According To Hoyt

There is a joke I THINK Terry Pratchett makes, but which we were making before we ever read him because my family used to make it (about me.)  When the kids were little, we used to say that they were most likely to get kicked out of the human race for shoving.

We don’t do it much anymore, because we achieved our goal, and now both legally adult, they are reasonably human.  Though I’ll point out one of them might be an alien.  (We just haven’t decided which yet. Right now I’m inclining to Robert because he’s sporting a beard and we all know beards mean you come from another and evil world.)

This brings me to the whole “what is human” which excited much discussion here a few days ago. No, for the record animals aren’t human, though they might be sentient to an extent and that might entitle them to some protections for the sake of OUR humanity.

What do I mean by that?  Well…  Humanity is earned.  Oh, not before the law, and not for others, but for ourselves. As individuals and as societies we must each earn “humanity.”

And what is this goal?  What is so wonderful about being human?

Well, nothing if you don’t make it so.  When I say we must earn human I mean we must attain the right to the protections due a human being – the right to be respected by other humans.

In some parts of the world and in some cultures, what you have to do for that are things that I would consider sub-human or inhuman.  But this is why each human and each society must earn it for themselves: the standard to aspire to is internal and so must the proof be.

Note that I’m not making moral or multi-culti equivalence.  As an heir to the great Western tradition and a student of history, I believe our cultural norms and what we consider “human” is better than what other people consider human (and yes, whoever asked in comments – not enough coffee yet – we should cover “the things they no longer teach in school.  Because.  Hey, would there be interest in you tube “courses” on great literature from a non deconstrutionist  perspective?  Ditto history?  I’m not an absolute expert, but I can do some of it and I know people who know the rest. I will not pretend to systematic knowledge, but it’s more than is being taught in schools – or even was thirty years ago, since I’ve had to acquire most of it myself, step by step.)

My idea of human is firmly based on Western tradition and therefore in the roots of Christianity and Judaism.  It includes such things as behaving decently to others; looking after yourself and those dependent on you; taking responsibility for your own actions; not hurting those who have done you no harm/are defenseless.

It also involves recognizing in other humans creatures like myself and respecting them for the sake of THAT if for no other reason.

This is what makes it so hard for me to even discuss whether those babies whom Gosnell dismembered were human.  If they’d been allowed to develop, they’d have been creatures like me.  Therefore a crime against them is a crime against me – against my own humanity and my idea of my own humanity, which is what keeps me from going around and killing everyone who gets on my nerves.  It is also a violation (of course) of the “do no harm to the helpless and harmless” and… too many violations to count.  I get sick when I think about it.

But here’s the thing, in my view the worst violence people like Gosnell – or the sainted Che whose favorite pastime was kill entire families personally, because he believed in artisanal murder – did was to himself.

I don’t know if there is such a thing as a soul – there might be.  I think there is, for various reasons for which I have no proof – but whether there is a soul or not, or whether it survives physical death or not, there is something integral to each individual, something unique and personal and that makes them what they are.  (In a character these are the internal, inviolable characteristics about which I go on at length in MGC today.)

Okay, so maybe Gosnell and Che were born broken.  I have no way of telling they weren’t.  We know some people are.  I can almost guarantee that just “they were abused” (or indulged) as children isn’t reason ENOUGH for what they became.  Ditto Stalin and of course Hitler and all the “large scale” monsters. I’ll leave the discussion of whether psychopaths are “real humans” for other people.  One thing I know is that we can’t decide psychopaths AREN’T real humans and treat them as things, because we CAN’T identify psychopaths.  There’s no measurable, scientific proof.

However, if they weren’t, somewhere back there  they were normal children, who, in growing, became people who do things that people shouldn’t DO.

They broke the fundamental laws of what makes them human and therefore cast themselves outside humanity.  (There’s that old story about a mark and stuff.  Might not be wholly stupid.)

So why can’t we decide people who do that aren’t human?

Because we have no way of telling for sure.  There are things that can make people act as non-people but which are recoverable from.  And no, I’m not going with “illness” theory of crime.  We’re all ill.  It’s called being human.  There are cracks in the design.  And I’m not going with the therapeutic approach to murder.  Sometimes, when someone is a clear and present danger to himself and others, removal from society by death is the best thing you can do for them and others.  It should of course be done with dignity owing a human, not for them, but for you.

(Of course there are all sorts of things to be discussed about giving the state power of death over any citizen.  But that’s another and more complex discussion.)

To remain human – to remain true to myself – all things that come in the shape of a human and present externally as a human need to be respected for the sake of myself and our common humanity.

Now that respect varies in kind, and different respect is owed to the helpless and harmless than to the hardened criminal who is threatening you.  Self defense is acceptable for humans AND for societies.  And let’s face it, if the person is really that far out of his/her mind, the best thing to do for the sake of whatever humanity remains conscious in them is to stop them doing more harm by putting it beyond their ability to do so.  If court systems and jails were secure enough, that would suffice.  But we know they aren’t.

(I find it particularly perverse when people advocate death to the unborn – particularly the viable unborn – or the newborn, or the disabled — who fit harmless and helpless but are against the death penalty for proven and unrepentant criminals.  I can’t even begin to imagine how one gets to that state of broken, though I believe it starts with good intentions and trying to be holier than our peers.)

However, in principle, unless I’m really mad, regardless of the people’s crimes, I do NOT advocate setting them on fire in the public square.  They might deserve it, but they’re human as I’m human.  And for me to respect my own humanity I must respect theirs.

The same applies to respecting the limited sentience of animals.  I should respect animals where possible and not torture them not because they have “rights’ but because I’m human and humans don’t/shouldn’t hurt the helpless.  This does not exclude killing them (as humanely as possible) for food, but it excludes abusing them.

And if vat meat becomes available at a decent price (yes, the recent hamburger thing was actually not that bad and the price will only fall) yes, I will give up on eating little bah lambs.  But not until then.

Pardon me the scattered post – there are a billion things needing done today and I can’t seem to settle.  But this should be enough to start a discussion and because I’ll be absent much of the day, I’d appreciate troll patrol from the regulars.

If it’s not clear what I’m saying is that you don’t make others earn being human.  You assume they’re human so you can earn YOUR OWN humanity.

There’s a somewhat related post by me at MGC.

 

To vary our fascination with English poets, today we’re going to hark to Tennyson who, yes, is an odd choice for this blog, being very much an aristocratic court poet, but who, never the less was touched by something.  (I’m not going to presume on what touches poets, though I’m to understand Tennyson was a very moral man and all.)

I like his cadences, but most of all I find his poems are a never-ending source of titles.  And if I can remember not to spell it like a type of onion, the lady of Shalott is one of my favorites among his poems.

Of course, this is not about poetry, except in the sense that I like to pretend to lecture you lot (ATH is culture) when most of you are way more educated/better read than I.

No, this is about separation, distance, and what it does to people.

The Lady of Shalott first commended itself to my attention when I was going through puberty because it was such a perfect resonance to my situation.  The poem, itself, of course, has a lot to do with a woman’s sexual longing and a wish for (a form of) liberation even if it costs you your life.  Well, at least it does to me, but it might have a lot to do with identifying with it as a teen.  We never studied Tennyson in school because he was an icky Victorian and everyone knew Victorians were repressed prudes, and exposing young people to them would probably scar them for life.

For those of you not conversant with the poem, it’s about a Fairy Lady living in her own enclosed space and looking at the world outside through the magic web she weaves.  Like her I felt very much set aside, though it wasn’t a matter of space.  I attended the local school until I went to school in the city; I shopped in the local general stores; I walked the same streets.  But though my family was materially poor (not that we knew it) we were still massively wealthier than the people around us (often a matter of the use we put resources to) and we were also educated.  Up to fourth grade I could have been one of the local girls, except I read too much.  But after fourth grade, when most of my classmates when to work in the textile factory, and others went to the local middle/high school, mom decided (having looked at scores) that my only hope at college was to go to a magnet school downtown as my brother had done.  And in our family college was sort of expected, because – I’ve told my kids this too – we were not wealthy through land (what there had been in the family had been lost long ago) and we were not wealthy through business or not in a general way.  My family has always eked out (or often icked out) its living in the affairs of the mind.  Mostly through engineering and medicine, but some have gone into law, psychology and even writing (no, I’m not the first, but I’m the first non poet.) My only inheritance as my parents pointed out to me and I point out to the boys is a mind and the ability to use it.

This meant that though I still came home every day, and spent a lot of time hanging around the village, I was no longer of it.  A year or two, and I couldn’t really talk to my old classmates and friends.

And then there was the old mating game. There simply wasn’t anyone in the village whom I could date.  It’s not just the fact we’d have nothing to talk about, but that well… there was a social distance.  Most of the local boys treated me as though I were a vaguely threatening alien.  (To be fair, my being an odd, most boys treated me that way once I opened my mouth.)

The normal way for this to go for people in my situation is that you met boys going to high school and you formed your circle there.  I went to an-girls’ high school (which is why I’m here to tell you that all-woman planet is not an utopia but all the circles of hell in one.)

I had classmates who made arrangements within the school (I know this because two of them were found beneath some bushes in the ornamental garden.  I’m still in the dark about how they managed to drag a double mattress there.  They lived nearby, but no one had cars. I’m also still flabbergasted about how I never noticed it, since they were both second-circle friends – i.e. not inner circle but the next level.) but I never had any interest in female bodies.

The more common way to cope was to do “classes in the café” where you cut class and hung out at the coffee shop where the boys from the all-boy school across the street hung out.

Unfortunately there was that thing where I was expected to make it to college.  Also, I was an odd, and probably wouldn’t get flirting if it bit my nose off and ran away giggling.  (In fact all relationships I’ve had, and those that I declined, the other person eventually had to come out and be blunt as in “Do you want to date?” or more such.  Because I’m VERY VERY DENSE when it comes to emotions.)

So I felt like I was living in a bubble where nothing ever happened while real life took place around and past me.  In that situation I couldn’t help but be fascinated by The Lady of Shalott.

This situation applies to what I’m going to say – but more applies, too.

What you have in the Lady of Shalott is someone very busy with work that’s not directly related to her sustenance and which only allows her to see the world at a remove.  Her life is comfortable: She lives with little joy or fear.

But everything new and everything exciting comes from outside.  She’s in a world of her own, both remote and insulated.

If you’re seeing our ruling class, you are right.  They too live in a world that has very little to do with the everyday world of men for most of history.  They weave their web – of theories, of regulations, of the involutedly just so stories that are Marxist analysis – and then they see the world only in it, reflected in it.  This is what I refer to as “drinking their own ink.”

They have been schooled to such an extent that instead of testing theory in the world, they view the world through the theory.  The stimulus didn’t work?  More stimulus is needed.  There are more unemployed? Well, we need more assistance.  Health care is too expensive?  Making it government controlled will make it cheap.  People want to kill us? We need to stop being racist, because little brown people.

Any one of those circumstances can kill us and destroy society, because stimulus only destroys the value of money; unemployed don’t want perpetual assistance and to the extent it works it encourages dependence and lack of initiative; as far as it’s observable from history, since the pyramids, no government project was completed on time or under budget; thinking that people with a tan are inherently oppressed and unable to have just as crazy and non-legitimate grievances as your next door neighbors is not just a form of racism, but one that can kill you when the other culture interprets appeasement as weakness.  (Oh, and for the record, I am a person of tannitude, and I can have just as crazy ideas as the my pale-skinned husband.  Crazier, arguably, given what I write.)

BUT since they can only see the world through their web, they can’t break out of it.  Curiously, they are also enamored of the more ah… carnal aspects of “normal life.” If you go over the Lady of Shalott and even without being an English professor (Maypoles, really?) you’ll see that a lot of courting and mating behavior is highlighted, and when Lancelot bursts on the scene it is as a vision of manly boldness.  There are also funerals, though, and that too is important.  Because what the Lady of Shalott is seeing in her poem was the “real life” through the rituals that people have imbued in it.

Charlie Martin and I are doing a thing on ritual and its need for writers, over at PJM (yes, yes, doing the piece after this.  Yesterday was eaten by re-doing some covers.  Sue me.) But ritual is not just needed for writers.  It’s quite possible (I ask those of you who know this better) that ritual is the thin layer of lubricant between humans and the world.

There is a tendency in Marxist analysis to view ritual as “the opium of the people” —  mayday and Halloween and all being ways of keeping the serfs from revolting.

They’re wrong on that as on so many things.  There is a fundamental lack of “getting” humanity which is needed of course, because if they “got” humanity, their beautiful, utopian vision would be ruined.

Humans, serfs and rulers alike, except where impairment exists, are all quite smart enough to know where this life leads.  You can say it bluntly, “We’re all dying of a fatal disease.  It’s called life.”  Shakespeare said it better.  Heinlein stole it better.  But your average guy on the street knows it too.

Into this knowledge that our time here is brief and that like those who came before us, we too will eventually be dust and bones and our memory forgotten, all we have is ritual.  There were ways in which life was supposed to go, and each of them was imbued with its own ceremonies – religious or just customary.  There is courting, and it has rules – though those of us who are Odd tend to not get them unless they’re written on the inside of our eyelids – so we have to contrive our own approximations) – there is marriage, there are children, and then there’s death, with its own rituals.

This is how life used to be.  The rituals changed, but they usually changed slowly enough – except through invasion or conversion, and even then it wasn’t instant – that people know what they were “supposed” to do.

I’m not going to tell you – I’m an odd, okay? – that I approve of people being forced into a pattern, but even for people like us it is a good thing to know the pattern is there.

The problem with our ruling elites is that their theories say all patterns must be discarded – all traditional patterns.  They take the idea of culture-influenced development so far they think ALL development is cultural.  They see life through their webs of theories so much they think only the theory is real, and reality can be infinitely molded.  Thus their ideas on raising “genderless” children (because hormones don’t matter before the beautiful theory) their ideas on how women should act just like men in sex and life (because hundreds of thousands of years of different evolutionary pressures are for sissies!  They have theory, d*mn it), and their theories on how punishing the producers will make us all rich, rich I tell you!

The problem is reality is hard and has sharp corners, and Tennyson knew no less than Kipling that contact between the lovely visions in the web and the real world ends only one way.

At least the Lady of Shalott wasn’t trying to govern those people out there that she knew only from glimpses and longing.  But our intellectuals are.

As things spin more and more out of control, their theories are becoming more tattered and strained.  Despite their fascination with and longing for “real” – for violence and sex and anything that will break them out of what they know to be an artificial paradise – they cannot see where the true problem lies.

The true problem is in that wheat harvesting and reaping, in the marrying, in the business of life.  They’re disengaged from it, separated from the rituals that gave meaning to the lives of humans for centuries.

Instead, they have theory and they want to “change the world” and “make a difference.”

Only the web only shows shadows.  You can keep printing money and mask things for a little while.  You can keep more glitz, more glamour, more cowbell coming. It has to be kept going, in frantic running to catch up with what can never be caught, like the curse of the lady of Shalott:

No time hath she to sport and play:

A charmed web she weaves alway.

A curse is on her, if she stay

Her weaving, either night or day,

But the web affects the real world, not just threads and not just watching it.  And the web doesn’t match with the world.  And the more they do the more things break.  Their theory tells them they are on their way to paradise, but things keep getting worse.  The only way they know is to keep weaving – to keep supporting models that don’t work, because if they say or even notice they don’t work they’ll find themselves ostracized.

Maybe they like their ideological predecessors eventually they’ll fight those people affected by their crazed weaving.  Maybe they’ll decide it’s all the fault of humans.

Let’s hope not.  And if yes let’s hope we have enough guns and enough gumption to keep the mass graves from filling.

But one way or another, the web will tear and the lady of Shalott will make her doomed trip to Camelot, where she can only arrive dead.

One way or another – the long route or the short – whether they get their very short splendorous (ah!) reign of equality in poverty or not, the history of humanity shows that sooner or later sanity returns and the rituals of human life: plant and reap, marry and reproduce, die and be briefly remembered.

They can take many forms and I’m not advocating a return to agriculture – but the underlying form will be there again – because despite moments of cultural insanity, our species usually finds a way to survive.

So – be not afraid.  1984 is impossible in the long run.  Brave New World also.  There might be choppy waters ahead.  They might last the rest of our lives.  But in the end, we win, they lose, because reality is on our side, and all they have is fairy weaving.

‘The web was woven curiously,

The charm is broken utterly,

Draw near and fear not,—this is I,

The Lady of Shalott.’

 

 

 

 

I keep running into people who say that you should never, ever, ever mention your politics, because you’ll lose fans.  I will grant you this is true, and when it comes to someone bringing their politics into a casual social occasion – say a dinner or a con party – particularly if they come completely from the “Uh?” side I’d say that’s true.

If politics is a sort of Tourette’s to you and you find the need to interject, in a conversation about how good the wings are or how tasty the peanuts “It reminds me of the house budget resolution” and then a crass comment that assumes everyone is on your side in this – let it be.  You will lose readers.  Of course, in my case the reason you will lose me is not because I agree or disagree with your politics, but because I dislike violations of social spaces and am appalled at your lack of social empathy in not figuring out in a group of ten/twenty strangers, some will disagree with you either completely or “yes but” type disagreement.

Of course there are a ton of ways you can go wrong after going wrong that way.  For instance there’s the fact you’re repeating some media-created trope which has been exploded a million times by anyone who follows the subject more closely.  Or the fact that – worse – you’re repeating some comedians joke in the belief it’s a factual analysis.

Note that all of these are first and foremost a violation of social decorum.  But they also betray a certain type of mind that goes something like “all right thinking people agree with me” or even “I have to say this so they’ll know I’m one of the good people.”  The idea of someone smart enough to make a living through ideas disagreeing with the person never occurs to these people.

Hence, when faced with this type of violation, I’ll be predisposed to not read them, because I expect a certain trend of conventional thinking and little originality.

Mind you, this is just an inclination not to read them.  I.e., faced with shelves and shelves of new authors to try, I will avoid this one on the assumption that I’ll enjoy him/her less than the others.  OTOH I have a lousy memory for names so unless you really get under my skin, sooner or later I’ll pick you up and I might even like your reading.

The amazing thing is that I have met more people who write with their hindbrain and are brilliant while being public life dolts than I care to mention. This is both a good thing and a humbling thing. When you do anything artistic and I have to reluctantly include writing, because I do other stuff also, and I know the process is similar, as hard as it is to admit, it must be accepted that it’s not quite under your control. Your subconscious can be way smarter than you allow yourself to be – or at least more plugged in.  We had an acronym for this back in the eighties when it was a thing for artists to devote paeans to the Soviet Union and berate the US because they’d been given the VIP tour and made to feel like important opinion makers in the Sov Union: BAPI – brilliant artist.  Political idiot.  Most singers fell under this category.

I never had the illusion that I could cut loose at any party and have everyone agree with me.  This is because my opinions are idiosyncratic and arrived at one by one, sometimes painfully.  There are things I’d really prefer to believe, because I’d sleep better at night – such as that government agencies devoted to causes I approve of would never be corrupt – but though I approve of many things, like better education, I can guarantee any efforts made by government to improve it, like a follows b, will mean that it spirals down the drain harder and faster because the person in desk A is building a fiefdom on the current regulations, and the person in desk C won’t let go of them And the person in desk B starts empire building on the new ones.  And in the end what you have is soup.

So I adhere to the Heinlein dictum that only a fool or a sadist tells the absolute truth at a social occasion.  Social occasions are for the purpose of socializing.  Unless you’re at a cocktail party thrown by your social action group, or you’re among friends whose opinions you know, you should assume that you can give offense with an ill considered jest.  Heck, even friends whose opinions you know might not agree with you in everything.  They just might never have rammed it down your throat at social occasions.  You shouldn’t assume – particularly if one political opinion is prevalent among those who have power over your career (say, colleges) – that just because someone gives you a sickly smile and doesn’t say anything they agree with you.  Maybe you just made the spicy wings curdle in their stomach and they want to beat you upside the head with the clue by four, but they’re too polite to mention it.  Or they want to make sure there’s money when baby got to have shoes.

I’ve managed to be offended by what I call “whole politics buyers” on both sides of the isle, though in professional occasions mostly by the left. On personal occasions sometimes by the right. And on both occasions, I started avoiding the venue because I couldn’t talk and I didn’t want to be discomfited.

Then there’s the “don’t let it go.”  I lost a friendship I valued and of some years standing because this person had recently become a political activist.  She would initiate political discussions out of the blue, repeating talking points on topics in which sometimes I knew a lot more than her, but worse, on topics where no one sane could take her seriously.  Let’s put it this way – if she’d been on the right, she’d have been screaming at me that any minute the black helicopters and Soros-funded mercenaries were going to come and take half the population to FEMA camps.  The logistics didn’t work, the economics were cacked, and these were rumors that, in a form or another had been around since the seventies, and were just as loony.

I’d known, of course, through the ten years of our friendship, that we didn’t see eye to eye on most things.  This was okay, because our friendship was funded on furniture refinishing, carpentry and writing.  And on that level we agreed on most things.  I highly disapproved of some of her opinions, but she’d proven resistant to change (you all know this.  You point the facts, they agree with you.  But next time it comes around their opinion has reset to where it was to begin with.)  And what the heck I didn’t want to marry her – just to talk a couple of times a month and go to lumberyards/writers groups together.

Only suddenly she amped up her “activism” and suddenly she was full of talking points and wanted me to listen to them.

Now, I had engaged her in the past in philosophical discussions and others, but never political.  And when she started politics, I made a joke and changed the subject.

Only now it didn’t work.  She’d tell me I was disrespecting her for not listening to what she had to say.  The “friendship” became an endurance test and I allowed it to lapse.

Which again is a lack of social decorum and a lack of understanding of time and place.  Also, a lack of listening on ONE part.  If she had been at all aware of facial expressions – as I said, I’ve discovered recently that I’m glass-fronted – she would have known that I didn’t agree with her in most things and that it was a disagreement of the sort she wasn’t likely to bridge.  (I did tell her that what she told me was illogical and why, but she just kept on shouting talking points – it wasn’t a dialogue.)  And if she valued our friendship she would have avoided those topics.

I still have any number of friends who disagree with me in varying degrees.  In fact, if I had any who agreed with me completely I’d be confused, since most of my friends are as much independent cusses as I am.

But we either discuss the point and find out that our disagreement is of degree, not kind (or sometimes of words, not real) or we realize that for whatever reason our views of the world differ in ONE thing – and we agree not to talk about that one thing.  Though for close friends, we sometimes tease each other about it!

So – why don’t I keep politics out of this blog?

Because I found it impossible.  If I’m going to talk about things about which I care deeply, I will impinge on the political.  Not because as it was common in the seventies “The personal is political” but because the side of the equation that views every facet of human life as likely to be improved by government regulation also tends to consider anything political.  Over the years I’ve found that saying something like “I believe that public schools are doing a serious disservice to children” is political – even though it’s very personal and I experienced it.  Or “I believe men get the wrong end of the stick in law and society these days” – political.  Or “I like the old fashioned incandescent lightbulbs best” – political.  Or “Low flush toilets are really multiple flush toilets” – political.  Or “Animals are cute and tasty with mustard” – political.  Or…

Given that, it’s impossible for me to have a blog without being political.  Why?  Because it’s impossible for me to have a blog without revealing something of how I think and feel, and if one side is determined to control how you think and feel, that makes blogging impossible.

Am I worried this will lose me readers?  Meh.  The sort of people who think in shouted slogans would probably have a heart attack at my books, or quit reading them within ten pages.  And the ones who actually think about what they believe, even if, like me, they have the sort of political opinions that would get kicked out – with force – out of anything but a group of radical libertarians (where they would get shouted down by twenty discordant opinions but PROBABLY not kicked out, because they couldn’t organize enough collective action to kick me out) will roll their eyes at some of what I say, but will read my books for my books.  They might avoid my blog, but they’ll enjoy my stories – even when a character now and then acts in a way that makes them urk – because the rest appeals to them.

None of the writers of the past were apolitical by our definition of political.  Jane Austen had people eat meat.  She had strong opinions on marriage, finances and even the equality of man.  If she’d lived in our times, some people would want to set her on fire.  And Shakespeare, within the confines of a society that had political censorship was more free to think and create than we are.  So long as he bowed obeisance towards the Tudors, he could have his women characters marry or not marry, sleep around or not, disobey their parents, have children, all without someone getting in his face and screaming “The personal is political.”

And that’s because the personal is not political.  Or it shouldn’t be.  If you live in a society where the government thinks it has an overriding interest in whether you use incandescent or fluorescent light, the government is out of order.

The only system of belief that should intrude into every act of your life and how you do it is religion – and that should be a matter of individual choice.

Government is a creation of collective humanity, and I have yet to see a group of humans – outside specific situation like the army – know what each human should do best to his own advantage than the individual himself.

Just because an individual craves power over others it makes him neither smarter nor better informed about those others than he was before.  The tendency to consider political leaders “very smart” is one of the most gaggingly stupid trends of modern life.  Most politicians might be “socially smart” – i.e. know how to engage people – but that talent is rarely if ever united to a talent for administration or indeed a talent for anything else.  Just like writers can be brilliant and total pants-on-head political idiots because the only thing that TRULY interests them is writing, and therefore they acquire their politics from the “Whole politics store.”

Now if – like me, and it is a form of deformity – you were bit by politics early and you have a sort of allergic reaction that keeps you interested in politics to make sure they don’t bite again, because there’s no epi-pen against stupid revolutions for instance, your politics will leak into your stories.

I try very hard not to make politics the point of my stories, though.  Sometimes my characters have political opinions of their own, too, and express them loudly.  It doesn’t mean I agree with them, and I try to show that by the events in the book.  (This is very much a thing in Through Fire.)

However I’ve decided to let politics hang out.  First, because my keeping them secret was always a forlorn hope.  Apparently, as I said, my face shows all my thoughts.  Second, because I spent years hiding and pretending to politics I didn’t believe in, and it gave me ulcers, made my hair fall out, and made it impossible to sleep at night.  I’d reached the point I was going to stop it anyway, and Baen and indie just made it easy.  Third, because when I don’t speak, or worse pretend to agree with positions that are morally repulsive to me, I’m lending credence to the idea that “All good people think this way.”

So, I say what I believe in this blog.  (Forgive me, Heinlein for I am opinionated.)  And if my political or any other opinions leak out in my books and fall outside the approved norm, too bad, so sad.  If you’re the sort of person who reads for a recitation of cant, (or Kant) you have an embarrassment of offerings and probably would never get to me anyway.

But if you’re my friend and disagree with me, you need never be afraid I’ll ambush you at a cocktail party with “You know, it’s amazing that the red sauce for these wings works, because communism never does, ar ar ar ar ar.”

Because that’s neither the time, nor the place.  And contrary to what the bien pensant would have us think, sometimes the political is personal.

This isn’t quite a post about writing.  It is more a post about writing and real world intersection.

It is also of course good advice to any young lady contemplating matrimony.  It’s also fairly useless.  To the extent that a willingness to be violent and to push people around is read by the back brain as “oooh, he’s gonna lead the hominid band” and most women like marrying upwards.  Mind you, I’m not sure it’s as universal as believed, or at least most romances show the hero as being clean cut, rich, and kind. Regencies will sometimes allow him to be a “bad boy” in the sense that he keeps mistresses (which he immediately discards when he falls in love with the girl) or gambles, or is excessively reckless, or… Never that he’s really rotten through and through, kills babies and tortures puppies for fun, or steal old ladies’ false teeth or something.

Which leads me to believe that the whole thing “girls like bad boys” is wrong.

There is however a hook where ladies like bad boys and readers like bad boys, if you do it as “he did it but it’s not his fault.”  It stimulates maternal (and possibly paternal) feelings and feelings of specialness too, as you’re the only one who understands and can rescue this wounded creature and make him what he was meant to be.

This is the same reason that giving your character a great handicap or an awful history works.  We always want to be the knight on the white horse who saves the victim, even when the victim is not exactly simon-pure and has a five o’clock shadow.

So… This brings us around to where Kilted Dave asked about how to write villains so that they’re not just moustache twirling evil but have reasons and are to an extent sympathetic.

I’ve never found that particularly hard to do, though when I was a young and inexperienced writer, it caused a few of the books to flip on me and make the villain the hero.

I know why that happened and I see dangers in it for both writers and readers.

It happened because once I’d given the character sufficient justification for what he’d done, then what he’d done was no longer unwarranted, and it blurred the moral lines between right and wrong.  The most obvious result of this for a writer is gray goo.

Supposing you don’t flip it enough to make your “hero” a villain, what you have are two characters fully justified in going at it and then any suffering is one of those things, and it all ends in goo.

But it’s more realistic, isn’t it?

Yes, and no.  I mean, was Germany after WWI fully aggrieved and a victim?  Oh, sure.  Was Hitler justified in what he did? Oh, hell no.  Even if he thought he was.  For one he was attacking his own people, as well as trying to establish a system that couldn’t work.  (We’ll leave aside all the other stuff, okay?  Not getting this into a discussion of WWII.  We know where that ended last time!)

For another because, well – what he did was still his own responsibility.

The cases in which both people’s or both people are forced to be at each other’s throat for reasons beyond both of their controls are probably less than one percent, if that.  And the cases in which they’re both fully justified is even less.

So, why have we learned that this is “good storytelling.”

Partly it’s the post modern thing, and part of it takes us back to WWI again.  The only way Europe could heal was to say “it was neither of our faults.  We were pushed to it through circumstances beyond our control.”  Only it was both of their faults, so the narrative didn’t take.

But it took in writing.  “More sinned against than sinning” is an intoxicating thing to write.  “How can I justify this REALLY bad thing?”  You can’t, but you try, and so you pile on injury on your villain, and then you know you’re the only one who understands him, which is intoxicating.

And if it results in gray goo the reader can say it’s more realistic, and they’re clearly “smarter” because they “get that.” Etc.

But carried on long enough it destroys readership and writing and the feeling of “right” in an adventure.  It too gets infected by the ambiguity that has been so in vogue since WWI. Worse, because our brains are really bad at distinguishing fantasy from reality, we end up looking at real life through the prism of these stories our subconscious thinks we witnessed.  We will look at someone who’s done something heinous and wonder what happened to them to make them that bad.  Next thing you know, we’re writing soppy poems to the Boston bombers.

When I was very little, I liked westerns and other such books.  At one time I was talking to my brother about how villainous a villain was and he said, “Well, he’s a victim of society.”  He proceeded to explain to me how the villain was marginalized, viewed as the Other, and therefore nothing he did was his fault.  I think this view held till I was sixteen or so.  And it was wrong.

We’re all victims of society in the sense that none of us gets everything he wants from the cradle on, or if we do, that might be the greatest violence you can do to anyone.

BUT to consider that everyone who commits a heinous crime is just a “victim” of something worse in his past is to ignore the millions of walking wounded and decent people: victims of every sort of abuse under the sun, can’t win for losing strivers, people who are genuinely cast out, sometimes for reasons they can’t either understand or correct – people with aspergers, for instance – who yet don’t feel the need to kill anyone, attack anyone, rob anyone, or commit worse abuses on their fellow men.

In the end, unless there’s great mental impairment (and that’s really not easy to write) your evil is your own.  You might have been influenced to it, but you can’t say you were made to do it (unless it was blackmail or possession.)

Sure, your villain might think he’s fully justified.  In DST as we learn more through other stories of Athena’s father’s grievances, he probably was partly shaped into what he is by his upbringing, being betrayed by his best friends, etc.  BUT it does not justify what he does.  He chooses what he does.  He chooses his means to stay alive and young.  And in the end, it is his villainy, and not anyone else’s.

In writing as in real life, too much sympathy for the devil leads to injustice towards those who might not be angels, but who are still honorable, decent and trying not to hurt others.

*OT: I have updated subscriber content.  If you’ve subscribed or donated above $35 and you’ve not been given password to the subscriber page – look in tabs at top – you should email me at goldport, and I’ll send it.  A couple I tried to send bounced back, I think because I did something wrong.*

First a state of the writer short update – for those of you who have been waiting with baited breath for the edited Witchfinder – it is coming.  I am halfway through my edit, which I unfortunately can’t outsource.  Because it was written piecemeal there’s “beats” missing and internal inconsistencies and–  You know.

What I found is that I tried to edit it early on, and it seemed a hopeless mess.  But I picked it up again last weekend, and it reads surprisingly clean.  As a note to self, clearly getting more distance helps.  Now my instincts are on.  I still need to do this part myself.  Then it will go to a professional editor for probably two weeks.  Then back to me to page-proof.

I have contracted for a cover.  Depending on how long that takes – but the artist said something about three weeks – we should have a book both electronic (and going free to those who paid in advance and the high subscribers, in epub, mobi and/or RTF – sorry, I’m not going to do the weirdest forms of ebooks.  If you have a really niche reader, you probably have become intimate with Calibre by now, anyway.)

Curiously, I needed this time too to see what the cover HAS to be.  I’ve had ideas before, but they weren’t right.

Meanwhile, sometime this week I’ll start re-releasing the backlist.  (Whee.)  Probably first up will be No Will But His.  I’m trying to find a cover, and wondering if I should do a pastel for it.  We’ll see.  Dan had a brainstorm and thinks I should re-write all of Henry VIII’s queens, to keep poor Kay Ho company.  I don’t know.  I’d only be re-writing Jane Seymour.  The rest didn’t fall to my lot.  But yeh, I could.  The problem is time.  We’re trying to figure out how to deal with that.  We’ll see if it works.  (Yep, we got a tardis.  How did you guess?)

RES in the comments of the post from two days ago made snippety snap comments about saving me the indignity of buying 100 blog topics – for the record, I didn’t buy them.  I got the 100 free ones.  Good thing, since I could only use one and only sort of sideways.  Of course, at least half of his topics I can’t use.  I watched Star Trek because my husband loved it, but I don’t think I care enough for it to analyze its politics (which at any rate seem incoherent) or to discuss its economics (why do they allow people to write who can’t understand the basics of life as defined by economics – and that economics is a basic function of being human, no matter where or when – if I read one more novel where the main character has astonishing magical powers and yet is very poor, I’m going to hurl.  Actually I never read those.  I hit the telling point and the book goes against the wall in a bouncy bouncy sort of fashion.  Ditto for universal replicators.  Why work? Why have credits?  What limits replicators?)

He also suggested Buffy and redemptive female love because he’s a BAD man.  Of course the series is full of that mythos, and I’m thinking I’ll watch it from beginning in the next 100 or so ironing sessions.  It should help with the YA too.

I have three posts sketched up for next week – which means I need a few more, of course.  Even counting the fact that I do Rogue Magic on Fridays.

So, if you guys want to throw topics at me, go ahead.  Just remember I’m a total ditz when it comes to television shows (as in, I’ve watched about half of Stargate while ironing, but still haven’t got around to watching the rest of it.  Also, I only watch Big Bang Theory when I happen to be in the room while the guys are watching.  Seems fun, but I’m not a “watcher” – if I’m not doing some handwork, like sewing, or some housework, like ironing, I can’t sit still long enough to watch a full episode, let alone a series.  The only reason I watched Buffy was that I was profoundly depressed after 9-11 and it was in re-runs and/or we bought the tapes (I don’t remember now), so we watched ALL of it.  But when I’m not depressed, I’d rather be writing or reading.  It’s somehow more vivid in my mind.

To open the bidding on this “come on, throw topics at me, come on!”

-How does narrative technique in books differ from tv/movies.  What are the advantages of books?

-When is the last time you’ve read really transgressive work, one that said something that shocked you because you never see it anymore.  You know, stuff like “men have their own strengths, and civilization couldn’t exist without them.”  Or “Humanity is good in and of itself and worth fighting for.” Or “western civilization outcompeted all the others because it provides best for society?”

-Would you like that as a blog topic, or would you like me to blog on the statements?

-Civilization is built on what we don’t do.  Requiring internal barriers is a characteristic of civilization – any civilization.  They’re just different in primitive civilizations.  How much is man a creature of “this you do not do?”  Is it necessary for us to be human.

-Is that a blog topic or two?

-How my life has changed since I went indie.  Look up at the beginning of this post – I’m contracting cover work.  It blows the mind.  Five years ago, covers were something the publishers did, and if I didn’t like them, I had to lump them.  There’s other stuff.  Like, when I come up with an idea the question is “where do I put it on the calendar” not “will my agent send it out?”  Of course, this means the poor calendar is bursting ta the seams, so I’m arranging to make time – yeah, I know.  Deal.  I’ll explain if it works. Also there’s a rumor eventually the kids will move out, we can downsize, and our life will be much simpler.

Anyway, shoot topics at me.  I’ll put them in the topic notebook TM and do them – if they appeal.

And now I’m going to do litter boxes, which don’t appeal but have to be done.

UPDATE: I have updated subscriber content.

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 (And at this point I’m hoping that will happen by the beginning of July at the latest).  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

 

Miss Ginevra Mythborn

“You know, it really is too bad of you to waylay me like this,” I said, and crossed my legs below the knee, in a way that looked like I was relieving the tension of my position, but which, in fact, gave me a chance to display my ankle by folding an edge of the skirt “accidentally.”

Yes, the Witchfinder was bonded – married to the princess Royale – and quite faithful to her, it was rumored at least.  But that didn’t mean he was dead, and most men in this land had been so deprived of the sight of female flesh that a displayed ankle was enough to set their hearts aflutter.

But Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Dark Water, the King’s Witchfinder, didn’t even flick a look of interest at it.  I remembered it was said that his wife had been raised in, and still sometimes visited other lands, and I wondered if he’d grown inured.  I’d been in a world, once, where full nudity was the norm, and men wouldn’t even look – unless they were alone with you and then they did.  It seemed to me to make life very bland, taking the pleasure of the daily looks women cast men and men cast women – a pleasure that costs nothing.  Well, except in this one word—

I disciplined my mind forcefully, and looked up at the Witchfinder.  Too late I realized I’d advanced my lower lip in what could be regarded as a pout, and looking up at his eyes, I found them full of amusement.  He’d understood our play as well as I did, and I amused him.  I, who had made men cry, and driven more stable men than he to despair and suicide, amused His Grace.  I tried not to grit my teeth.  It would only amuse him more.

“I know why you came over,” he said.  “And what hooks you set into our world.  What I’m not sure of, or not absolutely, is how the hooks were set, or how to remove them.  I am also, pardon me, somewhat at a loss to parse out your history.  Are you born elsewhere and elsewhen but raised here?  The marks on your magic seem to show that, but of course your magic is so unusual.  And are you a standard siren, or something else entirely?” On the word siren he looked towards my ankle, and then up at my face, and I realized he was teasing me.

It was such a shock, such a surprise, that it robbed me of power of speech.  Not that it would have done him any good, could I have spoken, as I had absolutely no idea what I was, something very hard to explain to him.  The Pater might know what I was, but even then I doubted it.  The old soot was as likely to sleep with whatever crossed his path as Jonathan Blythe, with perhaps even less regard to gender.  And what he’d got me from only he knew.  Or perhaps he didn’t.

As for the rest.  “I’ve been in many worlds,” I told him, my voice flat of emotion, because it was, and also because there is absolutely no reason to give the opposition more tools than you can help.

“Of course you have,” Ainsling said, and smiled civilly, and walked behind the desk.  “As a sort of all purpose agent, and assassin for your…  For your king, at least, though he might be more for all I know.  In fact, among your people, he might very well be your king, your lover and your father, might’n’t he?”

I felt blood climb, hot, from my neck to my cheeks, and said, “Not among–  Not myself,” because again, it was hard to defend.  I’m not sure what Pater is, exactly.  He’s not my lover.  I’ve done things that would make Seraphim blanch, but not that.  Not because Pater – likely – sired me, but because of what Pater is.  As well lay with a bout of the plague as with the Lord of the Thunderbolt.

Then I felt it, the little jab beneath the surface of my magic, and I realized what Ainsling was doing.  And I cursed myself for several kinds of fool.

Look, the first thing they teach you, at schools for the control of magic – they don’t teach magic as such.  That you’re born with.  They teach you to control it and aim it – is that emotions make your shields less efficient.  Anyone trying to interrogate you, and unable to force a truth spell beneath your defenses will try to get a rise out of you.

In my defense, most men didn’t try.  Not around me.  The type of power I have seems to strike most men with a sort of wonder and awe and they either find me repulsive – this happened a lot while I was growing up in Avalon, and for the longest time I thought that it was my ginger hair – or they treat me with a respect normally reserved to elderly and infirm females who have the capacity to disinherit them.

I never had to do anything to command respect.  Even raised in a home for magical orphans, even taken to balls to meet likely husbands, even while wearing threadbare clothes and last year’s fashions, I’d never had any trouble commanding respect.  In fact, the opposite used to gall me.  My friends, whom I objectively knew were not half as beautiful – let alone accomplished – as myself, found husbands within two or three balls, but most of the time I wasn’t even asked to dance, and just stood there, like a mannequin, while men bowed to me and treated me as though I were a duchess in disguise, but never talked to me, or… much less, dared touch me.

There I was, as dignified as a chicken taken to fair, with her legs tied down, and there they were, acting like I could smite them without thinking.  Which I could, of course.  Which is why I was three years older than all the other girls, too.  It had taken that long for them to teach me to control my magic.

It wasn’t until Pater had sent his agents to find me, that I’d discovered what had been wrong, then learned to enjoy it.  And learned to turn it upside down, as it were, so men couldn’t help being attracted, and wishing to talk and touch.  Which had been very useful, the last ten years in the places Pater had sent me.

To find out, now, that both the awe-inspiring facet of my power, and the seduction ability had failed me, was like walking down a familiar path in the night, and feeling the ground give out under you.

But then I realized that Ainsling wasn’t much happier than I was.  The amusement had gone out of his eyes, and his mouth quirked in a way that might betray amusement, but betrayed bitterness most of all.  He sat behind his desk and looked at me.  “Here is the thing, Miss … Mythborn.  We are not savages.  We use magic for everyday things.  I understand your land – or so my brother tells me – attaches here and there, bleeding magic from the worlds it touches.  I can give you a hundred such worlds where you can bleed the magic and cause no disruption.  In some of them, in fact, magic being illegal, taking it away from the poor unfortunates who can’t help having it would be an improvement.  In Avalon, though, we’re not savages, and magic powers all our civilization.  We can’t allow you to bleed our world, and I’m amazed you’d even try.  Surely, you must know if you try, it will be a battle to the death between our worlds.”

I almost told him, then, why his world.  It was a calculated risk, and Pater had said I could take such.  I looked up at him, and was about to tell him we had no more choice in this than he did, but the door opened suddenly.

In the doorway stood a young man, who looked much like Darkwater but was younger – at that age when men are no longer boys but are not yet men.

“Michael!” Darkwater said, standing.  I sensed shock, and concern.  “What are you doing here, past the guards, past—”

“It’s Gabriel,” the young man said, and I shivered, understanding that to be the name they gave the other, their half-mortal brother.

“What is Gabriel?” Seraphim asked.

“I think that’s the thing,” Michael said.  “It’s not Gabriel at all.  Fairyland has been breached and has its own kind of… changeling.”

I opened my mouth to say fairyland couldn’t be breached, then thought it might be if–  And then I ran for the door.

It was the work of a minute, to get up off the seat and run.  But the magical net stopped before I reached the door, and the Witchfinder said, “No, you don’t.  A moment, Michael.  I’ll see Miss Ginevra safely stowed, and then we can continue this talk without evesdropping.”

 

Ladies, Gentlemen, Beings of Furritude, I come not to bury grey goo plotting but to yawn at it and to sigh “I don’t care what happens to all these characters” and — occasionally, when a novel rises a little bit above the common style

–, to sigh and say “I want them all dead by chapter two.”  (Ah, for a minion I could dispatch to story world.  “Guido, see to it.  I want them all dead by chapter two before they all start the belly button contemplating until it reels the mind.  Make them dead.  Hide the bodies.”  Of course, in many cases this would improve the pacing and action of the plot.  In others no one would notice.)

Traditional publishing, having become a thing of a small circle of NYC where everyone attended the same colleges and deconstructed the same books, seems more interested in impressing each other and themselves than in capturing the minds and fancy of the rest of the population.  That is fine.

For the longest time, of course, it wasn’t fine, and even as a reader I had trouble finding stuff to read.  For you see, I am an apostate.  I went to a fine college and was taught that the best of literature was stuff you had to slog through, but I never gave up my allegiance to Heinlein and Christie, to Dumas and Sir Walter Scott, to Shakespeare and Austen (and I don’t treat them like dry literature, either.  The puns alone in Shakespeare – he’d fit in this blog very well.)  But on leaving college, I fell into even worse company.  No, yay and verily, I’ve been known to read Heyer and, in a pinch, Nora Roberts.

I don’t want books that reassure me that all of humanity is a waste of oxygen an excess of carbon or a “cancer upon the Earth.”  Yeah.  Maybe it is, if you are a multi-pincered being from the Pleiades and  view humans as competition and want them to go away.  But I am a human among humans, and whom should I love if not my species?  Besides, multi-pincered beings are only good with drawn butter.

I don’t want books that reassure me that life is a tale written by a graduate student, full of fog and moral confusion, signifying nothing.

While I’m alive, I’ll live in bright colors.  If I wanted to be sedated, I’d go back to being on valium.  The only thing that books have to offer, above television, above movies, above games, is the ability to manipulate human emotions.  Words and the evoking of other senses, like smell, are the quickest route to the emotion.  We read fiction not to think but to feel.  To go adventuring with Captain Morgan, to duel with the Musketeers, to love with Juliette, and to cross the universe and time with Lazarus Long.

What virtue is there to giving up that, our form’s most potent weapon?  Or of all the emotions to choose only vile, grey despair?  There’s despair enough in the world.  There’s always been.  But humans who made a difference, humans who continued the species, who built civilization, fought, no matter how desperate their circumstances.  And those humans are my brothers and sisters.

I believe the propagation of humanity and of that civilization that has allowed the most prosperity to the most people is a good in itself. While I’m human I’ll love humanity.

I have nothing against trees or bears, and I’m rather fond of cats, but – except for the cats since some are members of my family – I owe none of those allegiance.  I owe allegiance to humanity, because I’m a human.  Extinction porn, and those who dream of a world without humans are sad beings, who somehow thought that humans should be infallible and flawless and therefore refuse to love humans as they are.  Sometimes, it is a man’s flaws that make him best.  A perfectly rational man could never love.  A perfectly steady man could never adventure.  And a perfectly balanced woman could never dream up characters who do both.

I have no animus against ants, and as long as they don’t interfere with humanity I wish them well, but who are they and their mode of living that we should imitate it?  And consider ourselves flawed because we don’t fit it?

That is where I stand and that is where a lot of readers stand, or will come to stand.  People like people and people like fun.

Human Wave is a literary movement (How posh that sounds) which is to say a bunch of us zanies, who propose to bring all that back to fiction and reading.

And now, that we have indie publishing, we CAN.

So, thanks to the lovely Sabrina Chase,who set the whole thing up and publicized it at her own expense – one of the things I love about Human Wave is that we do help each other.  Not because we feel guilty but because storming the castle is much more fun with friends – here is… The Human Wave Garage Sale going on through this week, at an internet near you.

The Inimitable Word Slinger and Story-Weaver Sabrina Chase:

The Long Way Home -1.99 for the kindle

Webspace pilot Moire Cameron is one of the best–but even she can’t fly her way out of a catastrophic drive failure that triggers a time-dilation bubble. Left suddenly eighty years out of date, she is on the run in a world she no longer knows, caught in the middle of a human-alien war while agents of Toren hunt her for the information only she has–the location of the pristine world of Sequoyah.

The Long Way Home is the first book in the Sequoyah trilogy.

The Bureau of Substandards Annual Report – 1.99 for the kindle

A collection of short stories set in the world of the Bureau of Substandards…

Hidden behind protective layers of government red tape, the Bureau of Substandards fights the good fight against interdimensional snake people, “helpful” allies, busybodies from Atlantis, the annual budget report, and, most dangerous of all…the HR department.

Sarah Hoyt

Ill Met By Moonlight – Young Will Shakespeare is a humble school master who arrives home to find his wife and infant daughter, Susannah are missing, kidnapped by the fairies of Arden Woods, the children of Titania and Oberon. His attempts at rescue are interrupted and complicated by a feud over throne of fairyland, between Sylvanus, king regnant, and his younger brother Quicksilver who is both more and less than he seems. Amid treachery, murder, duel and seduction, Shakespeare discovers the enchantment of fairyland, which will always remain with him, for good and ill. Free from the 1st to the 5th of August.

Spinning Away — In a world where the ability to pick what news will interest most people is very real power, Layna Smythe strives to stay ahead of her rivals and alive. She often forgets that she’s also lonely, until an attack reminds her of the man she left behind. Free from the 1st to the 5th of August.

Crawling Between Heaven and Earth — Sarah A. Hoyt’s first short story collection, initially published by Dark Regions Press in 2003.  Contains most of Sarah’s early published work. Free

Wings — Second short story collection. $2.99

Michael Hooten

Cricket’s Song, Book 1: The Cricket Learns to Sing — Cricket is a young orphan growing up on an obscure farm in the country of Glencairck.  He wants to be just like Harper, who plays for the people through the winter, but Harper is not content to let him just learn how to harp.  He teaches him the ancient traditions of the Bards of Glencairck, a noble order that is responsible for not just entertaining the people, but for providing impartial judgement to their disputes.  When Cricket is old enough, he enters the wide world  and finds that not everyone knows the old rules, or follows them.  He has to decide for himself what is right–and how far he is willing to go to defend his beliefs. Free for Kindle August 1-5

 Rawle Nyanzi

Alien Frontier — Fifteen-year-old Norma Teague must avoid getting drafted into an alien army. However, her home village demands that she go since she has a magic belt that lets her destroy any armor made of matter. $1.99

 Thomas Sewell

Hitchhiking Killer For Hire — A border gang beats Ex-Special Forces soldier Sam Harper and leaves him for dead in the desert. Sam must discover “Why?” in this story of government corruption and human smuggling in the near future west. Dedicated to Louis L’Amour. Free for Kindle August 1st through 5th

 Elizabeth Bruner

Flash of Fire — A collection of super short stories (1000 words or less) on the subject of fire. Ranging from the love of a volcano goddess to natural phenomena encountered as humans explore a distant planet, these stories evoke a sense of wonder and awe at the nature and power of fire. $.99 for Kindle August 1 through 5th

 Zachary Ricks

Battlehymn — (Also Barnes & Noble) It’s a story of giant robots, forbidden love, princesses in danger, and the power of rock ‘n roll. If you’re a fan of Macross, you might enjoy Battlehymn. $1.99

 Cedar Sanderson

Snow Angel — When a child’s imagination leads his mother to a startling discovery, she must then protect him and his guardian from unknown danger. A human mother is fiercer than angels! Free July 31 to August 4

Little Red and the Wolf-Man — Little Red wears a red cloak, and keeps her shotgun hidden under it. But Grandmother has the biggest secret in the forest, and she is dying… can Little Red help the forest dwellers? $1.49

 Mike Weatherford

Cynthia — (Also Barnes & Noble) Cynthia was a nice girl from a prestigious family, with a “nice-girl” education.  That didn’t help much when she found herself chased by an organized criminal element, captured by pirates, and stranded on a planet that was so deadly human government had declared it forbidden.  Luck, in the form of Rat – a trained survivalist – can help, but will it enable her to survive? $0.99

 Kiti Lappi –Novels:

Fourth Sword — A portal fantasy: woman from our world gets transported to one with an ongoing generations long war and working magic, and finds out, after some adventures and to her chagrin, that she was taken there for a purpose. $ 1.49

The Demons of Khemas — A tavern wench has fallen for a barbarian swordsman (not that she admits it). When he disappears she needs to find out what happened. $ 1.49

Short stories:

Nights of the Wampyrs — A small town has problems with a couple of vampires, and the only people who figure out what is going on realize they have to become vampire hunters. Old school vampires, based more on the European folk tales than the later fictionalized versions. First story tells of the birth of one vampire, the two others concentrate on the hunters.

Raven’s Night $0.99

After Night Descends $0.99

Night Work  free from 1st of August to 5th, $ 0.99 after that

Dealing with Elves — A young woman is drawn to a forest where elves live. Urban fantasy, mostly a mood piece. Free from 1st of August to 5th., $ 0.99 after that.

The Task — A ghost story set in a traditional fantasy world, a peasant girls shelters for a night in an abandoned castle. $ 0.99

 

One of the problems with being a writer is that you end up living way too much in your own mind.

This is fun when what you’re doing is… oh, coming up with wonderful worlds, or even horrible ones, alluring characters, or perhaps even horrible but interesting ones.

What I’m trying to tell you here is that it’s fine to let your imagination run on the page, but do not under any circumstances let it run free in your real life.

Okay, fine, so I admit that I’m the sort of person who has to control herself not to make the story of her trip to the grocery store more exciting.

Early on I realized that telling my mom how I was attacked by brigands on the way to get peanuts at the corner store was a bad idea.  If it didn’t sound realistic, I got grounded for lying.  If it sounded realistic, mom went on the war path.

So I learned not to lie.  Though I reserved the right to tell the story of the hunting for the peanuts in as thrilling a way as I could, “And then there I was in the isle, when, looking to the right, there it was: PEANUTS.  Oh, how joyous I was—” etc.

For the rest of the stuff I wrote stories.  I mean, people in general don’t expect stories to be true.  Though there was the gentleman who chided me for making up elves in my biography of Shakespeare.  (Yes, he DID mean Ill Met By Moonlight.  No, I don’t know why.)

For the rest of the stuff I still write stories.  You can sort of assume that if I’m telling something as true, it is true as far as I know, always barring errors of memory and the way the past becomes colored in our minds.  (How is it that I always remember things happening at six, eight or fourteen?  I think the Author forgot to fill in the other years.)

I do know the limits of memory and what you think happened in the sense that after about twenty years things blur a bit, in my case particularly visual details.  There are places I’m sure I knew so well they live inside me and places in my head (the places I make up) look just like them.  My grandmother’s kitchen has done the turn of fantasy palace kitchen and science fiction kitchen/cottage.  And…  And yet, would I be shocked if I could go back to it?  Would I find I’d miscounted the number of chairs?  That the cabinets were the wrong shade of blue?  And how come I can’t remember the color of the walls at all?

Memory, particularly when you’re a writer, when it softens with the passing of years, tends to make things “better stories.”  Usually it messes the timing.  Say that this is the story of how I found a ring.  (No, I don’t think I ever did.)  In real life, I might never have found who the ring belonged to.  But my mind will conflate it with the story I heard years later of the woman who threw her engagement ring away, and I’ll be sure I found out that was her wedding ring.

Not, consciously, you realize – just over the years, as they pass, the random events assemble themselves into story.

That’s fine.  It’s human.  The human mind creates stories out of random.  It’s possibly what makes us human. The ability to turn “don’t go into the forest because there’s a 20% chance you’ll fall and break your leg and no one will find you in time into “don’t go into the forest, there are rodents of unusual size and swamps of flame.”  And if you made the story good enough, the kids believed it, and nothing bad happened.

However, there is a tendency being writers to make stories out of other things.  Specifically, to make stories out of things we don’t understand.  And since most of the things we don’t understand are people, there is a tendency to make up stories about how people are behaving this way because they personally hate us… or something.

Years ago, when I took the Kris and Dean Professional Writers Workshop, they kept telling us “Try very hard not to make up stories about why publishers or editors are doing things.  THAT can kill your career because you’ll decide they hate you and act weird.”

I’ll grant you it was easy to decide all publishers hated you. If you go by once it’s a mistake, twice it’s a coincidence, three times is enemy action, all of us midlisters were under enemy fire ALL the time.

But most of the time, it was just how the system worked.  Doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t walk, when you finally could.  (Free, thank the Lord Almighty, free at last.) It just meant that your editor was not doing it on purpose.  He/she/it worked for a very large house, and if you weren’t one of the properties hotly defended you were more likely to get trampled and the book’s chances destroyed in bizarre ways than of getting off the gate with nothing bad happening.

It was almost impossible not to get paranoid, and of course my FEELINGS were often that everyone was against me, but realistically I knew mostly they didn’t remember I existed.  Sort of like the old joke “Everyone hates me.”  “Don’t be ridiculous.  Most of them don’t know you.”

But because my rational self knew that whatever the emotions, most people in NYC publishing didn’t in fact know I existed, I was very surprised when, telling an older writing friend about an editor missing an appointment with me, he teased me by saying “Oh, yes, he hates you and is trying to destroy your career.”  I guess he thought that’s what I was thinking because of how distressed I was.  I was distressed because I wasn’t absolutely sure I’d kept the appointment at the right place.  (I have no sense of direction.)  And paranoid or not, it’s not a good idea to stand up editors.  (Turns out we had each heard a different hour, and he called me and it got straightened out.)  But at the same time I wanted to say “Oh, that, no.  Thank you.  I’m not that stupid.”

At the same time, I couldn’t blame him.  I watched people go into meltdown because their editor didn’t smile at them in the elevator.  Writers and the sort of explosive emotional situation old publishing created resulted in… drama.

Since I left all publishers save the one I like and can deal with, I tend to keep from drama in my life.  The sad truth about me is that you can completely annoy me one day and I’ll forgive you in a week – not because I’m good natured but because I have a rotten memory for names. You can be a total asshat, and unless I really know you, in a week I won’t remember.

What this means is that I can be fulminatingly furious at someone in the field, but it won’t keep.  Look, I’m far more interested in what’s going on inside my head.  I can write an entire article talking about how wrong, wrong, wrong you are – not, mind you, calling YOU names, unless you have really stepped in it, which usually means you attacked me or one of mine in a personal way – but this doesn’t mean that when I meet you at Worldcon (in the once every five years I go) I’m going to cut you dead.  Chances are even if I think your politics or your favorite movie are repulsive, I find things about you to admire and even like.

Look I have friends – though they might feel otherwise about me – even among the glittery hoo-has of SFWA.  If we don’t talk about their particular issues, they can be pleasant and even interesting people.

One doesn’t condemn an entire person or forfeit an entire friendship just because our friend has one or two really stupid ideas.  If we did that, there would be no friendship and no person who passed muster – particularly among us opinionated lot.

What I mean is that I tend not to get in conflicts, and not to get involved in emotional drama, not because I’m particularly good, but because I’m really busy.  I’ve got barely enough strength for my daily life, my commitments, and my writing.  I do not have time to wonder if some friend is mad at me because I didn’t compliment her on her new sneakers, and I certainly don’t have time to be mad at you forever because you said my hair was funny.  Even when sneakers and hair are stories, or careers.

Unfortunately I’ve discovered, either because people are scared of what is happening in the field and trying to find emotional relief, or because publishers are not all consuming targets of their anger anymore, that some people have had feuds with me for years – that I was TOTALLY unaware of.

Usually the first I hear of it is when a friend of a friend says something like “I don’t want to get in the middle of your quarrel.”  Which leaves me blinking and going “Our what?” since I haven’t given this person half a thought in months.

This can be very flattering, of course.  It’s almost as good as having someone in love with you, when someone cares so much they carry on an entire quarrel without your even knowing.

But it’s a little bit crazy too.  Now, if you are in this field – or even if you aren’t, I understand this sort of thing happens in other careers too (though of course, I know as much about honest work as a duck knows about prospecting for gold) – and even in normal social life (about which I also know… yeah.  Ducks.  Gold.) – seriously, do try not to get involved in too many feuds.

I’ll admit the thing with SFWA got under my nose, like mustard, mostly because honestly, when they start going after older men for being older men, they’ve crossed lines that sheer decency would leave uncrossed.  I was mad, but it wasn’t personal.  I still am mad.  It still isn’t personal.

What I mean is, the people on the other side range from a handful of self-willed villains (or at least self-righteous harm-inflicting people) to a myriad of people who are just going along, just heard something, want to be on the side of angels.  Even when they act like loons, it doesn’t mean some of them aren’t quite decent, the sort of people I’d let catsit.

No, none of them have gone out of their way to pursue a feud with me – at least not that I’ve heard.  (Though granted, I haven’t heard much, more or less on purpose.)  I was just talking about that situation was an example, because of how insane it got and how fast, fueled by everyone’s imagination and wish to be offended.

I’m seeing that happen more and more, and the thing is, I think the reason it’s happening is that it doesn’t matter.  Someone said that disputes are hotter when the stakes are very, very small.

Right now, there is no proof that good standing in fandom, or with your professional equals means anything anymore.  A lot of the people who are buying books have never attended a con.  The local fandom can no longer affect the laydown of a book.  The author of Wool was second only to George R.R. Martin in sales, but when he attended a big con he had no one at his autograph session – because he was selling to people who don’t go to cons.

From personal experience cons have been losing importance.  Organized fandom has been losing the ability to influence sales… at the same time that not a week goes by I don’t hear of some new feud.  (Not usually involving me.)

I think it’s because, like thinking your publisher hated you was better than thinking you’d been THAT unlucky three times, thinking that people in the field are destroying you is better than thinking that you just haven’t figured out how to deal with the new conditions yet.

The problem is that when your creativity is going towards interpersonal drama, it’s not going to writing, or whatever you do for a living.  Also, it makes people outside the field think we’re nuts.  (Which might or might not matter ;) )

Do other professions experience this too?  Does it matter if someone is fighting with you if you’re not even aware of it?  What do you do about it in saner fields than SF/F?  Am I hurting myself by being unaware that some people might/might not have it in for me?  Where do people find the energy for al this?  Am I broken because my attitude is, “hate me all you want, so long as you’re not actively coming over to argue with me?”

I remember in the village women mostly spent their lives in interpersonal feuds over things like “she cut in front of me in the fish queue, so I’m going to cut in on her at the green grocers.”  Even back then, I couldn’t muster enough interest to remember who was mad at whom, and shocked people who were feuding with my family by talking to them – not out of good nature, but because I couldn’t remember.

Am I the only one with a wretched memory?  Or is it just that I channel so much inside, I couldn’t bother to remember who I was mad at?

Perhaps it costs me in sales, or friends, or something – but if I have to put that much drama into something, I want to sell it.

(Grumbles off, convinced there’s something seriously wrong with her.)

UPDATE: Different social mechanics post up at Mad Genius Club: Ten Ways to Leave your (Writers’) Group.

I was told that some people enjoy the posts on the state of the writer, which is good because I intended to bless you with one today.  Mostly because I’ve made some interesting observations on how I work, both from the PJM series on organizing your creative life, and from some other stuff.  And some of the observations still puzzle me, and will possibly likewise puzzle you.  Or perhaps not.  I have, after all, got useful advice here before.

The state of the writer is as follows: I realized yesterday, as I was putting up two collections – Crawling Between Heaven And Earth and Wings – that I hadn’t put anything up in over six months. Worse, I hadn’t logged on in over six months, to do things like take stuff off prime, which means I burned two sets of promo without taking it. (Note I’m not putting links to them.  They might not even be up, because of course having been published before, I probably need to confirm they’re mine to put up – even if they always were.  Dark Regions never bought e-rights – at any rate, I intend to have them free and at 2.99 – being long collections and holding to my policy of having shorts IN COLLECTION at a little less than 99c each, Crawling will be 7.99 and Wings 9.99 – for the Human Wave Garage Sale first week of August.  Since I love you guys, I’ll like when they’re free/cheap.)

I have had an account with Kobo for three months now and not put anything up.  I have not put up at Smashwords things that have rolled off prime.

The problem is that, as my poor subscribers know, I also haven’t done much in writing.  Oh, three short stories last month and one due in two days, but that’s not exactly a full work load for six months.

I haven’t even done much in the way of editing Witchfinder.  I started, got discouraged, and didn’t get into it again until this last weekend.

So, what on Earth has been going on?

There are people who talk of the bees sting theory of poverty.  Poor people might not have anything big wrong with them, but they have a multitude of little things.  The idea is if you’re bee-stung often enough, your life will come to a standstill.

I don’t doubt this is the case with some poor people, though the times I’ve been in that situation, in a monetary way, there was underlying issues (health, mostly) beneath.  Like right after Robert was born, I think I went into hibernation mentally and emotionally for about a year and a half, and things accumulated, like clothes that needed just a stitch to be usable again.  And yes, we were desperately poor through that time.  Robert was born on COBRA and cost us 20k out of pocket. But the way I was also meant that I couldn’t get off my behind and do something to alleviate the poverty, like attempt to sell some of our stuff, or make crafts for sale, or something.  I’ve since found this isn’t unusual for people who are recovering from severe pre-eclampsia and being bed-ridden for six months.  Radical de-conditioning and all that.  I didn’t become myself again till we’d moved here and I made it a point of taking Robert for daily walks.

Interestingly, the latest symptom in the “Sarah isn’t doing anything” saga has been that I stopped daily walks for almost three weeks.  Yes, I was sick and out of breath, but I should – and normally do – walk, even if slower.

So, what is going on?

It is my theory that I was already full-up as a writer.  What I mean is that about two years ago, except for being terribly depressed about my prospects, I was writing four to six novels and some short stories a year and a blog almost every day, and that’s my full complement of work.  Or at least, it was.

Then I started doing a blog every day.  That’s fine, but I need to make an alteration (which I’ll explain) on my methods.

Then I started trying to do publishing.

Then I added the gig at PJM.

You know about the straw that broke the camel’s back?  (There is a similar proverb in Portuguese which I can’t now remember about the grain of sand that broke the horse.)

Like that.  The things added onto the writing are smaller each time, but the sum total of it is for me to sit here most of the time, feeling like I have so much to do I don’t know where to start.

Except, of course, I always knew where to start.  I mean when I was fourteen/fifteen and desperately shy (I put up a good front online and I have a persona at cons, but as much as it would shock most of you I was the classical introvert growing up and to an extent still am) I would hide from large gatherings (which for some reason became very common for my family at this time of my life) by going to the kitchen and starting to “make neat” while the party was in progress.  This also kept me out of my mom critiquing my social manners because she was so grateful that she could finish the party with the kitchen clean.  (In a society with no paper plates/cups, often you washed the same dishes four times while the party was in progress.)  Later, my friends started coming over from across the street to help and the kitchen party was as merry or more than the party-party.

Anyway, for really big parties, like my brother’s wedding, when I went into the kitchen, even right after it had started, it was mind boggling.  There would be dishes, pots and pans piled on every surface and you just stared around and didn’t know where to start.

What I learned then is that you started anywhere at all.  After you cleared the sink enough to start washing, you washed enough to clear a portion near you, covered that in towels (so you could invert dishes on it without water dripping onto the floor) and then started piling the clean dishes there, till you cleared and cleaned and covered in towels the next nearest area, by which time the first set was dry and could be put away.  (My mom only got a dishwasher when I moved out – she has an instinctive dislike of machinery.)

It’s the same when you’re contemplating a mess in your schedule, of course, but the thing is that it’s not… as immediately obvious.  It never occurred to me that I was overwhelmed, only that I always felt tired and vaguely ill (more on that later) and that what I really wanted to do was go away and work elsewhere (which I do at the undisclosed location known as officeish, though the last two or three times haven’t been very productive because I was so tired.)

Three things have happened to alter that.  First, I went away to an undisclosed location over the weekend.  Despite the fact that celebrating our anniversary took quite a bit of time – shut up wretches! I mean we went to dinner somewhere nice! Okay, okay, there was also the walk in the park with the geese (I love it this time of year because there are half-grown goslings.) – I took the print out of Witchfinder up, did about half of it and did not get discouraged by how many times I changed names of minor characters or such.

Also, I came back feeling very relaxed, which made me go “um.” And suddenly I was able to face publishing again.

The second thing relates to the time away too.  By the second night, I woke up with my airways clear and realized that they hadn’t been for close to two years.  We came back home and that night, I was clogged again and not sleeping very well.

I think I’ve identified the cause.  It’s something that was done to our heating/air-conditioning system about a year after it was installed and which I SAID at the time was a stupid idea, but the workmen insisted was the only way to make the thing work.  It eventually led to our aerostatic cleaner breaking and, well… let’s say the air in the house might as well be feeding from the unfinished crawl space.  Which would be fine, if I didn’t have delicate airways.  My younger son, too, has been “clogged up” for seven years.

So, I had an estimator over on fixing the mess – no, it won’t be cheap.  Yes, I hate to spend the money.  But I think in the long run it will do more for me than getting a cleaning lady, because when I’m not getting enough oxygen, I won’t use the extra time well.  Also, it will make the house easier to keep clean.

The other thing in the same vein is that Havey will have to have a bath every week.  THAT is going to be fun.  However, I noticed when he had a bath at the vets, he was much pleasanter to be around for two weeks, so…  (The other cats are all short hair.) I don’t know how much of this is Havey and how much it is that his fur absorbs household dust like… a duster, so he carries all the allergens around with him.

Okay – so what is the third thing I noticed? – well, last two weeks I put my blogs up ahead of time.  I wrote them all on Sunday, then put them.  This week I couldn’t do that, because Sunday was traveling, catching up on what was going on at home, and dealing with such things.

What I noticed is that if I do the blogs ahead of time this leaves me feeling less stressed and able to get more accomplished during the day.

The problem of course is that I usually conk out after 4 blogs in a day – which means to cover a whole week, I need a guest blog or so.  So… If my delightful commenters want to pitch in, I’ll be grateful.

The other thing I’m doing – having realized everything ground to a TOTAL halt when I got back my backlist and wanted it all up “yesterday” – is paying people to edit my old stuff or for things I have to do myself (The Magical British Empire will take considerable but subtle rewrite.)

Again, as with cleaning the air, it’s something I hate to pay to do, because, well, I do.  We have reason to believe – fingers crossed – our income will be secure for a while now, but still, in the times we live in, I don’t like spending money.  (And writers’ income is always iffy, so…)

But sometimes you have to spend money to make money – and I think it’s criminal to have the books up and not up and pimping their slutty little selves.

Of course part of this is that getting people to do other stuff also inspires me with the desire to do more stuff – like I told Dan over getting someone to edit No Will But His “Now I feel like writing all the dead queens, from Aragon to Parr.  And I could do it relatively easily because of course I know them so well.  Probably a week per book, with maybe another week to research.

The problem is, of course, I still am only one person, I have two books due at Baen (and a third that will go to them too) and five indie books in various stages of writing/revision/editing.  And I promised fans that if I can get all the musketeers up by December I’ll do The Musketeer’s Confessor for Christmas.

I do understand the process.  Just like when faced with the horrible kitchen, if you keep at it, eventually you turn the corner, and then are doing each cup as it comes in, and sending your helpers in to scour the sideboards for abandoned saucers, and finish at the end of the party with a sparkling kitchen, there is a race here.

At a party it’s between your washing and the rate at which people use dishes.  Here, it’s between my available time and the work load, keeping in mind that the more things I have out the more money comes in and the more – eventually – I have to pay people to do things.

Think about it, if I have enough out to bring in a minor salary, I CAN pay someone to clean and not feel guilty about spending the money.  I might even have enough money to “buy time away” which means I get more done (objectively, over the weekend, I did what normally would take me a week.)  Which means I get more stuff up, which means I make more money.  Which will free more time for me to write things.

There is a limit, of course.  Even I – probably – can’t write two books a month.  Probably.  At least not consistently.  But I could do one a month, I think, if I didn’t have all the other responsibilities.

And of course, somewhere along the line, the kids will move out, too.  They’re young men, and they shouldn’t give much work – I mean, they actually try to help – but there’s no denying there is a world of difference between running a household of two accommodating adults who spend most of their time together, and a household of four adults/young adults, which live very complex lives.

But right now I’m in the tough part – the part of getting as much stuff out as fast as I can, while not stinting the job.

And I’ve decided, yes, I’ll need to spend some money.  And I’ll need to learn to trust and delegate.  And I’m going to need to plan ahead. And I’m going to need to blog in advance.

It can be done.  But the state of the writer, as of write now is hopeful if subdued and horrified at having to spend money ;).

Oh, and the thing is, with all this, I wouldn’t even be a bit surprised if having put this out there someone who’s been indie longer comes and tells me “Oh, that’s the year and a half slump.  Like, you put something out, then it’s six months before you put the second piece?  Yeah, a year and a half later, you have this slump and go silent for six months.  Well known.”  There are weird rhythms in these things that we’re just figuring out.

Well, we go on.  And we find out.

 

I’ve been reading How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) in between two other books, because… it’s like this: I have a great desire to re-read Jane Austen, so I’ve done Pride and Prejudice and am now halfway through Persuasion (and let me tell you what a relief it is that these old friends are only 1.99).  I read those at night because I’ve found if I read non-fiction or even sometimes new fiction, I wake in the night in argument with it.  “Yes, but it’s not like that.”  I suspect it’s like eating oysters before going to bed and causes your brain to go into hyperdrive.  Then I’m reading Dr. Helen’s Men On Strike, but it’s slow going for two reasons.  Her writing, is superb and eminently enjoyable, but the subject has a way of ambushing me, either by reviving anger at circumstances I’ve encountered and which I have, since, talked myself down from, or by exposing me to things I didn’t even know where happening.  It has to be read slowly, lest I happen to someone.  The other reason is that I’m an idiot.  (But we’d established that.)  Being a bear of very little brain I did what I do to books of authors I like and know personally and bought it hard cover for the future signature. This is a problem, because I don’t want to hurt it.  Which means (grumble) I might need to buy a kindle copy because I find more and more most of what I read is on the paperwhite because it’s easy to carry around and, in a Ziploc, safe for the kitchen.

So… what this means is that I’m reading three books at different times and in different parts of the house, which, to be honest, is fairly normal.  (Unless it’s a book/series we all follow, and I have to concentrate on finishing as soon as possible, before Dan or the kids loses patience and absconds in this.  On matters such as “do you sometimes buy two kindle copies, a hardcover and a paperback” it is better to be silent, as it might have an awful lot to do with the wretched state of our wallets. But hey, the kids can take their own copies when/if they move, and won’t suffer the horrible trauma I did, leaving all their best friends behind.)

Anyway, back to Mr. Goldman.  Like me he thinks our problem is not overpopulation but is, or soon will be a birth dearth.

I disagree with him only insofar as I think he places too much faith in UN statistics.  I’d be shocked near onto death to find any of those is accurate, and while it’s possible that they’re undercounting people (after all, the laziness of local officials must be accounted for) I think on the balance they’re overcounting, due to the advantages of that error: more international subsidies; more pride-of-race; considerably more machismo.

I could be wrong.  I’m afraid it’s a situation in which “nobody knows not’ing” again, just like our own increasingly cooked statistics.  But in these situations in general, though we cannot have proof without extensive research, we do know the way to bet.  (And on research, put not your faith in princes, etc.  Almost every Western researcher, up to and very much including the CIA were absolutely sure that the population, industrial production, etc. of the USSR were what the government said – even though, again, it was a bet statistics were cooked and everyone knew the way to bet on HOW they were cooked.

Anyway, so far Goldman has advanced three theories for why civilizations stop reproducing themselves, and all of them – I’ll admit – apply to an extent: lack of cultural confidence/belief in a civilization as a ‘race’ that must go on, regardless of the rest of humanity; education of women; loss of religious faith.

All three of them, to be sure, are a concomitant part of the birth dearth in the west.  Weather they do cause it, it’s something else, though.

For one, I think Mr. Goldman is being – like most Americans, and even any number of Britishers – either too generous or too naïve about other cultures.  I meet with this again and again.  People with decent enough educations who have travelled abroad will, without irony, make statements like “Americans are the most racist/intolerant/provincial” people on the planet.  At which point my jaw drops open and I wonder “Are you for real?”

I can only attribute this belief to the fact that few people speak a language fluently enough to eavesdrop on foreigner conversations, and fewer still have the sort of “mongrel looks” and manner ;) with which I was blessed, where, depending on what I’m wearing and with whom I’m hanging out at the time, I can pass as a native pretty much anywhere.  So, I’m going to assume most Americans never hear people from the rest of the world letting their hair down, and en-famile, being themselves.

Suffice it to say that so far from being the only racist country in the world, the US is the only country in which racism is utterly unacceptable not just in material stuff like hiring (the rest of the anglosphere at least also seems to find this unacceptable) but in the sense of being a thought crime, so that it has almost vanished from jokes, conversations, and even in most cases thoughts.  As is, at that, “racism” unless it’s used as an accusation by someone losing an argument, is a matter of the more obvious race differences.  To the extent Americans are very careful not to discriminate the people they don’t discriminate against are black and secondarily Hispanic (because they’ve been browbeaten into thinking their objection to unchecked immigration is racist) with people who are far darker but not organized racial minorities (Indians) and people who can be darker but do so well in America that Universities consider them a majority, like Asians.

And because of our peculiar condition as a nation of Intent and Belief, we of course don’t consider ourselves a “race.”  In fact we confused my mom greatly by being “all sorts.”  And there hinges the thing most Americans can’t and don’t get.  Portuguese and Spaniards can tell between themselves on sight.  Despite all the interbreeding that two near neighbors much at war couldn’t avoid, they can (I REMEMBER) tell which one people are.  In the same way they can distinguish between French and Germans, English and Irish, and a fine degree of permutations within for the larger countries. (I could never distinguish between Swedes and Norwegians to their chagrin – or not to any degree of certainty, though I could guess with some confidence.)

By this I mean that pride of breed – which they would call race – and a certainty they’re superior to all others is still very strong in those countries.  And yet, both Portugal and Spain are dying of failure to reproduce.

The same goes for religion.  Yeah, I know, on paper it looks like post modern godlessness is leading to the death of populations.  But trust me, the paper is confused.  Portugal in my parents generation reproduced less than in their parents, and I’d guess except among the very educated putting on a pose for strangers (at that) Portugal is as religious as most places in the US.  And yet, my generation has practically ceased to have kids.  Which, because I also believe Goldman about how fast Islamic populations are crashing, also explains how their pride of race (trust me, kids) and their religion that permeates every facet of life, has failed to keep them popping out kids.

Education of women does have a strong influence, as does the participation of women in the work force.

First, because – duh – it delays reproduction.  When I studied history one of the best indicators of whether population was expanding or contracting was the age of marriage for women.  It’s a very vexing thing for us women who are rational beings that the peak of fertility seems to occur between the ages of 16 and 25 or so.  That is, by the time a woman has finished her bachelors and had time to look about her for a moment or two, and – unless she’s very lucky – before she knows if there is a man for her, the chief of her fertility is gone. Then each five years after that, it gets worse.

Second, women who are working might be too tired to engage in quite so much… ah… marital combustability as can overcome that lapse of fertility.  (Might be!  Ah.  After a kid or two and while working, I’d call it a natural family limiter.)

Third, we’re not absolutely sure of the effect of stress on women’s reproductive systems, nor what constitutes “stress” frankly.  It is possible there is a high correlation, though I don’t know of any studies and must therefore follow two unreliable paths of information – first, almost all high strung women (self included, yes) I know had trouble conceiving or keeping the pregnancy.  Second, it is a folk belief that a woman who is fretted will not get pregnant.  (Now mind I also know women in abusive marriages who kept having kids.  But one must wonder again on the TYPE of stress.)

So saying women’s education (and work) leads to a fall in birth rate is sort of a LaPlace truism: “The horse of Napoleon is white.”

Women’s education might by itself explain most of the fall in birth rates, but again, I think Mr. Goldman is stressing the point when he goes on about how this applies to Islam too.  I suspect the type of education these girls are getting, even in “modernized” countries is 9/10ths religious instruction which – by his reasoning – should make them more willing to have children.  And heaven knows in most Arab countries women are not participating in the labor force.

I think it is more likely that the cause is one that is concomitant but not operative with loss of faith and coincidental with women’s education: industrialization.

This is not because industrialization is, by itself, injurious to reproduction.  If you are a devotee of Gaia and believe that we are poisoning our reproductive ability with the noxious fumes of civilization, go in peace.  I won’t preach to you if you don’t preach to me.

It is rather because the industrial revolution, even at its beginning, cut down greatly on two things: the need/utility of children in the monetary survival of the household (I was going to say “labor” but in the context that might be misunderstood) and child mortality.

I think to get how incredibly rich, how incredibly healthy and well off we are, it takes coming, like me, from a country that – frankly – most of you would have considered a hell hole as to living conditions when I was a child.  Looking at pictures of my very middle class living conditions, I’m struck by the fact that only certain areas of Appalachia back in the sixties could match the poverty on display. Not  that we were – or certainly considered – ourselves poor.  We knew poor, and they were infinitely worse off.  We were, in face, as my grandmother would and did say “Well enough.”

But more than that, even the poor of my time didn’t match the conditions under which my mother – or my upper middle class father – had grown up.  The stories I heard, including of going gleaning after the fields were harvested, not on some lark but to keep body and soul together, and of picking up fallen bits of coal by the side of the railroad, were mind boggling.  Stories, too, of things like my grandmother sewing a satchel for dad’s book bag, because they couldn’t afford to buy him a book bag when he went to high school in the city (in his time, read “with all the rich boys” – which was true even in my brother’s day.  Most even in the middle class stopped school at fourth grace, because the family needed their income.)

In my day even the poorest could afford book bags – often plastic, but all the same.

And mom’s stories, since she was genuinely (through family mismanagement of her ancestors’ mostly ) poor in childhood and grew up in a bad area, are even more horrifying.  For instance, they used to make dolls, play with them for a year, then hold funerals for them, in the same way children in more fortunate circumstances had doll teas and doll weddings.  There are other stories, like of going to the wake of one of her little play friends, and being very upset because the flies would keep landing on the corpse.

This is something that literally breaks my mind.  Now, at fifty I have – that I know – lost two childhood play fellows (I must have lost more, but I live across the sea, and some of them married abroad, so it’s hard to be in touch.) One died of ovarian cancer in her twenties, and the other suffered a stroke while alone at home with her children and died before anyone discovered her, also in either her late twenties or very early thirties.  However, we all reached adulthood.

Of course, here I must beg a break to point out that the playfellows I knew – the ones I grew up with – were already maybe 1/3 of those born to my cohort in the village and surroundings.  The whateveritwas (Probably a particularly virulent chicken pox, though it might have been one of the last huzzahs of small pox escaped from a lab around that time.  The mortality rate was more small pox, and it spared the kids of school age and older who had been vaccinated) that swept through when I was three took the children of several people we later knew, and my own cousin of the same age.  But because I was so young, I remember being sick, and I remember being convinced my cousin had died because I’d refused to share my bread with her (no, I don’t think anyone ever told me this.  I think it’s what my mind attached to when being told of her death) but I have no memory of my cousin’s face, nor of our interaction.  So in my conscious life, children didn’t die.  (Though I have a memory of a funeral procession for an infant, at around that time, going up the village street, with the mourners all in white, and I remember my mom telling me that for a child’s funeral you dress in white, because heaven has gained an angel.)

I suspect for most of us, children don’t die.

But beyond that we are all so prosperous, so happy, so contented, that children seem a terrible disruption of a rationally ordered life.

And before you scream at me that people in Muslim countries whose population is already falling are certainly not happy or contented, do consider what their grandparents and great grandparents lived like. It’s not the absolute prosperity but how fast it increases that makes a difference.

For any human, just knowing that he/she is unlikely to starve to death is such a marked improvement from the past, that we might as well be called blessed.  But then consider that most of us will live longer, healthier lives than our ancestors.  Consider, too, that – rightly or wrongly – even Egyptians believe that they have the right to be kept by their nation from the worst extremities of want. (How that holds is something else again.)

Humans have lived through far worse set backs and much, much worse times.  Almost all the times and all the events, at any rate.  Portuguese didn’t stop having kids because of civil war, Napoleonic invasions, ditactorship or famine.  But they’re now stopping having children because they “have opportunities” and almost no one dies prematurely, and there is so much to do, to see, to learn and to explore.  (And let’s remember that reality TV is practically intellectual by comparison to the best entertainment our ancestors could command.  I mean, our ancestors in small villages across the world.  Don’t tempt me, I’ve been reading Jane Austen.)

We are, in many ways living in the isle of the blessed, where hardly anyone ever dies, there is no want (not of the sort our ancestors knew) and we stay forever young (no?  Go look at pictures of the early twentieth century.  Discount the fact that we are as a rule heavier, a consequence of our prosperity.)

In those circumstances, we are told, elves had almost no children.  So why would we be different?

Regardless of what statistics tell us and the intellectual conviction that we will, yes, one day die, it’s hard to internalize it.  Few of us lose anyone that matters until we’re far too old to have children.

And in the middle of our interests and pleasures, having children seems such an unwonted interruption – particularly for women.

This accords, btw, with the reproduction model for a scavenger species, which stops reproducing when things are TOO good.

Will the piper be paid?  Undoubtedly.  He usually presents his bill.  We don’t know what population crash will do to an industrial society, but I daresay we’ll find out – or our children will.

And then?  I don’t know.  I disagree with Goldman as to the cause (though to be fair, I haven’t finished reading his book, so I will blog on this later) and I disagree that this is “the end” of humanity as such (I tend to believe we’re like weeds and will come back even from greater extremity) but I don’t have a prescription for avoiding a crash before whatever correction comes.  (What price bio-womb.)

My guess is that our way of life will over the next couple of hundred years either suffer massive impoverishment with attendant increase in births, or that we’ll figure out some technological way around this mess.

Which in turn will bring about OTHER issues.