According To Hoyt

For previous chapters, click here

*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 half done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  I hope to finish MY edits and cut and add this weekend — I almost made it last weekend —  at which point it will take another two weeks at the editor).  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.  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

 

A Night Escape

 

Akakios Phillandrus, Earl of Yelverton:

 

I’d let them change my last name, and I suppose “friend of mankind” was appropriate.  At any rate, we had no last names, and with the herd I’d only been known as Prince Akakios.  And I’d accepted the diminished title that Night Arrow, king of Fairyland, had negotiated with the king of Brittania.

It didn’t matter, at any rate.  I’d known when I left the herd with lady Caroline that I’d never go back again.  The prophecy said that to help restore the true king I must give up fairyland, and I did.  With a light heart?  Does anyone ever give anything up with a light heart when they’ve known nothing else?  All I knew from birth was the herd.  Even before I changed into my centaur form the first time at five, and was taken from my mother to the company of my father’s herd at six, the village was all the wives of the herd, and the children were those who went with me when I was moved to the herd, as same-year-colts and friends and companions.

I made the decision, I thought, with open eyes, but I hadn’t thought through all that it entailed.  No one could.

I know I am lucky to end up with a title and a fortune, but I’d thought that perhaps the Darkwaters would take me into their family circle and treat me as one of them.

Nothing prepared me for this school.

I did not get sent to Eton.  I believe it was well meant.  I was older than most students there, already, and also, I was too odd.

So instead I was sent to St. Agur’s.  St. Agur’s was a school originally funded by monks.  It wasn’t exactly a school for delinquent children.  And it wasn’t exactly a school for magical orphans, like those, charity and not, which dotted the land and catered to byblows of noblemen and common people; people conceived of elves and other fairykind; and the inexplicably magically talented commoner.

Instead, it was a combination of all three.  Oh, not delinquents as such, but young gentlemen who had trouble accommodating to polite society, sometimes because their parents had only recently ascended to their honors.

It wasn’t hell, exactly, but within a month I’d decided it was one of the antechambers.  I’d also decided first that His Grace of Darkwater could not know what it was like, and then that he probably did, and didn’t realize how hellish it would be for me.

First, because the things I thought were most hellish might not have bothered a normal human.  For instance, the first time I got severely scolded I didn’t realize it.  I got told that my performance in the game field wasn’t “quite the thing” and it wasn’t until the shunning administered by my classmates that I realized I’d transgressed rules by playing as we played in the herd, with full body and full force.  To have to reign in and fit in made me feel awkward, and I couldn’t behave like all the others if I tried.

Second because what made it truly hellish was the confinement.  I knew I couldn’t change into horse form in this world, and therefore must learn to live as a human.  But I dreamed every night of galloping through open fields, of running unhindered for miles, as we had in the herd.  I dreamed of fragrant fields, and I wondered how my orchard was doing back home.

It was as though I were a prisoner in this human skin, and unable to break out of it.

The Duke of Darkwater would see only that there were many boys my age and older, that we were almost all new to the nobility of this land, if not to this land, and that I might make friends.

I hadn’t made friends.  There was a lad who was a lion shifter, and who’d become sort of a protégée, but being 5 years younger than I, he was more little brother than friend.

I’d applied myself to my lessons – even with the herd, I’d been always eager to learn – and tried to get through this as fast as possible.

The one bright spot in this existence, and the reason St. Agur’s had been picked was that Caroline – Lady Caroline, that is, the sister of the Duke of Darkwater – whom I’d met in my adventures, and who was my affianced wife, bound by promise to marry me as soon as we came of age, had been put in a school just down the road.  My school was all male and hers all female.  We got together with her school for dances and picnics, for strolls in the park and for such social activities, so I saw her once a week.  And though I still wasn’t allowed to run, I could always talk with Caroline, and she would always understand me.

So when I woke up in the middle of the night with the warning running in my head, my first thought was of her.  And when I realized I was mid-shift, my only thought was of her.

I got off my bed, quickly, before it collapsed under my weight, and thanked all divinities that the Duke of Darkwater had paid extra to get me a private room.  I stood, on my four hooves, in the little room, and looked at myself in the mirror.  They’d made me cut my hair at shoulder length, but other than that, I looked as I did when I ran with the herd.

And that was wrong.  There shouldn’t be enough background magic on Avalon to allow me to shift. Wrong in the sense of disturbing, was also the warning that had awakened me, my father’s voice in my head, telling me the king had been replaced and kidnapped or killed by an hostile power, and that my land was under attack.  He said the prohibition on me to reenter fairyland might be moot, but if not, yet I must contact Lord Darkwater and make him help them.  The king of fairyland was Darwater’s half brother.  This concerned the family.  And Darkwater was the king’s Witchfinder, tasked with dealing with all magical problems from other worlds, and this was in his purvey.

This too necessitated Caroline.  But it was the middle of the night.  I could wait till tomorrow and ask for someone to send a message to Duke.  But, other than the sheer consternation at finding me in Centaur form, and perhaps demands to shift back, which I wasn’t entirely sure I could, magic feeling the way it did around me, I doubted they would send a message, or send it soon enough.

The easiest thing would be to take advantage of my own hooves – harder than the ones of Earth horses, and not in need of shoes – and get Caroline, and make it to the Darkwater estate as fast as hooves can carry me.

I looked at my image in the mirror and frowned.  Dark curls, broad shoulders, a bare chest.  The thing was, in the herd, I’d gone barechested, of course.  It was how we lived.  Oh, sometimes we tied on cloth for decoration, or bandoliers in which to carry things, but we didn’t wear clothes unless in human form.  BUT here, if seen running like this through the road, I’d be taken for some wild invader from fairyland.  And besides…  My image looked at me from the mirror with pursed lips, Caroline was a young lady of good breeding.  My bare chest would shock her.

So I opened my closet and brought out a clean shirt, and a jacket.  Stepping as carefully as I could so as not to wake the house, I went to the washstand where a pitcher kept water warm for morning washing up, and washed my face and hands.  I didn’t need to shave yet, which was good, as I didn’t wish to light a lamp.

In the band I’d have tied my hair back with a bandana, but here, I simply tied my hair back, as I did for lessons.

If you think creeping down a corridor and three flights of stairs on horse’s hooves is easy, you should try it yourself.  There is a reason people rarely ride horses up the stairs or, worse, down them.

It seemed like years later, and was probably half an hour, when I eased the latch on the back door and erupted out into the moonlight.  I was sweaty, shaky, nauseous, and feeling like this was the worst thing I’d ever done, and not just because of the climb down the stairs.  I was very afraid the Earl of Darkwater would disapprove.  But there was no remedy.

I closed the door again carefully, and waited till I was off the grounds and on the road to gallop.  Galloping felt so good I had to force myself into the grounds of St. Claire’s, the girl’s school.

Caroline had shown me the window of her dormitory.  I knelt to pick up pebbles from the driveway and started throwing them at the window.

Presently it opened.  I whispered as loudly as I dared at the form that appeared on it, “Caroline Ainsling.  I must see Caroline Ainsling.”

From the  window came a giggle and something that was not a whisper, though it might have thought it was.  “Oooh, Ainsling.  It’s a centaur.  And he wants you.”

I am Spartacus* because for all too long I stayed quiet.  I stayed quiet because baby needed shoes (often literally) and I needed work in a biased field that would blacklist me as soon as they knew my true self.

I allowed my loyalties and beliefs to be assumed from external appearances and origins – I allowed them to believe I must be extreme left because I’m female, of Latin origin, and have somewhat more than a Master’s degree in Modern Languages and Literature. (I would go back for the doctorate, I would, but I’m not willing to stay quiet anymore.)  Those years of festering silence weigh within me, and in the scales of eternal justice I’m afraid I’ll get counted with the enemies of Liberty, because I was quiet, I consented.

I am no longer quiet.

I am Spartacus writ small.  I am Spartacus praying that I never need to stand  physically facing the might of the largest power the world has ever known.  I can tell who would lose. Because of that I am battling in the mind, to avoid the evil hour as long as I can yet. Maybe, if a miracle occurs, to avoid it altogether.

I’m fully aware that even in this battle of the mind the consequences can be death or worse.  I’m fully aware that once you identify as an enemy of the utopia to come – or even if you just fall in a category they don’t like – there are a million ways for death to come: in the dark of night, with a bullet to the back of the head, like the Polish officers in the Katyn forest; in public trials like the people who thought “if only Stalin knew”; in the despair of an engineered famine like the victims of the holomodor.  No, we haven’t got there yet, but there are ways for a living death too: anyone know where Nakoula B. Nakoula is?  And we won’t talk of the unjustified hounding of the lady who runs True the Vote.  There are ways to drive you to darkness and despair, even now.  And if they can get away with it, it will only get worse.

I am Spartacus because they think a hellish mix of Brave New World and 1984 is a consummation devoutly to be hoped for.

I am Spartacus because I have two sons and might have grandchildren.  For the generations uncounted ahead, mine or others, with my blood or not, I am Spartacus so they don’t have to live with a boot stomping on a human face forever.

I am Spartacus because our institutions are being corrupted, our system of checks and balances ignored, and we’re being ruled by Imperial Dictate by a blind man who sees the world through instruments and his instrument is an ideology made of Hegelian dialectic and fury signifying nothing and leading to death.

I am Spartacus because our betters have decided that the national debt no longer needs to be reported and that it will now simply be copy pasted from the total about two weeks ago, forever.  And because they believe this can go on forever.

I am Spartacus because our media are palace eunuchs gazing avidly at the harem of power and stroking their impotent pens in time to the rape of our liberties.

I am Spartacus because Benghazi.

I am Spartacus because our voting system is corrupted beyond belief and the political elites have sewn themselves into a cocoon of fraud, via mail-in-ballots and voter fraud and fight against any attempt to clean the mess even minimally – because they know they’d never win another election again, if the elections were only as corrupt as they are, say, in India.

I am Spartacus because Fast and Furious.

I am Spartacus because a Rodeo Clown CAN laugh at the king.  As can we all.  As SHOULD we all.

I am Spartacus because of a bloodied handprint on the wall of an embassy in Benghazi.  I am Spartacus because four men were abandoned to die, and might have been set up to do so.

I am Spartacus because of 300 and some murdered Mexicans so the precious flowers in DC could prove their false-but-accurate inner truth in the ridiculous, vile plot that was Fast and Furious.

I am Spartacus because you can’t get blood from a stone or money from people who have been hanging on by their fingertips and because you can only run the printing presses so fast.

I am Spartacus because Fast and Furious.

I am Spartacus because political speech should not be punished with audits.

I am Spartacus because while the United States isn’t blameless – which human institution is? – it has nothing to apologize for, and a tour of apology should have been enough for a treason trial.  It gives aid and comfort to the enemy and endangers the Republic.

I am Spartacus because of the UNREAD Obamacare bill, passed by legalistic shennenigans and putting my life in the hands of bureaucrats.

I am Spartacus because the Founding Fathers are turning in their graves so fast that if we put leads in there, we’d solve all our energy problems – forever.

I am Spartacus because Benghazi.

I am Spartacus because summer of recovery 1, and 2, and 3, and 4, and 5… and?

I am Spartacus because at some point you have made enough money – AND THAT’S FOR YOU TO DECIDE, not bureaucrats.  And if you never think you’ve made enough money, that’s your decision.

I am Spartacus because Fast and Furious.

I am Spartacus because I want the government to leave me alone.

I am Spartacus because I DID build that.

I am Spartacus because our schools are horrendous, and now we don’t even have standards — or requirements — to learn American history or culture in the schools.  It’s permitted not to teach them at all.  Or to teach whatever crazy version you please.

I am Spartacus because the Feds have no business in education — none.

I am Spartacus because wise Latina does not qualify you for the most powerful law body in the land – no race, not ethnicity, no characteristic of birth or position SHOULD.  Only hard work and intelligence and devotion to the constitution.

I am Spartacus because Benghazi.

I am Spartacus because I’m tired of everything being “racist” or “sexist” as a means of stopping speech.

I am Spartacus because of insanity over brown bagging it, and women in chain mail bikinis — and these are my middle fingers at all that.

I am Spartacus because there are crimes so great, so heinous, so horrible that they scream to the ages for vengeance and cleansing and their horror cracks the vault of heaven.

I am Spartacus because Fast and Furious.

I am Spartacus because Benghazi.

I am Spartacus because Fast and Furious.

I am Spartacus because Benghazi.

I am Spartacus because Fast and Furious.

I am Spartacus because Benghazi.

To stop the crazy train, to preserve as much as I can of the greatest nation the world has ever known, I Am Spartacus.

To this end I pledge my life, my fortune and my sacred honor.

And no, I don’t think it’s a joke.  This has long since stopped being just a game.

*The Spartacus this refers to is the myth of the brave slave standing against the Roman empire and how everyone claims to be him in the climatic scene.  The original book, as written, was a lance thrust at the US by having Rome as a stand in, and made some sort of paradise out of ancient Germania.  We won’t go into that.  Rome was unspeakably vile, but withal, it was as much more civilized than its neighbors as we are from people who behead seven year olds in honor killings.

UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit readers and thank you Glenn Reynolds for the link!

We’ve talked about this before, but in fact, I don’t think there has ever been a country like ours, where our elites are deliberately taught – in our best schools – to hate and despise everything that we are, everything that makes us unique.  I don’t think there has ever been another country where our elites are taught to be ashamed to call themselves by our national name.

Or rather, there have been countries like that – but they were countries who’d lost a war, and where the governing elite were in fact puppets of their erstwhile enemy, sent in to utterly destroy what the country used to be and to make sure that it did not rise again and (maybe) next time win the war.

Did we lose the cold war?  Well, of course not.  Of course we didn’t. The Sov Union fell apart.  Their internal economy was a shambles – communism does that – and they are suffering the fate of the defeated in a material and obvious way.  The name for prostitute in most of Europe (and the Arab countries) is Natasha. Their population is crashing.  Their men are dying of alcoholism and internally they are being taken over by a hostile minority.  Ignore the invasion of Georgia, those are the spasms of the dying bear.  It’s inevitable, in material terms to be aware that when it comes to the si devant Sov union  the applicable Latin phrase is Vae Victis.

But here’s the thing – long before communism had lost the cold war, it had won the propaganda war.

Part of this was their saber rattling and the craven and raw nature of our intellectual classes.  Craven because they know themselves to be weak.  Dueling with your mind might be an exciting sport – it is, I know, I do it – but it avails nothing when confronted by thugs with hobnail boots.  Most of those who labor in the vineyard of words find themselves utterly naked and defenseless in even the most minor physical confrontation.  (Note, I said most, not all.  I would not advise you to pick a fight with most of Baen.  Even myself and Dave Freer who are relatively mild put bite into any fight – he, because he’s a devious bastage and I say that in the most profound affection [if I ever govern anything he’ll be my secretary of dirty tricks.  The man has no bounds.] and I because I’m built like a tank and I berserk.)  So they both turn coward – and justify it in big words – by cleaving to the people they think are going to invade and kick their butts.  Now it’s Islam, but once upon a time it was communism; and they glorify and have a sort of hard on for violent sorts.  Hence, their worship of that despicable, blood tinged psychopath, Che.

And they were really scared of communism.  It also made sense in their minds – communism, I mean – as it can only make sense in the minds of people who live in the sheltered world of academia or the irrational world of art.  And so… they turned.

And they do influence public opinion.

I wonder how much the Sov Union had to put behind the effort.  My dad told me that the Sov Union spent quite a lot on Agit prop in western countries, the United states most of all.

But then there’s the nature of the beast, as it were – most communists in the US were by nature what we’d class as “radical losers”.  They were outcasts, for some reason or another, (the ugly women, the little men – no, seriously, in Europe in the seventies this was as good a predictor as any of who would go commie.) And most of them were not very effective.  There are stories that some guy in NYC got millions from the Sov Union for which he wrote careful receipts, and which he spent in the most bizarre projects imaginable, failing even to enrich himself.  (Whether it’s true or not that they bought the SF magazines wholesale, I’m not equipped to comment.  The rumor does go around and one does wonder how they could afford to play with New Wave and crash their readership.  Never mind.  A lot of others are doing it, so it might be an ideology uber alas thing.  Something to which humans are prone.  I think it was more like most of the media coordination, a matter of people wanting to be “cool” and “with it” – but then there is always journolist.  This might be one of those watchmacallits of history because those who know will take it with them to their unquiet graves.)

So you see, communism doesn’t work, and no one who has ever run a business, or worked for a business that actually depends on selling its products, or in fact done anything productive can believe it does.

But it makes a total conquest of intellectuals, academics, and people who feel the “real” world doesn’t compensate them enough and that they’re way too smart for the common herd.

There was a time back in the eighties and early nineties when the edifice tottered.  There were whispers about how things really were in the USSR and the more moral of the communists distanced themselves.

They’ve gone back now.  Embraced the mantra that it just wasn’t done “right”.

Which of course is the fault – sorry, but it is – of the US when the crash happened.  At the time they were dying for aid.  They must have it, or the collapse would have turned violent.

The price for that help should have been trials.  We should have – in Heinlein’s phrase – Hung the commissars with their own guts. More importantly, we should have exposed it all, and let the effluvium of seventy years of human wretchedness, perfidy, greed and horror wash out over our mass media.

We didn’t.  They were allowed to save face.  They were allowed to recoup – here if not at home.  (Though the reign of Putin means something.)

Few people have read The Black Book of Communism – which should be taught in our schools, in every grade, in grade-appropriate chunks – but our highs chools boast Howard Zin’s People’s History which is the Soviet view of America; Young Hegelians clubs and hipsters decked in Che Guevara.

The “Well educated” are in fact indoctrinated, taught communist propaganda and syllogisms until they’re UNABLE to think.  We now have an administration composed of people like this, who are unable to connect to reality.  They might be our first Marxist administration, but they suffer from third generation blight, not having come to their opinions from their own mind, but having been browbeaten into them.  They are the good kids, trapped in an illusion from which they can’t break out.

But the d*mned ineradicable fact about communism and its cousin “state capitalism” and the hellish hybrid they’re trying out here is that it doesn’t work.  IT NEVER WORKS.  It doesn’t work even when instituted by very bright psychopaths.  It works even less when instituted by people so indoctrinated they can’t SEE reality.

And it will crash here – hard or soft, with a bang or a whimper.  It will crash and it might drag the rest of the world with us into the endless night.

Tell me how would an alien think the Cold War ended?

Is the cold war ended?

When will it end?

Must we fight it here, on our soil, as it turns hot, and hang our own commissars from their own guts?

Vae Victis!

Welcome Instapundit readers, and thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link.  For those who don’t know it, this is my hobby, not my dayjob, which is writing fiction, so pardon the typos and the general mess of a post written before coffee.

UPDATE: There is an entirely different post at MGC, where I’m Robbing Graves For Fun and Profit!

No, I’m not talking about writing.  I wish I were.  It is way safer.  And it doesn’t make me wake up screaming and pummeling the pillow with the fist of death.  (We go through pillows like you wouldn’t believe it.)

I’m talking about how we experience history – not just what we think of as “history” but also what we think of as personal history – and what really makes humans tick, which is not real history – i.e. what they’ve experienced – but convincing narration.

I used to have near eidetic memory – I didn’t know this, until my husband informed me of it.  To me it was just memory – until I gave myself severe concussion thirteen years ago.  What I mean is that it was a total puzzle to me why people needed memo pads or calendars, and most people, even my friends, annoyed me by telling me the same story more than once or by engaging in what I called “rewriting history.”

That last part I now understand – having looked at life from both sides now, as it were – is often not intentional.  In fact, I have to tell you that I was considerably more neurotic when I could remember everything in sharp relief and unblinblinking.  In fact, I had to remember everything in sharp relief and unblinking.  This meant I couldn’t soften the edges of my own mistakes, or attribute to myself less obnoxious motives than what had operated at the real time, and definitely there wasn’t room for the comforting “I meant to mess that shot, ah ah” even ten years down the road.

This meant I lived with the unflinching memory of my own short comings.  I’ve come to think much more highly of myself now that my past sort of blurs together.  But I also find myself clustering events according to what I now believe were logical impulses and/or changing what I was thinking at the time to a more flattering or less culpable form of twerpitude.  What I mean is if I’m faced with something written at that time, I often realize my memory is way too kind to myself.

Most humans are like this, and therefore most humans’ internal narration of the past is flawed in a way that allows them to live with themselves – it also is what really drives them.  The driving motor of the world is NOT what really happened but what the most convincing and pleasing narration tells us happened.

My mom was the keeper of the narration in the household, and it drove me bananas in terms of “rewriting history” which, of course, at the time, I thought was intentional, but I now see it was notional, because I do it with my own kids.  “One of the kids used to like such and such, now which one? – Oh, yes, it must have been Robert because—”

One of the things that my mom annoyed me madly about was saying that when I was little I used to get car sick.  This drove me bananas.  Even now, as an adult, I’ve got car sick exactly three times, two aggravated by lack of sleep and having coffee on an empty stomach, and one after having drunk a great deal too much (which for me is an amazing quantity.  No, trust me.)

But as a kid, the fact my brother got car sick and I didn’t got interpreted – as just about everything in which we differed – as a badge of adulthood on his part.  I did everything including try to unfocus my eyes to make myself sick and/ or hit my head against things.  It didn’t work.

However my mom says – and is convinced of – I made our early car trips unbearable because they had to stop all the time for me to be car sick.  This makes perfect sense if you factor in the biases: one of her kids got car sick.  My brother was older and male.  I was female and very sickly anyway.  So it must be me.  It fits the narration better than the truth does, so it has become part of the myth, and other people in the family (though of course not my brother!) believe it and refer to it as though it happened.  They think my brother and I are insane for insisting otherwise.

This was my first exposure to how the power of the myth that fits is what shapes people’s beliefs of what happened, more than reality which they experienced at least peripherally (i.e. – they were there at the time).

Later I experienced this in funnier ways.  There was a lady who did the turn of pre-school/kindergarten teacher in the village – though not really, because she taught reading, writing and arithmetic, to kids as young as three, and yep, it was strictly disciplined.  What had happened was that the government had got shirty about ages of going into school and there were official birth certificates and everything, beyond the mere “Well, I reckon my little Antonio must be about seven, because he was born three years before the great storm which brought down the oak tree” – which was normal in my dad’s time.  Well, the villagers were used to their kids  — those of families thus inclined – going to school when the parents thought they were ready to read and cypher, and found it inconvenient to prolong early childhood because the government said so.  So at three or four, or when we started to show an interest in knowing how to do things, they would pack us off and send us to Dona Maria, who lived in a cottage at the edge of the village and who was the remnant of the pre-official schooling in the region.  And then at six or seven or whenever they were allowed (being born in November, I couldn’t go till seven) they packed us off to “official” school.  (Some of the reason to teach you earlier was that many of the farmers needed their kids to start manning the selling of produce and dairy at an early age, and to be able to keep records.  The same with women who worked at home bringing their daughters into the job by ten or so – when they left fourth grade.  Childhood was considered an uneeded luxury for most of the village, even if I got to have a rather idyllic Tom-Sawyerish one.)

I didn’t learn Dona Maria’s history till much later but it would be familiar to anyone who reads regencies – though of course it took place at least a hundred years after. – She was a young woman of “good families” who fell for a “rake” probably a married one, and ran away with him… to this nowhere village, where he bought her a cottage and established her as his “convenient” until he got tired of her.  At which point she traded on the fact that she knew how to read and write – rather well – and how to teach fine work – embroidery, lace, crochet – to the girls in the village, and made a very meager living from this (I mean, half the time she was paid in potatoes or leftovers.  She liked having my family in, because we had “real jobs” outside the village and paid in cash.)  [I’m not sure, by the way, how it slates with my own great aunt who was schoolmistress before her, quitting the business.  I suspect my aunt left it in her forties or so, when her husband was finally doing well enough that she didn’t NEED to teach.  She taught my dad who is now eighty, but my aunt had to be in her forties or later because she was much older than my grandmother –and I’m going to guess Dona Maria was twenty or thirty years older than my dad, because she died in her eighties, about twenty five years ago.  As an example of history no one thought it important to tell me, I can’t be sure, but I’m going to guess Dona Maria stepped into “village schoolmistress” when aunt Laura either decided it wasn’t worth it, or had already retired.]  Anyway, the old lady died respected and respectable in her eighties twenty five years ago.  BUT before she died, I met her on the street a year or so after I got married – that this hadn’t happened in about 20 years or so is actually explainable as she lived mostly in the upper village and my parents’ house is in the lower village, compounded by the fact that she used to work all day, and I wasn’t out in the evening.  She called me over, very excited to see me, and there was one of those awkward conversations old teachers have with you (which considering she brought me to grandma after a few months and told grandma to teach me herself, could get VERY awkard, trust me on this.)  Weirdly, she didn’t mention my decidedly checkered past, and instead went into how she remembered my brother and my cousin Natalia and I “all being little together” and how we used to play around the village.  Guys, my cousin is 14 years older than I, my brother is 9 years older than I.  Even they didn’t “play” as such together.  They hung out a lot as teens, but that’s not the same.  And the idea of the three of us (all three bookish, though my cousin and I had broad streaks of hellion) gamboling through the fields of the village like puppies could only occur to someone who no longer remembered us but who fit us somewhere in her own myth.

So, what does this have to do with anything?

Well, this is far more complex when it comes to national myths.  And part of the national myth they’re trying to institute has failed, but another is taking remarkable hold, and it worries me, because I’ve seen this play before.

It was easier to establish a national myth back when there were no dissenting voices, but just the main stream.  So, for instance, when Clinton was elected, I watched the Reagan years being turned into a decade of greed, when working people went in rags, while the millionaires sipped champagne off street urchin’s belly buttons.  Or something.

I was there.  I lived through it.  The eighties were more “the decade when we shut up and went back to work.”  Yes, there were excesses, but nothing to compare to the 90s.  Mostly, there was renewed faith in shutting up, taking baths and going to work.  And it worked.

So did the myth making.  Suddenly it was all about “caring” and “caring” was going to get us out of the hole (!) caused by the “decade of greed” (and not by the George H. W. Bush tax increase.)

That type of myth is not taking hold as well – they’re trying, and you can see it with the “Summer of recovery.”  The MSM – even those you wouldn’t expect.  Yes, I’m looking at you WSJ – all jumped in the first year, and the second and the third, and are still talking like “of course we’re in a recovery.”  But you listen to conversations in line at the grocery store.  No one is buying it.

OTOH… OTOH it’s taking hold in a weird way in wonkish cycles.  I’m so tired of hearing nonsense like “in real terms middle class salaries haven’t increased in 30 years.”  There’s lies, damn lies and statistics.  What are they considered “middle class”?  Because in thirty years I’ve seen that change, and besides it wasn’t that clear to begin with.  Are retail clerks middle class?  Retail managers?  Garage mechanics? Computer programmers?

It’s pretty hard to track that over a drastic tech change, which we’ve undergone.  Look at it this way – when Dan started out in computers (programming in machine language, which he learned when it became clear that the only path for a mathematician was academia and that he was sick of college) it was a pioneering field, even though it was twenty years old or so.  If we met someone and he told them what he did (in Charlotte, NC, granted) he got the “Oh, you’re one of them.  The fad will pass.”  Now, I’d say most of the “middle class” – skilled and semi-skilled — works with computers in some capacity.

Retail clerks and managers can only be considered middle class on a case by case basis.  Because what happened is that what is “middle” shifted.  There are very few manual laborers and factory workers, which I assumed were “working class” thirty years ago.  Instead, most retail and low-level service has fallen to “working class.”  And since their salaries have fallen in real terms (My friends in retail make now what they made 30 years ago. Blame out of control low-skill immigration) that actually means that if you count them as middle class, middle class “real salaries” have fallen.

But that’s not what most people think of when they read “middle class.”  They think programmers and teachers, writers and specialized repairmen.  And for those – I’ve been there, okay – salaries have risen IN REAL TERMS until about 2008 when they have been falling – again in real terms – at an amazing clip due to the inflation we’re told we don’t have.

Why this concerns me – even smart people who think for themselves are falling for this.  It’s easier to lie at a distance and with statistics.  It’s easier for people to go “Oh, well, it seemed like the eighties were so much fun, but I guess some people, over there, were really starving and I didn’t see it.”  And debt wonks, who don’t like the growth of our debt (I don’t either) over the last thirty years, are all too eager to believe this nonsense.  No, guys, we made a lot.  We just spent a lot more.  However, most of it was just flushed away, because that’s what government does with money.

Why this is important – because I’m seeing another myth fall neatly into place.  I’ve caught whispers of it.  It’s called the “This is bad, but ten years ago was much worse.”  This isn’t true, it isn’t true in any way that doesn’t involve the kidnapping, handcuffing and rape of statistical science.  And it’s not being said out loud yet, but it’s whispered.  That way in another two or three years, as collective memory fades, it can be brought out as “everyone knows” and you’ll remember the whispers… And it will seem plausible.

If I sound like I’m crazy because I think someone is coordinating this, remember Journolist.  Of course someone is. A lot of someone’s.  And it doesn’t need to be a central directive, just the human drive to make us look good to ourselves and a faulty memory.  If these people supported the most economically disastrous regime this country has ever seen, they’d be ashamed.  Fortunately they don’t need to be.  They can tell themselves “it was worse before.”

I’ve seen this happen in Europe year by year whenever socialists are in power.  It was always worse before.  Even when it wasn’t.  But the majority of people don’t remember and they want a “rational” or at least “inspiring” narration and “we’re repairing the mess we inherited” is inspiring.  “We’re pissing fifty years of accumulated capital and international relations away” isn’t.

This is why in socialist countries, you always know what the future will hold.  It’s the past that keeps changing.  And we’ve always been at war with Eurosia.  And dear leader has the rudder firmly in his hands, as he pilots us to the bright future of Utopia.

*Yes, I’m taking another day off.  Look, I’m finishing up a line edit and rewrite and for reasons known only to its designer, my brain shuts off non fiction when this happens.  NOT fiction.  Non fiction.  Though Alma’s title made me think of a political post I want to do, called “Fictionalizing history.”  Not about writing, curiously.  Anyway — what is fascinating to me is that Alma — our very own TXRed is describing a lot of what I am in the middle of with the French revolution and Through Fire.  More importantly, she’s reassured me I’m not the only woman who falls in love with guys centuries dead.  (It’s okay.  Dan has given me permission.  I can fall in love with all the past guys I want, though not Kit Marlowe because that would be weird.) As long as they don’t come back as UNdead I’m in the clear.  So, read Alma.  She makes sense. (Which is more than I do this morning.)*

 History as Fiction (More or Less): The Saga Begins

Alma Boykin

Let’s say you are enamored of a historical character you’ve read about. Or an event in the past seems like it would be just the thing to hang a story on, but, well, you don’t do historical fiction. What’s a writer to do? Sci-fi or fantasize it, of course, after some serial-number filing.

I’ve been interested in a certain European historical personage for many years. He had one of those “you couldn’t make this up” sorts of lives, lived to a ripe old age, died rich and respected, and left almost no personal documents or relatives. In short, he’s perfect fodder for all sorts of speculation. As I said, I’ve been intrigued by this individual for a decade at least. Finally, this winter, I got a wild hair to use his life as the basis for a one-off novella, just to get the idea out of my system. I finished the draft of the fourth novel about him on August first. Oops.

So, how did I go about turning a real person and real events into science fiction? First I had to know the basic facts of the original story. Next came the decisions about what to do with the setting and what changes to make, assuming that I would build detail into the world once I got started. And then I had to decide what to keep or change about the historical figure, based on what is known about him.

It began with research, because I needed details, not just about his life, but his times (roughly 1670-1750) and surroundings as well. Since I intended to focus on one particular moment in his long career, I found accounts of that battle and books describing the organization of the armies involved, what life was like in and around armies at that time, and other related things. That led to my reading back in time, into the Thirty Years War, and into Ottoman history, which caused (among other things) major revisions to the first and second books once I realized just how flaming long it took to get anywhere in the 1600s, even if the roads were in good condition.

Research well in hand, I needed to decide on the world. Would I try and replicate the original figure’s time in some way, or would I pull a David Weber and shift everything well into a high-tech future, or a la John Ringo bump it into the near future? I ended up replicating the technology level of his time. Why? Because I don’t think well in three dimensions. If I stayed low tech, I could avoid accounting for the effects of airpower. And I wanted a different world to play with, so creating a different, Earth-like planet gave me flexibility to rearrange geography and create hybrid cultures, and to address some questions (under-population, political organization, men’s and women’s roles in society, et cetera).

The next decision was the voice. Would I try and use the language of the historical person’s time? No. He spoke French, German, Latin, probably Italian, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he understood and spoke a little battlefield Turkish and Hungarian. He wrote in French, German, and Latin. If he had been a more recent German or English-speaking person I might have tried to use the language style of his time, but I just couldn’t do it in this case. To learn the languages’ “flavors” I would have had to find diaries from the time, and (alas) I couldn’t justify an archive run to France, England, and Austria in order to read the originals, the very few that still exist and that were not written for public consumption. What I did do was keep the formality he would have used, and the religious language. This was a very religious period, he fought religious wars, and he would likely have used invocations in his daily speech, especially around his employers, who saw themselves as protectors of Christians.

So, I have background material, I have language and voice, now all I needed to do was write. Except . . . how did he get from one end of Europe to the other? He rode. (A mule becomes a major character in my version of the story.) How did he advance so quickly once he got to his destination? He had letters of introduction and the Emperor was desperate. And then what? He worked very hard. Well, shucks, now I was most definitely staring at a novel! So I wrote the novel while doing more research and discovered that my memory had been wrong. He had not been in command at the big battle I’d planned on him winning. He’d been there as a junior commander. Oh bother. Right, the novel just became a trilogy and I made a massive deviation from the history of the event (but he’s still not in command).

And that meant digging into politics. Here things got a little tricky for me, because we’re not dealing with the modern ideas of nation-states. The historical figure swore allegiance to a dynasty and their empire, not to a country. And the empire was a loose amalgamation that assembled over several hundred years, not a centralized creation. As it turned out, I managed to escape dealing with politics until the third and fourth books. Other cultural things were more important.

Religion became a big deal, just as it was in the historical period I based things on. In the beginning I had minimized the religious aspects, but the more I wrote, the less happy I became with the results. By the time I was 20,000 words into the story, I decided to chuck the plan. Religion returned as a factor and a huge number of plot problems vanished. I did change the religions, for example keeping some features of traditional Roman Catholicism and eliminating others.

What else did I change? Not the technology, with a few special exceptions, mostly dealing with knowledge of technology rather than actually having the machines themselves. The story is now set on a colony planet that was abandoned by its sponsor (it had been losing money anyway) after a series of Carrington-type events led to the loss of ninety-nine percent of their electricity-based technology over the course of ten or fifteen years. Those events became the key point of the main character’s religion, taking the place of Noah’s Flood. Oh, and the main character was now a woman, with all the additional problems that entails for a world with no modern medical technology and only the most basic forms of birth control.

The other major difference was the main character’s sexuality. The historical personage, according to popular English-language sources, was a sodomite. The German and French-language sources are more ambiguous. He left no personal records and was notoriously discrete. I’m inclined to think that he was celibate or very, very careful, in part because his mother was a stellar example of how not to behave, even by the rather loose standards of the court of Louis XIII. My character started off celibate, which worked well in the religious milieu and eliminated the complications of marriage and pregnancy.

By the time I’d written half of what became the first novel, I knew I’d have to expand the story into three books, requiring more research and delving into the politics and personalities of the historical figure’s time. Which led to more decisions and complications, and eventually a fourth book. I’ve probably done a dozen things wrong in the process of developing these stories, but the characters seem satisfied. The author is, too, for the moment.

 

The series title is currently “The Colplatshki Chronicles,” a name taken from how the characters pronounce what they think is the name of their world. (It was designated “ColPlat XI” but called “Solana” in the advertising.) I will be submitting Book One to Naked Reader Press in the near future.

*Robin is my lawyer and he insists all sorts of things should be treated as trademarks.  Like “Darkship series.”  I don’t think “Musketeer Mysteries” qualifies, being too descriptive and I refuse to call the Henry VIII queen’s series, if I ever write the other books the “Divorced Beheaded Lottery Series” while the “Dead Queens Books” which is what we call it around the house is way too generic. But he has his own ideas… as you see, and he’s more knowledgeable and experienced in the field than I’ll ever be, (as well as smart and a genuinely nice guy) so he might be right.*

A Guest Post By Robin Roberts:

Trademark Law for Writers

Sarah didn’t appreciate the latest video of skateboarding cats I’d sent her, and asked “Where are you with that guest post?” So I had to cough this one up or get relegated to eating with Havey.

I’ve wanted to write a bit about trademark law and writers for awhile now because its something that I think the publishing business is not handling correctly either in its practices nor its contracts. I’ve looked at a lot of book publishing contracts over time and especially recently, and they can be quite frustrating.  As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, sometimes my frustration is more from the ambiguous drafting than the actual effect of the intended contract language. And one of the things that isn’t as well handled in the publishing business as I think it should be are trademarks.

This is a bit baffling to me, specifically why their treatment of trademarks embodied in the book trade is so unsophisticated.  But let us discuss for a minute what trademarks are.  The classic definition that I use is “a trademark is a distinctive word, symbol, design, phrase or other thing that is intended to distinguish the origin of goods or services”. (Technically “trademark” is for goods, and “service mark” is for services but I’ll just use “trademark” or “mark” here). So a trademark can be almost anything, indeed Harley Davidson tried to register a trademark in the sound of their motorcycle exhaust note and only failed because of a functional doctrine that I won’t go into here.

What are more common trademark issues for writers are book titles, series titles and such. Recall that, by statute, you can’t copyright a short phrase or a title.  So if I write a book, I can’t protect the title using copyright law.  That’s why we often have books published with the same title.

What Is Protectable?

In trademark law, we have a concept of a spectrum of marks with varying degrees of strength. A “strong” mark is one that is very distinctive. The spectrum, from strongest to weakest, is: Fanciful, Arbitrary, Suggestive, Descriptive or Generic. Fanciful mean a word that is madeup or coined for the mark.  A common example is “Exxon” – a word that means nothing in any language. Arbitrary refers to the use of a word that has meaning, but unrelated to the product. “Banana Tires” would be an example the USPTO uses in its trademark booklet. Tires have nothing to do with bananas. These are very strong marks and easily protected.  Suggestive marks are marks that suggest a product characteristic but don’t describe it.  QUICK N’ NEAT for “pie crust” and GLANCE-A-DAY for “calendars” are examples from the USPTO. Suggestive marks are almost as strong as the first two categories.

Descriptive marks are marks that do describe the product. A classic, that seems to appear in every phone book (you remember what phone books are … right?), is “Accurate Accounting”. That’s a very weak mark.  Probably utterly unprotectable or only protectable with a lot of proof that you are widely known under that mark. The USPTO trademark booklet gives us examples of CREAMY for “yogurt” and WORLD’S BEST BAGELS for “bagels”.  Lastly, Generic marks are words that simply mean or have become to mean the product themselves and can never be protected.

In our world of book publishing, series titles are trademarks whether we realize it or not.  I’ve had amusing arguments with authors where I asked about their trademarks and was told that they don’t have any … even as I was looking at the series title on the cover of one of their books.  But where do they fall within the spectrum of marks above?  Sometimes they can be weak if not well chosen, from being too descriptive. A series title like “A Bodkin Nettlesworth Mystery” is going to be easy to protect.  But a series title like “Valkyries In Hell” is going to be weak, as its either descriptive or even generic.

Descriptive as mentioned is hard to protect without a lot of proof of existing recognition in the market.  Lucasfilms’ “Star Wars” ® is an example of a descriptive mark that was protectable because of its rather obviously large amount of market recognition.

How To Clear a Mark?

Clearing a mark means to ensure that you won’t infringe another’s trademark rights with your use. Trademark law works in the United States on a principle of first in time, first in right.  In other words, the first person to use a mark has priority.  (With some caveats on geography that we won’t discuss). So how do we find out whether someone else is using that mark?  Aye, That’s the rub. It is impossible to ever perfectly clear a mark without a literally infinite expenditure of time and money. Just doing a search on the internet search engines is not enough. Frankly, its not even a start. There are commercial firms who will for a fee dump out their databases of state and federal trademark registrations, corporate filings, advertising materials, phone books, etc. for a proposed trademark but then that dump of data has to be reviewed closely by someone who knows what they are doing and each potential conflicting mark evaluated.  For an international company that is proposing to clear a new mark that may be used globally, the costs of a trademark search alone can be millions.  I know, I’ve seen the invoice. Something far less ambitious can still cost hundreds of dollars in search firm fees and attorney time.

So one has to decide how much money the mark is going to represent in revenue and decide when that revenue needs to be protected by due diligence in clearing your mark.

Do I Need to Register My Trademark?

In the US, trademark rights are created by using a mark to sell goods or services or offer them for sale in commerce. Registration is not required.  A mark that is used within a single state can be registered at the state level but that provides very little additional protection and only a limited amount of notice to others.  Marks used in interstate commerce can be registered with the USPTO which provides a lot more benefits in statutory rights (e.g., it’s the only time you use the circled R mark) and a lot more notice to others. Registration cannot be made of any generic mark obviously, and the USPTO will reject marks it considers descriptive unless provided with compelling evidence that the mark is already widely recognized.  Registration costs in the low thousands of dollars in attorney fees and USPTO fees. The USPTO charges fees for each mark for each category of goods or services in which you are registering the mark. So I recommend that a business decision must be made on how important the mark is, what it would cost to register and how much business revenue is protected by a registration.

At a minimum, include in your rights notices that you are claiming a mark and who owns it. After the copyright notice, include something like “’A Bodkin Nettlesworth Mystery’ is a trademark of A. Author”. Using the parenthesis “TM” or superscript TM on the cover will probably be unattractive but it could be done on the title page at least once.

The more important question is who owns your trademarks?  This is where some of my frustration resides in the publishing business.  Traditional publishing houses’ contracts are very uneven in whether they treat the issue at all. Some don’t discuss it, and most are ambiguous at best.  And what happens if your book series’ title was chosen by your editor, if you get the rights back on the copyright of one or more books, do you also get the trademark? If not, will you have to omit the series title from it when you arrange independent publication?

Infringement of trademarks is something I want to address in a later article.

Robin D. Roberts

http://www.robertsandroberts.net

UPDATE First chapter of what will become a shared world series up at Mad Genius Club.  Elf Blood, Free Novel, Chapter One.

Yesterday I spent a considerable amount of time fighting software which meant that I didn’t do much productive.  This was rendered more “fun” by the fact that thunder kept cutting our internet out.  Unfortunately that means as soon as I’m done here I need to go do litter boxes and general dusting.  I cleaned the kitchen while making coffee, which is probably against the Geneva conventions, but we had too many dishes from dinner to actually fit in one load, so it had to be done.

Speaking of which, have dishwashers gotten smaller, or is it my imagination?  The external size takes about the same, but I swear fewer dishes fit in dishwashers today than did thirty years ago.  Is this a memory caused by my getting older (In my day, sonny, we had DISHWASHERS.  Now you have shoeboxes!) or what?  The only way I can figure for them to have shrunk would be better insulation so that it reaches higher temps with lower electricity.  But in that case, like the low flush toilets, it’s misguided because you have to run it twice, which makes it worse.  End of digression – well this digression.

So, once I’m done here, there’s the boxes, and the dusting and the vacuuming and I need to go out and spray weed killer out there – my life is that exciting, yes.

After that, I will do some hours of editing Witchfinder and maybe actually finish it so editor can get it.

Which brings us to…

I’ve got back No Will But His edited, have gone over it and am in the process of getting it ready to put up.  It’s very easy with Atlantis and Sigil, although being html er…  — can I say retarded, in reference to myself?  Because that’s the only thing that describes my relationship with html.  My kids look at me when I say “I can’t edit html” as if I’d just confessed to being unable to feed myself.  (Ah, well, think how much fun it will be in another thirty years.  “What do you mean you can’t zoom, mom?  Everybody can zoom.  My five year old can zoom.  You just warble the govars, and you’re zooming.”) – if I find an error in Sigil I have to take it back to Atlantis to fix, but it’s not a big deal.  (Anyone making Atlantis – if you figure out how to make it open the ebooks/mobi you just created, you have a winner. It can take you from minor to major leagues, and heck, Microsoft will probably buy you.)

Anyway, we’re now trying to figure out if we need to buy ISBNs (yes) and under which identity to buy it – it’s complicated – because we need to get the 1k ISBNs and even I can’t exhaust those in ten years.  (Dan thinks I can.  I’m not sure that’s cute or scary.)  Then I’ll need to contract out typesetting due to a ban totale (imagine that with a Spanish accent) on Adobe products on our machines instituted by the man who says they’re dirty software that can’t be removed.  (Adobe, you’re a dirty, dirty girl – never mind.  The exciting lives of programmers.)

That’s on the slate later tonight, as well as working on the publicity workshop I’m taking.

The Human Wave Garage sale had interesting results.  I had fewer free downloads than previously, and fewer sales than most of the participants, but since then I’ve sold ten of Wings at full price.  (!)

Now keep in mind all the books I put up I had either had for free before, or had been in the free library.  Curiously I had free downloads in every country BUT Spain.  (Go figure.)

Anyway, another uptick since the collection was advertised in Book Plug Friday, so clearly that helps.

Other than that I’m all at sea about how to publicize, which is why I’m taking Dean Smith’s workshop.

My sales overall are very weird this first week of the month.  Normally I have half a dozen short stories, but this week ALL I have is two of the Marlowe short stories, one in England and one here.  The rest is the novel or collections – none of which makes any sense.  Perhaps the price point for short stories has changed again, though I can’t believe it’s up from 2.99.

Further on the slate today is actually getting some stuff up on Kobo and doing an All Romance account for Goldport Press.  I’m still not sure on that one, since now the only nominal romance I have is No Will but His.  People who think that Draw One In The Dark is a paranormal romance are misleading both themselves and potential readers.  People who read PNR would throw Draw against the wall because PNR is the most sex-soaked of the romance genres.  But more than that, the structure is adventure not romance, although because I’m establishing the couple who will carry the series, there is romance.  And because they’re both young and broken, it’s DORKY romance.  (Yes, I know someone in comments will mention a dork is a whale penis.  Yes, yes, let the games begin.)

So, I’m not sure that I’ll ever write much else that can be classed as romance, even at a stretch, but the madman I live with tells me I can do the rest of the Queens and my distaff side war of the roses and – yeah, let the games begin.

Anyone have a spare head and a couple of hands?  I need to double my production.

UPDATE: Oh, yeah, and the musing I didn’t put in.  Are writers emotional vampires?  Was talking to friend last night about how I now want to write the Red Baron as dragon story and I explained that what attracts me is the emotional pain caused by the contradiction about how dignified and well buttoned-up the man is, and the situations the dragon ends up in or puts him in — as well as the inherent fact that the dragon is considered a repulsive (and illegal) shape for a human to assume.  (All shapes are other than human, but you know what I mean.)  This generates such an amount of pain and fracturing that it makes the character irresistible.  And then it hit me “Oh my heavens, we’re emotional vampires, torturing the characters for our fodder.”  I’m adding this to my “Creepy facts about writers.”  Because you know, me, Sarah Hoyt, not the writer, I’m a rather compassionate being who will go out of her way not to hurt people and who will even try to avoid striking back at enemies unless in self-defense.  (If you REALLY p*ss me off, I won’t help you when you’re in desperate in.  But I feel guilty NOT helping.  — and to be honest most of the time the help I DON’T give is help I can’t give to people I don’t trust.  Like, I can’t recommend you to my editor.  BUT I will give you bread if you’re starving, of course. Yes, even if I want to beat you with hammers.  Because I repressed the beating people with hammers thing early, and humans as humans still deserve my compassion.)  But the writer?  Sarah A. Hoyt — THE WRITER — is a stone cold bitch.  Particularly for characters.

My feeling seems to accord with a post on FB by Michael Grant this morning, dealing with his own uneasiness at being a writer — uneasiness I’ve also described as well:

I don’t write, you know. Some guy who lives in my head writes. I just set the table for him. I feed him. Sometimes he does what I ask, and sometimes he goes away. So I show him pictures and hope to get his attention. And then, like today, he appears and says, Here you go, Michael, here’s your book. This is the story. See how it makes sense now? See how fucking easy that was?

This is exactly why for so long I resisted becoming a writer. I knew that was the deal, that I would be a step out of phase, not be part of but apart from. Like I was ever part of. Like I wasn’t always this person, this lurker. Yeah.

I’m a fucking alien, an anthropologist. None of these people becomes a character in my books, they just feed data to the algorithm. I drink and watch and steal an expression here, a clothing choice there, a strong tanned leg, a pale face, a sigh, a too-loud laugh. I think of a funny line. I whip out my laptop. Idea: tattoos that reveal souls. Idea: The old feasting on the memories of the young.

And if you’re dying for a less scattered post, Peter Grant is up at MGC with Sam The Sex God.

For previous chapters, click here

*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 half done.  My wretched health this year delayed everything.  I hope to finish MY edits and cut and add this weekend, at which point it will take another two weeks at the editor).  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.  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

In The Lair Of The Monkey God

 

Miss Helen Blythe, sister to the Earl of Savage:

 

“What darling little monkeys they are,” Betsy said, as yet another bowl of steaming soup was put in front of her.

The soup was hot and fishy, and I felt the great need of some bread.  But Betsy had eaten two bowls, and I’d eaten three, because it was hot and filling.  And they’d got all three of us baths, first, and how and where they’d found or managed to distill clean water without salt I didn’t want to know – but obviously they must have some to drink too.  We’d taken turns in a large tub, with plenty of soap to hand, and Mr. Merrit had insisted that I bathe first and then Betsy before he made use of the rather used water.

They’d found us clothes also, produced with great reverence and a great deal of signs and gesturing between them, while the few monkeys who could talk exchanged words.

The clothes were new, though they smelled musty, and Arya the Voluble, Arya the right hand of Hanuman, as he always insisted on referring to himself, had explained to us that they’d been gifts which they were taking to the lady of the many eyes and the lord of the star bow while sailing “on the power-filled oceans of our own native land” when “suddenly we found ourselves here in this dank prison, and with lamentations we have kept the dresses, for there are no women among us, and certainly hour chance for offering appeasement to the great one of the silvery hands has passed now.”  They had not used the men dress either because “you must see it is all wrong proportioned for us – and to sew it anew would cause the ruin of the garment.  But I’m glad to have it for our honored guests.”

And so the honored guests were dressed and I must say I’d never fully appreciated the difference clothes can make to one’s judgment of a man.  In his normal, sober day to day clothes Mr. Merrit looked like what he was: a man who worked for my family.  A man of decent habits and frugal living.  His face, no one could have recommended, being blunt-featured and almost surly, and his hair – cut short and very badly – was a course and unremarkable dark brown or black.  He would pass unremarked in any street, save maybe for people who had had dealings with him.

In the clothes procured for him by the monkeys – whom he kept whispering to Betsy and myself we should call apes, because chimpanzees are apes, a nicety the monkeys themselves didn’t apply – he looked…  Well, not handsome in the sense of having beautiful features, but—

The clothes he’d got were a blood-red pair of pants, loose and caught at the ankles much like what the monkeys wore; and a bright green top with embroidered little flowers in gold.  Around his waist was a sash in green, gold and red, which I suspected served to hold the pants up, as whoever the lord of the star bow was, he clearly was broader at the hip than Mr. Merrit.  With his blunt features, his eyes narrowed in concern, he looked exotic and vaguely dangerous.  If only, I decided, I could have convinced him to tie a headband around his forehead, he would have looked like a pirate king.  But the idea of making him wear a headband made me wish to giggle, and I had to remind myself of the predicament we were in, lost in a confusing world with allies who were equally lost and who might be unreliable.  One of mama’s acquaintances has been in India – indeed she says he’s not quite the thing, being a nabob but not at all of good birth or a person of consideration – and he talks a lot, and I thought I remembered the name Hanuman as that of a trickster god, like Hermes in Greek mythology, who if I remember was a shocking thief and a liar, and not at all the thing, as mama would say.  And the thought that Hanuman might be one such stopped the giggling in my throat.

Besides, I was sure I looked a complete fright myself.  Or at least, I looked part shocking and part fantastical and, had she seen me, mama would have much need of her smelling salts.

Whatever the great one of the many eyes and the silvery hands might be, she was about my height thought perhaps rather more… ample on the top.  The skirt fit about right, though.  Both were wretchedly large on Betsy who could have used the tunic almost as a dress and – her insisting on the skirt for the sake of modesty – who had forced us to do a hasty sewing job on both tunic and skirt.

Betsy had first been amazed the monkeys had thread and needles, but I pointed out that sailors must, after all, be provided with those commodities.  Then she’d tried to convince me that we should sew both “properly” in tiny stitches that hid the work – the kind of repair she was wont to do on my clothes.  I’d talked her out of it, urging that we didn’t have enough time, but I could tell it pained her, because she said those were the first quite new clothes she’d ever had.  I made a note to get her clothes that were not hand me downs as soon as we got back home.  Then it occurred to me we might never get home, and I felt heartily guilty for involving her in this, it now being clear she had not the least desire for adventure and had only followed me because she liked me and felt some misguided loyalty to me.

She looked well enough in her borrowed garments, I thought.  They effected the same sort of transformation on her as they effected on Mr. Merritt.  In her day to day clothes, she was just Betsy.  And in boy clothes she looked odd and rather too plump in all the wrong places.  But in the green gown embroidered with silver, except for her very short hair, she looked like a little lost princess trying to pass as someone unremarkable.

My own transformation, as I said, would be less of that kind and more of the shocking kind.  The top of my own garment was a sort of little tunic in dark blue embroidered with silver and gold tread, and there were tiny bells sewn to the hem of the tunic, which jingled when I moved.    The skirt was also blue and gold and silver, with bells all along the hem, voluminous but made of very fine silk which tended to cling to my limbs when I moved.  So did the top, a problem worsened by the fact that I had no way to bind my breasts, and no corset or support was provided.

I’ve heard that fashionable ladies often wore nothing underneath their dresses and misted the fabric so it would cling.  This didn’t need misting, and I was very much afraid I was shockingly fashionable.  Mr. Merrit had taken one look at me, turned a dark purplish red, and since then talked while staring at my feet which were still wearing the very scuffed and dirty boots that had been part of my male costume.

He talked to me now, coming back from a discussion with the Monkeys.  “Arya says we can talk to Hannuman now.  Miss Blythe, I must entreat that you try to pay him the reverence due his status, no matter how nonsensical or strange he may act.  I need not remind you, we are entirely in his power.”

I wondered what he thought I would do, but I assented, and presently we were led into a sort of cave, with Arya leading the way, Mr. Merrit after, and Betsy and myself bringing up the rear.

The cave had big heavy doors which were opened to make the way, and two monkeys holding lances straightened up.

Inside it looked like a palace, which had to be by magic.  First because I perceived the “cave” was the same pink tissue as everything else, and I wondered if this were a boil in the poor monster’s flesh in whose gut we were uninvited guests.  And second, because no one could have brought marble floor tiles and silk wall hangings unless their ship had extended to other dimensions.

They certainly could not have brought the throne, massive and heavy in itself, and seemingly made of gold, but – what was more – set on a platform with twelve steps, covered in silk tapestries.

We looked up and up and up.  Atop the throne was not, as I’d expected, a monkey but a rather good looking man, of swarthy complexion, with glossy black hair and very intent and lively black eyes.  He smiled at what must have been my  obvious surprise, and spoke in a good English accent, “Ah, Miss Blythe.  This is my other form.  It makes it easier to converse with mortals.  And we must converse, for I wish a boon of you.”  For a moment my heart sank, as I wondered if this one too would have need of a human wife.  But then he said, “Of all of you.”  And to what must have been our blank stares, he added.  “You see, I need your help to escape this vile prison.”

You wanted a green monster with an ax called Copybook Headings ready to bring on the terror and the slaughter?

Lo and behold, one of the Huns who wishes to remain anonymous has sent me an even more AWESOME sight — it’s a green RUDYARD KIPLING with an ax called Copybook Headings.

When I was a kid I hated, with a burning passion that whole “if you love something set it free.  If it comes back to you it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.”

I confess part of it is that I saw it everywhere in posters filled with the iconography of the seventies: some chick letting go of a dove against a red sunset on the beach, or something.  I can’t say I’m totally against everything that was immortalized in that way in the seventies, but I have the sort of reaction someone has when jabbed with a sharp pin to a lot of them, and any maxim received that way is worthy of skeptical scrutiny.

Since this was mostly advocated for love affairs I have to tell you that I, and Jane Austen and Agatha Christie for that matter think it’s dead wrong.

If you have a relationship and it’s working, but not fully solid yet, sending your partner away (or having him go away) for a long period will break it 9 times out of 10.  And even if it’s solid, the breakage rate for long distance relationships is something like twenty percent, judging from the village where men went away to work abroad and women stayed home.  And even then, I’d bet it wasn’t higher because most women didn’t know and didn’t want to know what the guys were up to while they were away, and the guys pretended they couldn’t count and that the new kid didn’t inexplicably come out with blue eyes.

Okay, it’s more men than women who stray while away, because men are more tactile and visual.  Maybe it was why most traditional societies had a built in “man’s infidelity is not as serious as women’s” or maybe it was because men couldn’t get pregnant, women could and there was no serious way of preventing it and therefore women straying threatened the structure of society, while men didn’t.  Or maybe the feminists were right and it was just seeeeeeexis! (Why isn’t this as easy to wail as raaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaacis!)

Where was I?  O yeah, out here, in the weeds.  Right.  To get back to the purpose of this post, if you have a romance going for the love of heaven don’t tell your girlfriend/boyfriend that you should see other people in the hopes that he/she will come back to you afterwards, because that’s just stupid on stilts.  Every time I come across this plot on a TV show I lose all interest in the rest of the series because it just means both characters have mental issues.  (Not that I’m opinionated or anything.)

A lot of love and friendship – “I’ve grown accustomed to your face; it almost makes the day begin” – is what used to be called propinquity or to put it in Agatha Christie (and Jane Austen) terms “They were thrown a great deal together.”  I can hear that in Portuguese and in my grandmother’s voice.  It was the “discrete” way for older relatives to arrange your marriage when I was young.  Grandma or great aunt would invite so and so’s cousin over a lot while her grandon/nephew was visiting and “they were thrown a great deal together” with no other amusement.  Most of the time it worked.  (What?  It would have worked on me to.  In fact, it was in a fair way to, but it went astray for reasons beyond everyone’s control.)

Likewise, I had a friend in college, whose wife went away a week after his daughter was born.  She came back three years later (he’d been raising this kid on his own while attending classes, mind, and working to pay for both their living, so he never slept.  I never had a romantic interest in him – not my time – but I admired him greatly, because he lifted his burden without complaint even though it was killing him) very ill, and he took her in and looked after her.  Was she his then?  I doubt it.  We graduated and I got married in the next year, so I never got to hear it, but I bet the minute she got over lingering effects of illness she was off again.  So the test is not even a test, it’s just stupid.

So the revised Sarah Maxim is “If you love something, hold on to it.  What, are you stupid that you need to be told this? And if it comes back again, make sure you put it in sheep dip first because who knows where it’s been?”

However the maxim “you have to be willing to break it” does apply to relationships, as well as to everything else.  It’s a matter of levels, though.  Someone who breaks a marriage because they have an argument over painting the bedroom or mowing the lawn is not proving they are strong – they’re just proving there’s something wrong with their head.

OTOH if Dan suffered a brain lesion and started beating me and there was no cure and no way to stop him, I WOULD walk away.  However, our case is different, we’ve knocked through – pardon – most of those “you have to be willing to break it” moments and because we were, and because both of us knew it, we never went too far and we stayed together.

Same thing with friendships.  I mentioned here the friend I lost after 9/11 – actually around 2006 – because she wouldn’t shut up about politics, and she wasn’t DISCUSSING them either, just shouting talking points at me.  “War criminal!” “No WMDs” “Are going to put all homosexuals in camps” etc, etc, etc.  (The total lack of irony in ignoring what Islamic regimes DO to homosexuals—no, I won’t go there.  I actually pointed that out and she looked confused then told me it was cultural and accused me of being racist.  Never mind.)

The thing is it had gotten that far because I wasn’t willing to break it.  I liked her, the kids liked her, she’d become part of the family.  I knew – to be blunt – that something wasn’t right up there.  But which of us is totally sane?  Okay, so her hangups were particularly extreme and she would go on rants for extended periods about things that made no sense.  But it was only sometimes – so I let her rant even when it offended me.  And when she made crass political statements I deflected it with a joke but I never told her “that’s asinine” or more often “that’s heinous.”

And so she had every reason to expect she could push it yet again, and she could push it that far.  Only she couldn’t.

It is an unfortunate trait of my character to let myself be pushed around, until suddenly my back is against the wall and I can’t be pushed further and then I turn and fight.  I’m fairly sure it has been a great shock to people – like my ex-agent – and it’s not quite fair to them, either.  I’d change it if I could to give more warning, but see the reason I let myself be pushed around is that it’s less trouble and the white-hot-heat of my attention is on my work and my family, which means I don’t have room for any more trouble. So it needs to rise to the point of impinging on the things I DO care about before I snap.

My relationship with my agent is actually a good example of what goes wrong when you’re not willing to break it.  For years she’d been “pushing” it by rejecting things before sending them out or by getting such weird answers that I wonder what the letter she sent out was (Kris Rusch found out one of her agents was sending things out with “this is awful. She insisted I send it, so I am.” Not literally, but that was the gist.  For various reasons, I think that happened at least twice.  I never got to see the letters out though.)

But it wasn’t until Sword and Blood that it started truly annoying me.  First, because the answers I got back seemed to indicate people thought it was a comedy, which they couldn’t think if they had READ it at all.  Second, because they couldn’t get that idea unless her letter out said something like “A fun adventure” and their heads broke trying to picture vampires/a world in darkness/a fun adventure.  (It’s dark, with sexual overtones.  Oh, fine, yes, “Oh, Sarah!” It’s dark with female dominance sexual overtones.  Deal.  It is what it wanted to be. There’s a certain resemblance between me and “Oh, John Ringo, NO” We both get abused by our muses who periodically make us write stuff that we don’t want to.)

Second because she then pressured me to sell to a small press who didn’t seem to know what to do with it, including having it checked by an “amateur” proof reader who – for the love of heaven – presumed to correct my French by using google translator and my names for the musketeers by deciding the ones from the first (silent) film were the right ones.  (A piece of trivia for you: Dumas only named Aramis – Renee.  Also those people who say “but D’Artagnan really existed, the story was based on real people, so D’Artagnan was Charles” – PFUI.  PFUI with bananas on it. – The story was based on a story about four cousins from Gascony who might or might not have had an adventure involving the Queen’s ring.  In other words, it’s “real” like The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress” or “A Few Good Men” are based on the American revolution.  However, that doesn’t mean that Manny was really named Thomas or for that matter that Jefferson and Adams were involved.  The people who think that Dumas just wrote down what the musketeers did and were need cold compresses or perhaps a rock to the head.  “Based on” doesn’t mean “it’s an account.”  In fact, I think the only thing “real” about the musketeers was the “rumor of an adventure with the ring” and the fact there were four of them.  Okay, and he picked the name D’Artagnan, from near the Charles de Batz’s domain.  DOESN’T MAKE THEM THE SAME PERSON, even the locality is riding it like a rented horse.  Ahem.  Where was I?  And who put this soap box under me?)

Note I signed the contract with the small press, and it wasn’t just because at the time I was still under the impression I needed an agent to continue working – it was just too much trouble to break the relationship and I kind of liked her, and we’d worked together for eight years.  But it rankled, and it acted like a burr under the saddle.

And then there was the whole “we’re now going to publish select works” from her agency and that broke it for good and all, because I could no longer trust them.

It might not have broken it, if I hadn’t already been feeling impinged upon, and if I’d given her warnings it might have saved the relationship, at least to the point of breaking with greater decorum.  BUT I didn’t realize how resentful I was until it was ready to explode, and then I did at a touch.

Is it the same with publishers?  Yeah, sort of.  I love Baen dearly and I can’t imagine them doing this unless Toni dies (please don’t die, Toni!) tomorrow and is replaced by someone who was trained in NY publishing and (it goes without saying) isn’t all there – however, if Baen said  tomorrow “You can only work for us, under any name.  Look, we put it on the contract.”  I’d be out a there so fast I’d leave streak marks.  No, the indie doesn’t (yet) pay even vaguely enough to allow me to live from it.  But that would impinge on my ability to work by forcing me to write ONLY what they wanted and I’d be willing to starve rather than submit.  They know that, too, and even if they were crazy enough to do it (actually stupid.  Nothing can be gained by “owning” a writer.  Art doesn’t work that way and, malgre moi, writing is a form of art.) they wouldn’t because I’d just walk and what’s the point.

However, if you’re a newby signing with an unknown publisher remember that.  Make sure they know you’re willing to break it, and what your break point is.  Kevin J. Anderson has told me he never got a good contract on a deal he wasn’t willing to walk away from.  The ones he REALLY needed and was willing to sell at any price, he got treated like cr*p on.

But – at the bottom of the fourth page – what I meant for “You have to be willing to break it” wasn’t even for relationships, but for any work of creative invention, any living arrangement, anything that is not quite right but you’ve grown accustomed to.

You don’t need to break it, but you have to be willing to.  I talked yesterday in Mad Genius Club of breaking a character by having him do something heinous and out of character and how this was bad.  It is.  But I’ve done it – in outline and first draft – more often than any of you wants to know.  The thing is, until you do that, you don’t know where the boundaries are and when “The character breaks” and if you don’t know that you risk doing it accidentally and sending it out there and having the readers hate you.  You have to break them a few times before you know where the boundaries are.  Which means you have to be willing to break it.

This might sound obvious and easy, but I used to be so careful of my novels and so afraid of breaking them that I often got blocked for fear of going wrong – of introducing the wrong incident or the wrong tone, or making the character go too far.  Don’t be afraid.

Particularly in series, being willing to break it is important.

And my husband once got me out of a deep blue non-writing funk by sitting down at the computer while I was getting a cup of coffee and having my characters break out into a wild bisexual orgy in the middle of a court appointment.

I was so indignant because my characters would never do THAT that it made them come alive in my head again.  Because I knew what they wouldn’t do I knew what they SHOULD do, and the novel went on (after I erased the orgy.  No.  It’s never been published.  No, when I rewrite it the orgy won’t be on it.  No, I erase it and won’t put it here for your prurient enjoyment.  SHEEEESH.)

If you’re creating something alone or with someone you have to be willing to break it to know how to make it really strong.  This applies to works of art, relationships, and works of mechanical invention.  It doesn’t apply to babies (unless you think changing their diaper breaks them.) Your mileage may vary.  See your dealership for details.  The author is not responsible for acts of criminal stupidity on or off stilts committed by acting on this advice.  Caveat Emptor and don’t go acting like you don’t have a brain.  Just consider where your limits are before they’re hit. That way you might save what would otherwise be irretrievably broken.