government funding this program means that program will face cuts. That the Federal Government mandating something means more paperwork for teachers. That the Federal Government sternly promising more oversight so who-know-what won’t happen again means it’ll take two extra hours to get a permit, and no doubt it’ll cost more.

The larger scale governments have started to seriously impact the smaller. Or maybe I’m just finally aware of that. I’m beginning to see that to save the underpinnings of society, we need to protect not just ourselves from the federal government. We need to protect our local government from the federal government.

Each layer has a proper field of endeavor, a proper scope to their oversight and control. The drainage district doesn’t have input into the school curricula. The Federal government ought not be able to tell someone they can’t fill in a low spot in their yard that’s breeding mosquitoes because it looks like wetlands to them. Their business ought to be looking outward at the rest of the world, and inward only to things that cannot be handled at the state level. Like maintaining a monetary system. The military. Protecting civil rights, the rule of law. The interstate highway system. And yes, some environmental issues as well, as little air and water pollution will stay put in the state where it is generated. Patent and copyright issues are important to encourage creativity in both the arts and the sciences. There’s a ton of stuff that could easily be argued as being properly under Federal control.

It’s much more comfortable in my imaginary worlds. I can make the local, regional and national and planetary governments stick to their own stuff. Or whip up popular pressure or an actual rebellion, according to my stories’ needs.

How do we do it in the real world?

We talk. We vote. We see the alternate news on the ‘net, and we don’t blindly accept the mainstream media. And it changes very little, very slowly, if at all.

So we’d better all learn the local system, and figure out how to best maintain it. How to make it ours. Because at the Federal level, everything is looking grim. They seem determined to destroy jobs, the medical system we’ve got, however flawed, the currency and the economy.

I think we need to save America by each saving our own town, city or county. Maybe we can save whole states, once the Feds collapse.

And maybe we can then rebuild a small, limited, federal government that will stick to its own job. My only suggestion is, keep the Constitution. And make the Feds keep to it.

Why do I think the Federal Government is headed for a crash and make over?

It’s because, in my fictional world actions have consequences.

The real world is complex enough that consequences often aren’t obvious. Many times they take a long time to arrive. But they are there. And they’re on the way.

This is the real world, and we can’t write it off.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  This is pre-first-draft, as it comes out.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon be taken down (once edited) and put for sale on Amazon (It’s now done and with editor and we’re getting the cover done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  (Meanwhile, if you donate $6 or more, I’ll get you a copy of Rogue Magic, once finished and edited, in your favored ebook format when it’s done.  Of course, if you’re already subscribing to the blog at a level at which you get whichever books come out that year, you don’t need to worry. )*

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

 

The Gamble.

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

 

After a while it became clear how to outwit the beast.  We couldn’t use magic alone, not while fully enveloped in the creature – or at least not unless we laid the spell in an unusual way.

Which is how we found ourselves, with ropes around our waists walking single file along one of those narrow ridges that I believed were the very flesh of the creature in whose gut we were trapped.

We consisted of the king Hanuman and his monkeys, most of them in Monkey form —  though Hanuman himself had a disturbing tendency to shift in and out of his ape form – and myself, and Miss Blythe, and Betsy.  We brought up the rear, or rather I did, with Betsy walking ahead of Miss Blythe, and Miss Blythe ahead of me.  This formation was necessary in case one or the other of the girls should lose their footing on the slippery pink ledge.

When Betsy slipped, miss Blythe would hold her, and likewise if she slipped, I’d hold her.  As for me, I took great care not to slip, as we’d been told that the foamy liquid foaming a foot or so beneath us, and filling a cavity the size of a natural lake was – in this part of the beast – pure acid.  Hanuman had said one of his monkeys had fallen in it, and they’d not even retrieved the skeleton.

This was born out by the smell which was much like what I’d smelled once at an engraving plant – acrid and acid, seemingly burning the nose as we breathed.

Which was a concern, since, if this didn’t work out, then we would be in the liquid, anyway.  Or at least I would be, having made up my mind to that I would be first to try this.  My magic, my responsibility, my fate.

“Are you sure this will work?” Miss Helen Blythe asked, leaning back so that I could hear her, and, in the process, almost slipping.  I put an arm around her waist and tried to tell myself it was all to keep her from tripping and dissolving.  The thought of Miss Blythe dissolving, or indeed suffering any untoward fate was unbearable.  I’d come on this adventure to protect her, and I was a full grown man, with full knowledge of the vagaries of the world and its traps.  If anyone deserved to pay for any mistakes made it was me.  She was little more than a girl out of the schoolroom, and she couldn’t have known how unadvisable this adventure was.  She certainly couldn’t have known about the rogue magic plaguing the world and what effect it would have upon her.

I debated whether I should lie to her, but I had a feeling this young woman had already had too many lies in her short life and would be bound to know if I prevaricated.  “No,” I said.  “I’m not even more than half confident.  But there doesn’t seem to be any other choice.  So I’ll do it, I’ll be the first to go.  And then, if I fail—”

“We’ll be trapped in the beast’s gut forever?” she asked.

“Well, no,” I said.  “At least you get to live.  And if you or Hanuman don’t come up with another scheme in no time, I’m much mistaken.”

“But then why try it at all?” she asked.  “Surely one of us three will come up with another scheme soon.”

“Not that I can think of,” I said.  “And Hanuman is impatient.  Besides, this scheme has some hope of working.  Perhaps not high, but some hope.”

She shivered against me, and I realized I still had an arm around her waist.  I let go, but took hold of her upper arm, because she must be guarded against chance slips.

“How horrid,” she said.  “Well try one thing after another and each of us will fall into this terrible liquid and be destroyed.  Or die some other way, till in the end there is only Hanuman and his monkeys.  Perhaps we’re not the first humans he’s recruited?”

I bit my lip.  “We shouldn’t think such gloomy thoughts,” I said.

“Why not?  If they are true?  What are the chances of your succeeding?”

I sighed.  “Three in ten, maybe.  Not that one can calculate magic chances precisely in these circumstances and under these situations.  I don’t have my magical charts.”

She looked back, her little face pale amid the dark curls.  “Doesn’t God disapprove of self murder?  Don’t you have anything–  anyone you’d live for?”

“My son—” I said, before I could stop myself, and thoughts of my child put a heavy weight in my heart.  Mom would do the best she could for him, but it might not be much.  Truth be told, I wasn’t sure I could do much more.  Magic children weren’t meant to live in the normal world.

“You have a son?  Then you have a wife too?”

“No, his mother—”

We stopped, because Hanuman had stopped suddenly, and there was much shuffling and holding as we grabbed each other to keep from slipping.

Hanuman was in a larger, projecting promontory, if such terms can be used when inside an animal.

We all filed after him into this little projecting platform, standing cheek to jowl in such a way that it barely contained all of us.

“Well, Mr. Wolfe,” he said.  “The time has come to try your magic.”

As he spoke, one of his monkeys was clambering up into the dim depths of what looked like a cavern ceiling above us, but must be the upper walls of the creature’s stomach.  He affixed a hook to something there, and from the hook there dangled a rope.

The rope was brought to me.

“Climb up, Mr. Merrit, and show us how it’s done.”

“No!” Miss Blythe said.  “Let me try it.  He’s the greater magician and he—”

“No, indeed, Miss Blythe,” Hanuman said.  “His magic it is and he must bank on it.”

I hadn’t climbed a rope since my days in school, but this one had been knotted so I had somewhere to edge my feet.  That said it was still hard at my age, to engage in such athletics.  Particularly hard when the monkeys stopped holding the rope and it swung vertically, like a pendulum on a clock, with me doing the turn of the weight at the bottom.

The base of the rope disappeared into the liquid and gave off a most strange smell.

You see, the thought was that this was the largest chamber within the creature.  And that I must be in it, as far away from the flesh as possible, and then let go even of the rope because that was still attached to the creature, while the spell took effect.  If it worked, I’d be transported back to Earth.  If it failed…

I’d made little pre-packaged spells for everyone, contained in the powder inside tiny transparent envelopes whose provenance I’d rather not know.

As I climbed the rope, it was hard to avoid the thought of that lake of acid below.  But I must climb as high as possible, so I had more room to fall – and perhaps transport – before I hit.  The question was, of course, had the magic gone rotten here too?

No use asking.

I was sweating by the time I made it to the top.

Tearing the little envelope – I really didn’t want to know its provenance.  It was rather like sausage casings – with my teeth, I released the powder and said the one activating word, “Abras.”

And then I let go of the rope, and fell, tumbling head over heels towards the lake of acid and certain death.