(with a side note on electronic estate planning.)

by Robin Roberts

*Note from Sarah — Robin Roberts is my lawyer and he’s very, very good, so listen to him.  However I want to add ONE thing to planning your elife if you’re a writer.  I get sent novels, short stories, etc by friends, merest acquaintances and total strangers to “read and give me an opinion.” Most of the time they don’t get downloaded, and it’s not even because I don’t intend to read them — it’s more that I have a mind like a sieve.  If you’re a friend, a regular commenter or a friendly acquaintance and waiting for me to read your stuff, poke me.  But if I like the person, they do. If these are already published, I put them in my ebooks drive (i.e. the books I buy/get to read.) But if the person wants comments and editing, it goes on the work drive.  So, suppose I drop dead tomorrow.  Given my tendency to write under names even they don’t know, how does my family figure out which books are mine?  Well… I keep them under a directory called Other People’s Writing.  If they can’t figure it out from that, I can’t help them. And now listen to Robin who knows a lot more about this stuff.*

Sarah and I were discussing some deep philosophical concept via email (either ICANHAZCHEESEBURGER pictures or the best way to word a Craigslist ad for selling the boys) when she sent me a completely out of topic message: “if you have time and patience, would you do a post about electronic estate planning for writers”.

So what can I do?  Here are some more or less random thoughts based on my years of estate planning and probate practice.

Estate planning for authors must be more carefully thought out than ordinary estate planning. Authors have a unique form of property in a copyright of a work.  It is “intangible” property – in contrast to tangible property like cars, personal possessions or real estate. (Even bank accounts are “tangible” in the definition that I’m using).  And in the more common vernacular of “intangible”, your heirs may not even think of that form of property in dealing with your estate.

In ordinary estate planning, one aspect of what we consider is whether or not the client’s estate would have to undergo the probate process upon death – the court administration of an estate.  Most states have some form of easy non-court process – often nothing more than a sworn affidavit and a copy of the death certificate to claim property – for heirs to obtain their inheritances for small estates but what a “small estate” can be varies greatly from state to state.  Sometimes a court appointed executor for the estate ( or personal representative as called in other states ) can have powers that make such a court probate useful even if the estate would qualify for “small estate” handling. We can also use trusts – revocable (aka “living”) or irrevocable – to organize an estate to avoid probate.

Authors, with their unique forms of assets, can use a couple of mechanisms to make it easier for their heirs to handle their copyright works upon their death.  Certainly a well-drafted will can operate on an estate.  Finding an estate planning attorney who also understands copyright can be important because of some of the statutory issues in US Copyright law, e.g., the Section 203 right to terminate transfers has a specific list of who succeeds to the right upon the author’s death.  Consider that you may wish to separate control of your copyrights from the monetary benefit.  In other words, you may wish to appoint someone to have the power to license your works after your death to control how your work is exploited that is different from who you want to receive the revenue from those works.  That may require that your estate plan create some mechanism like a trust to hold those copyrights.

Another mechanism is to use a corporation or limited liability company to control the ownership of the works, then use your estate planning to decide who keeps control of the corporation and who receives revenue from it.  Perhaps using more complex structures like voting trusts to keep control the corporation in the hands of a trusted administrator while seeing that your heirs receive the benefit of the proceeds. That can be more complex to set up during your lifetime but less work for your heirs.

 

Now for this purpose, trusts are very useful and there are lot of really neat things you can do with trusts that are well drafted. The original purpose of trusts was to separate the benefit of property like income, rents, profits etc. from the control of the property.  But you won’t find a trust that is designed to work with intellectual property assets like copyrights and trademarks in a Nolo Press book or software will drafting programs or online legal document services. Estate planning firms charge serious money for drafting trusts and explaining to you how to use them.  Indeed, the latter is the real problem.  I can’t tell you how often I run across someone who has paid thousands of dollars to a law firm to draft a trust, then failed to fund the trust i.e., failed to transfer into the trust the property that its supposed to control.  If you don’t know how to use a trust, you’ve bought very expensive but not very soft toilet paper.

Now what did Sarah mean by “electronic estate planning”?

Today, so much of our lives are online, especially for people who feed themselves with words.  So much of our lives are also in our email, on websites, in forums and such.  Even outside of the literary world, when we handle estates we are finding a lot of trouble dealing with the deceased’s online life.  Some of it is obvious, like online banking.  If you don’t get mailed bank statements, it can be a struggle finding financial accounts.

So everyone needs to keep some records of where their accounts are, their email accounts with passwords (well, except for the ones you use to pay for your porn website subscriptions … don’t ask …), websites that they own, and such.  And it can be a good idea to have a list of online forums if you have a significant online life.  Our online lives are becoming more significant.  I greatly miss some online friends or acquaintances. There have been many times that I’ve been truly grateful that someone was able to come online and tell me of an online friend’s passing because they knew about that forum.  (This can also be true for a serious illness, some of us were very concerned about our ability to reach Steven Den Beste last year during his recovery from his stroke.)

But an author also has to consider how to organize for his heirs or executors the intangible assets of his writing business.  The copyrights that he holds, are they registered?  If not, is there documentation of the work sufficient to establish when it was created and published?  If they are registered, is there a list of all the copyrights for the heirs/executor to use to find them? What accounts are setup with Amazon, Nook Press, Smashwords etc. and what are the account credentials?

And pen names pose a special problem.  Some are only decorative, in that the copyright is registered in the author’s real name. Compare “S. Andrew Swann” works with the copyright page in the name of Stephen Swiniarski for example.  But its possible to register a copyright in a psuedonym that is opaque to the Copyright Office. Have you done this and if so, are there records in a convenient place for your executor to find?

Some authors use the tradename or “doing business as” registrations of their local Secretary of State to be able to accept royalty checks in their opaque pen names, do your records include these filings so that your heirs/executor can locate them and renew them if needed?

These problems are also among those more easily solved by an author owning a corporation or limited liability company that has in its records those works, or even has the works registered in its name as works for hire (see Kevin J. Anderson and his use of Wordfire Inc.)

 

Robin D. Roberts

http://www.robertsandroberts.net

 

CROSSPOSTED at Mad Genius Club

 

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 Helen Blythe, sister to the Earl of Savage

A Most Fantastical Crew

We stood there on that slippery horrid pink…  I tried to think of it as a rock, but I was more or less sure that it was actually a muscle or a gland or … – a part of someone or something – and watched the little boat approach.

As it came closer it became obvious that it was not made of anything sensible like wood.  Instead, it appeared to be assembled of bones.  Not human bones, thankfully, or I might have given way to strong hysterics which likely would have vexed Mr. Merrit very greatly.  As it approached, it looked like it was made of great planks of cartilage, like one finds inside certain sea animals.  But its masts had teeth along the length and looked like they had been built of mandibles.  And the “cloth” hanging from the mast was pink and horrible, and I suspected was really a flap of skin, perhaps from this same creature inside whom we seemed to be lost.

The whole had a fish-like aspect.

When I was very little, Jonathan had a tutor for only one summer, before papa decided that Jonathan would be better off at school or, as he said, being someone else’s problem.  The tutor was a tall, thin man, who coughed a lot, but he had brought with him the most amazing and interesting collection I’d ever seen.  He had mounted skeletons of birds and fish, and pinned butterflies beneath glass.  When he’d caught me spying into his room, he’d asked me if I wanted to be told about his treasures, and had given me an interesting lecture on each of the skeletons and butterflies and insects that crammed the tiny room my parents had allotted him. I’m not lying, it really was interesting, and I’d probably have gone back to him for lectures, except nanny had caught me in his room and nearly had strong hysterics, and treated me to a very long talk about how some older men like little girls.

At the time it had all gone so far above my comprehension I’d thought nanny had lost her mind.  Now I understand what she meant.  One hears stories.  But it wasn’t so with Mister Brim.  He had talked to me as he would have talked to any other interested creature.  It appeared he’d been on a three-year-long tour through Africa or South America or some place that is, at this distance, hard to remember.  It was where he’d contracted his cough and ruined his health, and that had caused him to return home.  But obviously his mind and his passion remained there, and he just wanted to talk about his happy times.  Since Jonathan wasn’t much interested, he’d spent an afternoon talking to me.

I thought of him, as that odd little boat came to dock near us.

From a distance, I’d thought that there were little men aboard the boat, but now I saw that they were monkeys.  A vast number of monks – I thought chimps – wearing ragged sailors uniforms, but not sailors as in our own navy.  More like some exotic navy all silks and odd tailoring.  They were little white tunics, and bulky ballooning pants and colorful silk sashes carried around their waists.

I heard Betsy say, “They’re monkeys,” in an astounded tone, beneath her breath, and then the boat was docking up against the soft pink stuff, and a monkey jumped up and tied it with a thick rope of unknown – and best not examined – provenance to something in the protruberance upon which we stood.  And Wolfe Merrit cleared his throat, “I say,” he said, in the tone of a gentleman trying to make conversation at a social function.  “I say, you wouldn’t happen to know where three forlorn travelers can get shelter, would you?”

The monkey who’d tied the rope looked at us and blinked.  It seemed to me that his eyes were far more intelligent than they should have been, and I wondered why I wasn’t scared.  I should have been.  It wasn’t as though bone-built boats crewed by monkeys were a normal thing in my life.

I could only think that either I’d become too tired and inured by all the successive shocks and incongruencies of the last many hours or that the monkeys were too… entertaining.  They looked much like a circus act trained by someone.  I wondered whom.

The monkey turned and gestured towards the boat, and another of his fellows came scrambling up, and across the rope.  He was better dressed than the others, in that his clothes looked newer and his baggy pants were made of striped silk in gold and silver and red that must at one time have been blindingly bright.  He wore a rope of pearls around his neck.

He bowed deeply to us.  “My fellow here,” he said.  “Does not speak your language.  You talked to him.  What do you need?”

“I …”  This impeccable speech, in the Queen’s English, from a Monkey had stopped even Mister Merrit cold.  He cleared his throat again.  “Who do I have the pleasure of addressing, sir?”

The monkey bowed.  The feeling that I was caught in the middle of a circus act was stronger than ever.  “I am Arya,” he said.  “Arya the Voluble.  Arya of the Nimble fingers.”  He looked inexpressibly sad, as though he’d suddenly remembered that his entire family had perished in a horrible way.  “Arya, alas, the great sailor.  Which I misdoubt my lord Hanuman would believe now.”  He sighed, a very human sigh.  “For two years now we’ve been lost in the gullet of this beast, having been swallowed in becalmed sees, and how we’ve survived, milord, it would make you weep to watch it, for there are neither forests nor trees, neither fruit nor plant here, and what our lord Hanuman must think has happened to us, when he sent a crew of his best magicians and his most competent tricksters.” He sighed, then opened his arms and showed us both palms in a very human gesture.  “I know not.”

I knew not either, save that Merritt hadn’t corrected the “my lord” and that his hand had clasped my arm hard enough to bruise.  I didn’t know why, except I assumed something in the monkey’s speech discomfited him.

He finally found his voice and said, “We’re in a beast, then?”

“Oh, aye, a great tentacle beast, like an octopus.  My lord Hanuman sent us for to see if we could put it to sleep again, as it’s been for centuries uncounted.  Instead it swallowed us whole, and our craft too.”  He must have seen us staring at his craft.  “Oh, aye, not that.  A proper craft, which is moored at our home island.  We would not risk it in these daily expeditions to get our living from the gullet of the beast.  Because one day we will defeat the magic on it and leave here to go home.”

“Magic,” Merrit said.

“Magic barriers,” the monkey said.  “Like a magical strainer.  They don’t let anything magical pass out of the beast, once swallowed.”

I shuddered.  The idea of living out my life here did not appeal.  At my side, Betsy gasped but said nothing, which was a vast improvement over what she would have said just hours ago.  The poor girl must be very tired.

“I see,” Merritt said.  “then you can’t tell us how to leave?”

“No,” Arya said.  “Except that perhaps with your magic and our magic we can confound it.”

“Are there… many other people here?”

“If you mean many other magical creatures, there are other tribes of lost travelers, but we stay away from them, for they don’t consider monkeys quite … creatures that shouldn’t be eaten.  We lost a young and well intentioned fool our first week here, and since then we avoid them.  Not that I blame them exactly, for men have often eaten monkeys, and there is little to eat here.  Except that we’ve found you can take vast strips of the beast’s muscles, and they don’t even taste too badly, and they grow back wondrously fast.  If you come aboard my meager vessel now, we shall take you to our village, where you can bathe and get fresh clothes and share our humble repast.”

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a species with a massively growing population must be in need of another planet.

And that’s our problem.  We don’t have a massively growing population.  We might not have a growing population at all.

For thirty years now I’ve had this funny feeling at the back of my head.  It started on coming to the States and hearing that Portugal had a birth rate of something like six children per woman.  It made me sort of sit back and blink.

Again, yes, I know that anecdote isn’t data, but I knew at least 10,000 families fairly well – those in the village – and I knew OF probably a million families if you count my school friends, people I knew casually, etc.  Of those I knew exactly three families with six or more children, one with four and a couple with three.  More common – far more common – was the family with two and one child.

Sure in my parents’ day six children weren’t unusual, though back then it was highly unusual to raise them all.  Mom came from a family of six that raised five, and dad came from a family of four that raised them all.  But their generation didn’t reproduce in nearly the same numbers. My generation as far as I can tell has hardly reproduced.  Or the generation before mine.

Because Portugal is a relatively traditional country compared to the US most boomers did get married (sometimes several times) but few of them had more than two children.  And in my in-between generation, I’m a miracle of fertility with two children.  (And, of course, I don’t live there.)

Of course, when Portugal joined the EU suddenly we were told its birth rate was beneath replacement.  Then there was the USSR.  It too was growing, and its population would in fact crush us, and then, suddenly, after the collapse, it has negative births vs. death.

Meanwhile I’d been getting a feeling – just a feeling – this sense that the population wasn’t “exploding” nearly at the rate we’d been told it was.  While school books and textbooks said that we were expanding at a geometric rate, it didn’t seem like that anywhere I looked.

It was sort of the feeling Heinlein described in one of his books, when he talks about how he and Ginny went to Moscow and it didn’t “feel” like it had the population they said it had.

I’ve studied history.  I know what a society with a rapidly expanding population (and young population at that) looks like, and we have none of the symptoms.  In fact, we have the opposite symptoms, though masked by “digesting” the huge lump of the boomers as it moves through the elephant.

Twenty years ago, discussing this with a friend, she called me crazy, because, she said, if the population wasn’t booming, why were houses taking up more and more green space?  Why were cities expanding into areas that had previously been forested?

My answer, of course, involved people preferring more space (I always live, by preference, in walkable neighborhoods.  It’s not a greeny thing, it’s the fact that I know if I don’t have to run errands on foot I will never walk.  I don’t even particularly prefer Victorian houses, though they can be neat – they’re also a pain to clean – but that’s what’s mostly available in walkable neighborhoods.) Most of the neighborhoods I’ve lived in, you can reach out the window and touch your neighbor’s hand if he reaches out.

These days only the cheapest suburbs do that.  (And our region was a suburb when first built.)

And yeah, in places like Portugal you see a lot more vertical building and the overtaking of traditional villages, but a lot of that is because – as we discussed here two days ago – people no longer wish to raise ten (or one) kid in an unheated hovel with two rooms.  (My mom’s parents raised a family of five in a home the size of my current bedroom.  It had bedroom, common room and kitchen.  The girls – three plus a cousin who more or less lived with them – slept in a double bed in the living room, two facing each way.  The boys slept next door at their grandmother’s house. Now, her parents were much poorer than my paternal grandparents, but those living arrangements were middle class in her day.  In fact, until I was seven, my parents had both children in very little more space, and either I or my brother were farmed to sleep next door at grandma’s.  And we were if not the upper crust of the village – those being rich farmers – but we were close to the top of the middle class there.)

What I mean is that most of the signs people scream about as “expanding population” are in fact signs of expanding affluence, or expanding demands in lifestyle.

There has for instance been a move en-masse from less desirable to more desirable areas.  In the states this seems to be a move from the old rust belt states to more sun-blessed areas.  Going to Ohio, where I was an exchange student thirty five years ago, last year, it was not only obvious that it was shrinking – there were a lot of boarded up areas; houses were being offered at ridiculously low prices; selection in stores was much smaller. – but also that it was stagnating.  Most of the people we ran into were older – our age and older – or very young, ie high school kids waiting to move out.  The “vital years” of say between twenty three and thirty five seemed to be largely absent, doubtless having moved elsewhere.

In Portugal the movement is from G-d forsaken villages to cities and the surroundings.  This is in accord to culture – the idea of suburbs puzzles me, and I suspect would puzzle most Portuguese.  Life is always in the city and has been since Rome tramped in – and facilitated by highways which make it easy to live in one city and work in another, but difficult to go anywhere from villages in the mountains. So the village where I grew up, being 10 km as the crow flies (?) or so from Porto (remember Europe, everything is scrunched together) has been overtaken by the city, but when we drove around in search of Celtic ruins to show the boys, we wandered up areas of boarded up villages, decaying farmhouses and areas so isolated you couldn’t hear a sound of civilization.  Many more so than one used to find when going through that region.

And the States had and might still have (though with La Grande Salida (sp?) this is unlikely) a growing population, but this is mostly due to immigration, not to our craptacular birth rate.  It is the same mechanism that draws people to the sun states, or the cities.  They’re looking for a better life.

But the important thing is that we don’t KNOW, and we can’t KNOW.

Censuses, even in the US where we take them semi-seriously are manipulated.  Mostly they’re manipulated upward.  Because our electoral system depends on proportional representation, people who feel threatened with losing power come up with adjustments to the head count.  “Uncounted populations” and “people who are afraid to answer questions” and…  And arbitrarily add a number of people to the top of the count every census.  How many are added depends on how many congress critters and ward bosses need to retain power – pretty much.  If you buy that’s a scientific process, I have some swampland in Florida.

We do know how that can be expanded, because it’s turning out, for instance, the number of uninsured people with chronic illnesses is less than a tenth what it was puffed up to be around the time they were trying to pass the Unaffordable Health Care Act.

And if you think that other countries are better – please!

In democratic countries, the benes are usually distributed per-head: representation, aid, pork for a particularly region.  In the non democratic ones – the ones that are usually net receivers of public aid – it gets even worse.  Far, far, far worse.  They’re not just lying to themselves.  They’re lying to the UN and international aid associations. Frankly, they’re probably also lying to their own country.  You have no idea – NONE – how law abiding the US is.  Even now.  Even with all the “illegal immigrants” supposedly hiding in the shadows.  In Portugal, which isn’t even a third world country, lawlessness is a way of life.  For instance, when I was a kid, the government insisted you pay a radio license (no one had TV.)  No one did.  QUITE LITERALLY no one.  When the inspectors came by (once a year or so) word came down from the entrance of the village and people would hide their radios.  As far as official statistics, in Portugal at the time no one owned a radio.  Even though radio soap operas were a growth industry.  It was a miracle.

Do you think they don’t lie about their number of children?  Particularly when the government pays a subsidy per head just for having children? (It’s called support of family.) Particularly when so many births take place at home and often people are slapdash about registering?

I’m surprised Portugal doesn’t STILL have a birth rate of six children per woman.  They must be losing their touch.  I suspect it has to do with EU mechanisms curtailing that.

But what about the countries that aren’t part of a semi-civilized polity?

These days it has become more or less fashionable to say that Islamic countries are the only ones growing in population.  The Muslim womb will conquer the world.  But there are the occasional reports, sneaking in, under the wire, on things like women having discovered the rhythm method via the web and limiting their own fertility.  And no one asks: who goes into the desert and counts the Bedouins?  Or do you go up to one guy and ask him how many children he has, then extrapolate?  And why would you trust a guy, for whom having more sons is more power and definitely more honor..

But Sarah, you say, you know that they’re immigrating to Europe in massive numbers.  Yes, they are, and do keep that in mind.  More on that later.  However, the numbers are not nearly as massive as they were when the Europeans were going the other way (to all the world, not just Muslim countries, not considered particularly desirable at the time.)  Keep that in mind too.  Their immigration has more to do with their truly bankrupt economies than with their birth rate.  Portugal has a birthrate below replacement, but anyone with a bit of initiative still immigrates (usually to England these days, seems like.)

Also keep in mind that though their first generation seems to have much higher fertility (seem to have, you say?  Well, look, even in the US welfare recipients, which a lot of these first generation immigrants from third world countries are, are known to borrow neighbor’s children to show up at the welfare office.  Also, I’ve heard from social workers, they often apply for welfare at all cities within driving distance, under different names/addresses.  You think CLOSED ethnic communities largely hostile to the host country wouldn’t do the same?  Why?) than natives, the second and subsequent generations match with locals.

Is this happening?  I can’t tell you.  NO ONE CAN.  Because if the figures aren’t reliable, then we’ve got nothing.

The last time I talked about this, someone said “give us a way to investigate, and we’ll do it.”  The problem is that I’m not a trained anthropologist and I can only guess at methods.  One of the methods, if you can get those figures (and I’m going to guess you can only get it for the more developed countries) is to find the sources of water to a city, then supposed population and calculate whether that’s even possible.  Another would be with the food entering the city.  Another yet would be to count houses, occupancy, and figure out if it’s possible to have close to that population.

I don’t even know how to get those figures, though I suspect some of you do.  And in water sources, at least, you’re going to contend with “green” propaganda which tries to exaggerate water one way or another.

But Sarah, if you have nothing concrete, how can you say you know the statistics are wrong?

Well… first, because as I said, they’re not even particularly smart, even in the US about telling you they’re “inferring” people who are “hiding.”  And the movement is always in one direction.  They never say “this family answered the census twice in different addresses, so they can receive welfare at two locations.”

Second because there are things I know have happened – the AIDS epidemic in Africa, say – which were barely a blip on the demographic radar, in an absolutely impossible way.

Then there’s – as with evidence of self-deportation in the US right now – just… living day to day somewhere.  You see things.  One of the first signs in my region that people were leaving back to South America was that the mostly Latin high school closed, and its remaining population was dispersed to other schools.

In the same way – look, read the Heinlein juveniles.  They’re not of course a record of the future, but they’re a reasonable extrapolation of what an exploding population looks like.  This happened, historically, in Elizabethan England (not through an increase of birth rate, but through an increase in survival of infants) at proportionally larger rates than the boomers here.  It happened in most of Europe at the same time.

So, what does an expanding population look like, from other signs?  Well, humans are a colonizing species.  When we have an excess of young, we send them off.  They go and find new land, new places.  They go and discover new things.  Life changes very fast, and not just technology-change-fueled.  There’s new fashions, new mores, exploring of new (usually really old) ways of living.  There’s a feeling of POWER to the youth.

What there isn’t is a bunch of kids living with their parents and re-hashing the “controversial” ways of their parents or grandparents.  What there isn’t is overprotective parents struggling not to lose their one or one of two chicks.  What there isn’t is a sense of restraint and traditionalism to the culture.  (Which, yes, we do have.  It’s just our “traditional” got set in the last population explosion and it was influenced by Soviet propaganda.)

And that’s part of your answer on why Space colonization isn’t happening – it isn’t happening because there’s no population pressure driving it.  It is a longing of the mind, not the body.  But even if you think that Space is too hard to conquer, there isn’t other colonization taking place.  There are plenty of regions in this globe that are – yes – still untouched, including much of the Americas.  Beyond that, there is easier colonization than space, including some sort of “living on the sea” arrangements.  But it isn’t happening.  It JUST isn’t.  Why not?  Because there’s no pressure. (Which is also why it’s possible to abandon less hospitable areas.)

And then there’s the international financial crisis.  Socialist and socialist light regimes REQUIRE larger generations each time, in order to keep going.  They’re not getting that.  Demand is soft because the consumers counted aren’t there.

This is where I bear the bad tidings: writers of the golden age of SF imagined a falling population kind of like Europe after the plague, but they forgot something.  That was an abrupt fall and the few survivors inherited a lot from the dead, leading for many of them to a surplus for the first time.  Which in turn fueled an expansion.

But a naturally falling population looks different.  It’s a narrowing of consumer demand, a narrowing of expectations.  It’s becoming a little poorer every generation and – because of our expanding life spans, at least for now – a smaller younger contingent supporting a huge aged one.  Which makes having children harder.

If this sounds familiar, that’s what we’re stuck in.

I don’t hold it against Heinlein not having seen it.  Yes, he should have, but there was no genetic evidence (which we have now) that humans are like any other scavenging population self-limiting.  If we get the sense there’s too many of us around the population seems to limit, either volitionally or through some biological mechanism (perhaps explaining the epidemic of infertility.) Also in his time, it seemed like all the rules had been swept away.  Humans were living in new, new ways and nothing was impossible.

He was right at least in one thing.  When he said population pressures cause war, he was right.  But it wasn’t population in toto.  It was population of YOUNG people in proportion to old.  If you want to know why the cold war never went massively hot – that was it.  It came close during the boom, but then it cooled again.

I don’t believe in massive conspiracies.  You know that.  I think a conspiracy of more than a few dozen people with a lot to lose is highly unlikely.  But this wouldn’t take a conspiracy.  It takes a hundred little acts of corruption, a thousand acts of lack of exactness.  And once the figures move out of the village, out of the region, out of the city, out of the country, other governing bodies aren’t aware and take those as gospel truth.

It is a thing that humans are prone to – taking written numbers seriously and acting as though they were true.

And this, in turn, brings out cries of how we’re overpopulated and we’re all going to die.

I made this bet before and I’ll make it again – in twenty years, we’ll hear panicked cries, as the evidence of a fallen population (as the boomers die) becomes clear.  Governments will then try to tell people still of an age to reproduce it’s their duty to have kids.

Might very well be too little too late by then.  My biologist son tells me that the human species has gone through at least three bottle necks when populations around the world were reduced to maybe a few dozen individuals, maybe a few hundred.  There is a pattern of this, which means it’s part of who we are.  Though I hope this time is the first time we’ve talked ourselves into it through statistics.

However, meanwhile, please stop screaming at me about “exploding populations.”  You don’t know.  And neither do I.  No one knows, because all our figures are vitiated by the interests of those who are supposed to curate them.

What we know is that humans are certainly not expanding and not claiming brave new territory.  And those of us like me who think we must go to space; we must expand or risk losing civilization, have a tough, tough row to hoe.  Because there is no population pressure pushing us outward, and no vast numbers of expendable young to send ahead of us.

And that might kill us.

It’s become a thing among Heinlein fans, writers and readers alike.  We get together for a good talk, and a glass of wine, and one of us will mention something nuts and the others will go “Well, these are the crazy years.”

Things like the girl who had to remove a decoration from her purse before boarding a plane because the decoration was in the shape of a revolver, though about finger sized and evidently cut in half lengthwise.  The TSA thought the ban on guns applied to this too.  (Of course, she’d flown with it before, so it was just this TSA station, but nonetheless its rulings were absolute.)

Things like the little deaf boy who can’t sign his name because one of the letters looks like a gun.

Things like kids getting in trouble because of a fictional story they wrote.  Things like my younger son – it’s a theme, yes.  The boy is lightening rod on his mother’s side.  More on that later – getting sent to the school psychiatrist because he used the following sentence in an essay “Some people think I’m crazy.”

Then there is the shooting in the Aurora theater, which doesn’t even make any sense, except in a culture where it’s better to be famous for killing people than to be obscure.

There’s half (half?) of our literature and movies, which glorify behaviors that in real life get you killed or make you a bum.  There’s the fact that being thrifty, hard working and honoring your contracts makes you “uncool.”  There the fact our women are taught to hate all men and men are finally learning to avoid women.  There’s…

You say it in groups of Heinlein fans, and people go “Well, these ARE the crazy years.”  And you move on.

I’m here to tell you these are not the crazy years, these are the fracking insane years.  Yesterday I went for a long walk and because I didn’t have my son – he was volunteering at the hospital – and therefore had to stay off the more interesting parts of downtown, I took an audio book to keep me company.  The book, because I’m writing space opera and trying to internalize his rhythms (and also because I really am trying to avoid using his terminology, etc, by reminding myself what it is.  I grew up with it, and to me it just means “science fiction” but of course it’s more than that), was Methuselah’s Children by Robert A. Heinlein.

When he hits the description of the Crazy years – you know, kids striking for less homework, more pay (for going to school) and eating clay sandwiches and such, I thought “Brother, you didn’t know from crazy.”

Part of his explanation – built into his world building – was that the crazy years were brought on by population pressures.  One must give the man one strike, and that’s a big one, but it’s one he shared with every scientist of his time.

At least he seemed to have a clue what really was at the bottom of it.  “Semantic confusion.”  Semantic confusion is a big big issue, and it is what is at the bottom of our own insanity.

Heinlein believed that semantics would become an exact science.  Since he based his beliefs on the scientific magazines of his time, I’m going to assume there was research into this.  But it seems to have come to nothing.  Or did it?

Was this one of those sciences that was never published?  One of those things that were considered too dangerous for people to know?

Let me put it this way, if I say “Women should sleep around with every guy possible, because guys want to have women available to them with no strings attached” most women figure out that’s bad, right?  But if I say “Women should sleep around with every guy possible so no man will hold strings on them and they can be free” this is liberating, right?  Semantics.  Not looking beyond the significant for the signified.

But the emotions know, if the head doesn’t.  Pretty words can beguile women, and tv shows can show the wonderful joys of the slutty lifestyle, but every one of a us knows a woman who is turning forty and fifty, still raising the fist of liberation but finding fewer and fewer takers and, let’s face it, sinking into a pit of quiet despair.

Because men and women are different, and studies prove this.  You shouldn’t need studies.  It’s evolutionary.  It benefitted men to sleep around and so those who did it with no issues were the ones who left most off spring.  It did not benefit women to sleep around.  It benefited them to have a guy know (or think) the kids were his, and therefore bring her the best hunk of mammoth from his hunt.  Her kids survived.

Studies have shown that though in both cases sex creates attachment, the effect is much stronger among women.

There’s other stuff.  We won’t talk about the human papilloma virus, now endemic in populations, which apparently causes interesting forms of vaginal, penile and mouth cancers.  The widespread dissemination of it requires that most people have MANY partners.

BUT at the heart of it, guys enjoy the hooking up culture, women don’t.  I’m not saying there weren’t always women who enjoyed it – of course there were – but statistically speaking, women favor attachment over hooking up.

How in hell did “liberating women” turn into “make them available for men’s fun with no pressures and no commitments?”  How can we believe “Men and women are exactly the same, despite different evolutionary pressures, despite the fact we can see and hear they aren’t?”

Semantic confusion.  We confuse equality before the law with equality.

How did not teaching your kids to read – whole word, making the classroom fun, “new methods” of learning for something that has been done in a mass setting and successfully since at least the Roman Empire – become “pedagogy”? and “Desirable”?  Semantic confusion.  We think “new” is better and trust “new discoveries” to make learning “less boring.”  (Almost all basic learning is mind bogglingly boring.  But it opens your wings to the sky.)

How did “Question Authority” become “Question all authority except your hippie teacher?”  Semantic confusion.  The teacher is after all cool and still behaves like an adolescent and assays your fears of growing old and unhip.  And he says the authority are those other people.  You know, the unhip ones, like your parents.  And you don’t think that the teacher has power over the classroom.  That he has his own authority.  And that he’s using it to manipulate you.

How did “Speaking Truth to Power” become saying platitudes that are already enforced from the top down in our laws and in our societal assumptions.  You know, things like “Anyone could be homeless.  They just need compassion.”  (Actually this is true, but for the long time homeless compassion should come in the form of making sure they take their meds and at least moderate their behavior enough to live in society.)  Things like “Women are exactly the same as men and any differences are cultural.”  (Actually women are driven by different hormones which shape thought, which shape – oh, never mind.  Yes, some women are more masculine then men, but not the vast majority.)  Things like “You should be able to make a living at whatever you want to, whether it’s something other people want or need or not.”  Things like “What’s wrong with capitalism is that it doesn’t distribute money equally.”

This is “Brave and courageous” I suppose because they can give you your very own TV show, for parroting what the authorities want people to believe.

But the thing about semantic insanity is that words aren’t the truth.  Words are just words.  Our lying eyes still insist on telling us where reality differs from the words, and things start cracking up.

The first symptom is an amping up of insanity.  Do women feel used and treated like dirt?  Do they get upset because younger women (DUH) attract more men?

Well, you get screams of “harassment” at mere words said in passing; and you get “lookism” and its being considered a bad thing to note someone is in fact female.

They could step back and think that perhaps sex for its own sake is bad, and perhaps there is a reason for mating for life and having support in your middle or old age.  But that would require real talking truth to power.  And that they can’t do.  Because everyone knows married people are unhip.

Is your kid failing to learn to read by the new spanking shiny methods?  Well, then he must have a disability and it must be the fault of something that’s tragically unhip, like irradiated food.

… But insanity can only be amped so much.  After a while even the crazies know it’s crazy.  And then, there’s the fact that semantic insanity encourages the sort of behavior that makes things worse and takes society apart faster.

And then the crash comes.  The normal result of the crash is a strong man regime, and maybe that’s where we’ll end up.  Only not the current strong men, because they’re semantically insane.  The very people trying to speed up the crash are the ones least likely to survive it.

Because most of them are third generation indoctrinated and unable to think of the signified beneath the significant.

I’m an odd duck.  I’d prefer no enforcement of even the old morals.  It makes most of us Odds distinctly uncomfortable, when any societal normal is rigidly enforced.  And it makes it difficult for creativity and invention to flourish.

But that’s where we’re headed if we don’t rein in this semantic insanity, because a strong-man regime that’s closer aligned with the majority of people is better than what we have now, which is only aligned with the reality inside people’s heads.  (Or at least the kakistocracy’s heads.)  It will allow people to survive better.

Or we can turn back now, and try to think clearly and believe our lying eyes and not the pretty stuff we want to believe.

As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,

The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!

There is a different post over at Mad Genius Club:  Entanglements.

The Portuguese are a very odd people  (you can stop guffawing now, it’s unbecoming).  I don’t know if there  is such a thing as a word devoted solely to nostalgia in other languages, but there is one in Portuguese.

They told us in translation class that this word – Saudade – can’t be literally translated to any one word in any other language.  Its definition would be something like “a near sick longing for days gone by/someone who is dead or far away/a condition you can’t be in again.”

The only time I can honestly say I’ve experienced it full force is in the middle of winter in Colorado.  I’m a person who doesn’t function well (or often at all) in cold weather, and sometimes I just long for warmth and know I can’t get it, and get all upset.

If I could recapture one day in the past – just one perfect day – it would be labor day when Marshall was three, and we discovered the decaying amusement park where I set Noah’s Boy.  The kids were young enough they never tired of the rides.  We went there I think at five, and stayed till long after ten pm.  Dan went on the rides with them, but I don’t do rides (I don’t pay money to be made uncomfortable.)  So I just took three mysteries, and walked around, and waited for them, and listened to their excited stories about the rides.  Then we went for a train ride around the park.  And, because all other restaurants were closed and we’d already eaten at our favorite diner that day, we ended up having late dinner at a Chinese restaurant downtown with a view of the city and introduced Marshall to Peking Duck.

If I could relive one perfect day, it would be that.  But it doesn’t rise to the level of saudade, because afterwards, I would want to be right back where I am.  (Though if we’re going to talk about knowing what I know now, this was right after I’d sold Ill Met By Moonlight, but it hadn’t come out, and if I’d known then what I know now, I’d not have bothered pursuing a career again, except for trying to get in at Baen.  Everything else would have gone in the drawer.  It would have saved me years – years – of stress.OTOH who knows if I’d be the person I’m now, and have the abilities I have now.  Yes, I know I might have better ones, but what if I didn’t.)

So, yesterday I was hanging out at Powerline, and saw their little thing on the pictures of the early twentieth century that Glenn put up.

John Hinderaker says this My reaction is, it isn’t just Detroit. The whole world looks better to me–less crowded, cleaner, more confident and hopeful. Better dressed, too.

So, I went and looked.  I can do saudade like nobody’s business, I was trained early.  But looking at those pictures, what came to mind was my childhood.

No, I didn’t grow up in that time.  Believe it or not, I was born in the middle of the twentieth century, plus twelve years.  However, looking at those pictures, they looked more familiar to me than I suspect they would for most of you.

I was told when I was little that Portugal was twenty years behind the rest of the western world.  Maybe so.  I’m sure the gap in medical science and other such things was no more than that.  Were it more, born premature and fragile, I wouldn’t be here.

However, it is a bad thing to think of civilizations and of history as moving along the same lines everywhere and in every respect.  It’s a human error, of course, and one that often shows up in science fiction books as “they have nineteenth century level technology.”

The thing is not scripted, and someone can be living at the nineteenth century level in transportation, say, and at the twenty first in medicine.  Or, as I understand applies in parts of Africa, at the medieval or before level in technology, but with ipods or cars.

In the area I was in, the pockets were more complex than that. Yeah, we mostly had “nineteenth century level” transportation tech, except that there were cars and buses and particularly vans and trucks aplenty.  The… a … domestic tech might have been pre-nineteenth century.  Most kitchens didn’t have running water, so it had to be got out of the well and carried in.  And our house had a – cold – shower, but most houses didn’t even have that.  (And the only person who used that was my dad.)

Looking at those pictures, I could feel the scratchy fabric on the skin, the sense you have in summer of grime all over you when you don’t bathe but once a week and just washing in parts from a basin is not the same.  I could smell those pictures too.  Yes, they’re beautiful, but I could smell the horse manure on the city streets and the tang of the smoke of those trains in the air.

And I could smell those children: unwashed hair and sweat.

I remember thirty years ago, even, getting on a train in Portugal – when it had come long distance from the mountains – was a noseful.  Not that people didn’t wash.  They did, once a week or so.  But we humans are stinky beasts.  And in winter you needed to add the smell of coal fires, which many people used to dry clothes and most people – outside the urban centers – used for heating and cooking.

And I knew that the beautiful shops and restaurants would be sweltering in summer, freezing in winter, and frankly, that as beautiful as they look, you couldn’t get the variety you get now at your local seven eleven.  Or frankly the quality.

As for “less crowded” – not really.  There were probably more people you were forced into close contact with.  There are statistics proving there was less footage per person in houses, and I attest to that in trains and buses and city streets.

As for ideas – brother, you think we’re badly off now – back then they really  — really – believed big government could solve everything and take us to the stars and make everyone’s life paradise.  And we won’t go into the thousand indignities that composed daily life, which were taken for granted.  And no, I’m not talking of “women and minorities.”  We have gotten more… civilized – for both good and ill – in the last hundred years.  If you don’t believe me, read books from that time.  (For Us The Living, but Rex Stout of the time, too.)  Men seemed to be as violent as adults as they now are in Middle School: a constant game of “I can knock off your block” which must have been hell for Odd males.

So, what causes the “saudade” in rational people, with no invested interest in returning us to the past?

I think it’s two things: there is a sense of confidence in the photos.  Yes, part of this is that it was a more masculine society and in contradiction to what I said above, maybe we need to go halfway there again.  Maybe society shouldn’t be as namby pamby and “mommy will hold you so you don’t fall.”

But the more important one is the aesthetic.  I’ve talked here before about how our aesthetics, our society and to an extent our morals were all shocked by World War One and what we have now is the equivalent of a child hiding in the closet and denying its childhood, because it all ended badly.

For the last almost a hundred years, we’ve been living with the stripped down function-over-form aesthetic, the aspiration to look proletarian, the undecorated, stripped down look that became fashionable post WWI as a reaction against the previous aesthetic.

The thing I want you to understand is this: There I no reason for it.  The reasons you’ve been given in school are not reasons, but someone’s guesses at why it had gone this way, or even someone’s bankrupt justification of why it “should” be that way.

Things like “there were fewer resources and we had to stretch them over more people” are patently not true.  The price of raw materials has gone down, not up.  Things like “Stripped down following of form is always more beautiful” is someone’s aesthetic OPINION and you don’t have to believe it.

Look, I can even see where in those days those clothes they wore were horribly uncomfortable, and the decorations in bridges and stuff were hard to make and expensive.  But now?  With our materials?

We can make the future look like anything we want and make it comfortable too.

And that goes double for societal confidence.  As long as we remember that things don’t need to be done by the state to be big or ambitious?

What I want to say to you is this: You like the look of the past?  Take the look of the past.  (I’d argue there’s a great hunger for this.  Look at Steampunk.)

You want the societal confidence of that time?  Have it.  Yes, we’re going through bad times, but we have the resources and the abilities to make things better.  Do we have the abilities to make things perfect for everyone?  No war, no disease, no crime?  Well, no. The infinitely perfectible humanity is a dream that has caused more death and devastation than any other dream of mankind.  Let it go.  Just concentrate on making things better, and, yes, prettier if you can.  Societal confidence will come with it, with improving things step by step.

Let others dream of the past.  You forget about saudade, okay?  You take what you like/love/admire about the past and bring it to the future, with all the improvements the future offers.

Be not afraid.  The future is wide open.  It is yours to shape.

Apparently my post defining what’s harassment and what’s (mere) rudeness or boorishness caused much consternation in some quarters, because half of them insisted on reading me as saying I was all right with sexual ASSAULT.  This lack of reading comprehension concerns me.  It’s sort of like the idiot who thought that the post “If You Don’t Work, You Die” referred to my wish that the unemployed and those who simply aren’t fit to work should be killed.  As opposed to its being a point of macro-economics about how much energy a society can divert to non-work-work or work that destroys work before it becomes utterly non-functional. (No one disputes that a sane society looks after those who can’t work in a humane way.  Cave men were doing it.  It is always the regimes on the left that come up with the idea of eliminating the non-functional. We find an inherent value in human life, productive or not.  Hint, Death panels oh, I beg your pardon, cost cutting commissions who determine when you’ve been treated enough are a thing of the OTHER side.)

I’m not absolutely sure whether these kiddies (of whatever age) have the functional reading comprehension of a six year old (and not my six year olds who were both better than that) or choose to be blind for ideological reasons.  Of course, it’s possible that their reading comprehension fuels their political opinions.  If any sentence more complex than See Spot Run needs explanation and interpretation from their betters, it would also be very easy to tell them what they should think.  Also, of course, you’d have no danger they’d read history for themselves and realize that the bright new way of doing things their betters are “trying” has been responsible for more deaths, poverty and misery than any other bright idea in the history of mankind, including but not limited to the hundred year war.  I wish I could tell you that our schools are teaching better reading than that, but I’m afraid no.  Mostly they’re teaching compliance with interpretation from on-high, if the few times I’ve come in contact with recent graduates is any indication.

Which brings us to the topic of sexual harassment and how the seeds of the current insanity were seeded long ago in schools.  (I’ll pause here so those not on low-carb diets may pop popcorn and go grab a beer.)

I first realized that schools were doing something very weird to the relationship between boys and girls when Robert got sent home with a letter from Kindergarten commanding that he absolutely stop making little girls uncomfortable and hinted if he did this when older, he would be subjected to sexual harassment charges.  What was his awful crime? It appears he had made a poem to a girl and compared her eyes to stars.

Now, I come from a long line of men who made poems to girls, though Robert might be a little precocious.  Most waited till fourth grade or so.  The poems were received – from stories I’ve heard, all these men being older than I – with varying delight, some resulting in the lady fair screaming and running away and some in the boy’s first kiss.  None before this had resulted in a threat of legal action.

I thought well… we live – then – in hippieville USA, and we got some slightly crazy person (it wasn’t his teacher who sent the note, and now I don’t remember who it was.)  I told Robert that he shouldn’t write romantic poems until he learned to spell and that his meter sucked raw eggs (I made it a point of never praising the kids’ work when it didn’t deserve praise.  By and large this means that when I praise something they know I’m serious) and sent him off to play Magic School Bus.

Nine or so years later, having moved to a saner area of the state, I’m in the dentist’s waiting room, and the receptionist says there’s a call for me.  Let’s give props to the kid for remembering that I was going to the dentist that morning and also what the dentist’s name was.

I grabbed the phone.  Listened to the principal of younger son’s elementary school, and realized I’d let through a long sentence laced with profanity when I saw the expression on my dentist’s receptionist’s face (she’s a devout Christian) and realized the rest of the waiting room was staring at me.

At that point I put down the phone and said “I beg your pardon, but they just told me they’re going to charge my ten year old with sexual harassment and that he’s already confessed.”

The receptionist and the other people waiting in the room all stared at me aghast, for completely different reasons, and then the receptionist, who knew my son, said “But your son can’t PRONOUNCE sexual harassment.”  (Which at the time was true. I understood him fairly well, but his sensory issues meant that he had speech issues because he didn’t HEAR properly.  Once that was semi-fixed, the speech fixed itself.  He still goes into these modes when he speaks too fast and you have to tell him to slow down or you don’t get a word, but that’s different.)

I hadn’t driven, because the dentist is a few blocks from our house and has a tiny parking lot.  This meant I had to run ten blocks in the other direction.  I arrived out of breath and asked them what in the name of Sam Hill they thought they were doing.

They said I was threatening, and called the school guard.  (Yes, I was also shaking trying to keep the berserker in.  I can’t help that.)

After I reassured them that I wasn’t going to kill them all with my bare hands and a purse (well, I might have, but they couldn’t KNOW that) we went into a conference room and they bring in my crying son.

His terrible crime was as follows: He had this game that he had been playing with his brother since the younger one was able to talk.  They called it the space game.  In it our entire family were explorers in a spaceship (the house) tasked with exploring and charting new worlds.  The cars were away pods, the places we visited were various planets (a trip to the aquarium was made fascinating for the whole family by listening to them!) cons were trips to administrative planets… you get it, right?

Apparently younger son had devised an addendum to this that involved school – aka “explorer’s academy” – and taught it to a select group of his friends.

One of his friends happened to be a girl.  The other two were absent for whatever reason.  Younger son had a great lack of tolerance (back then) to the world not working according to his plan.  He wanted to play the space game.  His friend (who happened to be a girl) was talking to other kids.  He stood on the periphery and tried to get her attention.  Nothing.  So he reached in and tapped her to get her attention.  Twice.  On the behind.

The girl turned to talk to him, but it was too late.  A playground guard had seen them.  She grabbed both of them and dragged them in to the principal, where they SOMEHOW managed to get my son to admit to “Sexual Harrassment.”

Now, I’m not going to tell you that ten year olds aren’t interested in sex, though I’ll say mostly the sex-part they’re interested in is finding out why adults think this is so much fun.  I’ll even admit some ten year olds (mostly girls) are developed enough at that age to have some embryonic interest, though normally nothing much unless they’re in an abuse or inappropriate environment situation.  (Say watching a lot of inappropriate movies.)

I won’t even beg you to believe me that at that age my son had no inkling yet of what makes the world go round and what makes pretty girls smile.  It’s true he didn’t.  A mother knows this stuff.  His brother sort of did at six – or at least he liked to make pretty girls smile.  My younger son… not so much. The drive came in two years later, when he grew a foot over summer and his voice dropped two octaves.

BUT even if he’d had a rudimentary drive – note he touched this girl on the butt.  Look, guys, my son would have no clue anyone considered the butt “sexual.”  He wasn’t that far off his years when that area was mostly concerned with “did you clean yourself properly?”

If he’d been intent on “sexual harassment” he’d have touched her between the legs, maybe, or FAR MORE LIKELY kissed her.

That a touch, twice, on the behind could be interpreted as “sexual harassment” at that age boggled the mind.

That  was bad enough.

More fun is what they proposed to do about it.  They were going to put him in detention and notify the police of his “record” (I don’t remember the exact term for this) so they could be on the lookout for him in the future.

I should draw the veil of decency over the following scene, but I won’t.  Since they had the guard standing there, to prevent me, you know, from strangling the principal, the school psychologist and the secretary (curiously the play ground guard who had started this was never brought in.  So much for confronting the accuser) with my purse strap, I had to resort to other means.

The means I resorted to was sarcasm. First, I questioned my son and had him explain why he’d touched a little girl on the behind – TWICE —  Then I asked him to explain why touching her there.  “It was the place I could reach.”  Then I asked him to tell me why he’d confessed to sexual harassment.  Well, because they told him otherwise they’d expel him.

I finally pointed out to them that I was a writer and I was sure I could get a national magazine (Reason, for sure) to take an article about this.  I took out a notebook and told them to spell out their names, because I was going to make sure they were the laughing stock of the nation from sea to shining sea.

They started scooting back.  They’d just put him in detention.  It would be in-room detention.  Truly, they wouldn’t do anything except make him write out that he wouldn’t sexually harass people.  No, really, they didn’t mean anything bad, they…

I got a full recanting and the whole matter dropped.  (Except that as I write this I wonder if the Harassment By Employee Children, Using Complaints Of Harassment was a late hit revenge, since personnel from both schools mingles freely.  I’ll note once he was out of that system he had absolutely NOTHING bad reported against him EVER even though by then he was a teen and more likely to harass if he ever had been.)

He went back to his class.  I went back to the dentist.

However, before leaving, I gathered that the little girl had been gathered up into the arms of officialdom, and would be in counseling for some weeks, to get over the terrible trauma of having her behind touched – TWICE (they were very insistent on this) – by a ten year old boy.

Look, adults tend to read too much into what kids do.  That’s always been so.  For instance, when I was caught at six playing doctor with my cousin Johnny, I couldn’t understand the fuss and boderation.  I was fifteen before – reading something about “playing doctor” in a book – I realized my parents and his had thought it was a sex game.  Nothing could have been further from our minds.  Johnny was in fact very lucky we were interrupted, because I was going to cut him open, being far more interested in what was inside him than outside and having no clue it would hurt or that I could kill him.  We’d agreed to take turns.  (It might have been his idea.  He’s now a neuro-surgeon.)

Adults, of course, know about sex, and tend to interpret quite innocent actions on the part of children as precursors to sex drive.  Freudian theories didn’t help.

HOWEVER though my parents and Johnny’s made a big fuss and botheration, and told him never to take off his shirt (!) when alone with me, they didn’t threaten penalties upon him or console me for horrible trauma.  (Well, I was fully dressed, but I had the – old, used – razor blade.  I got rid of that, of course, unnoticed because we weren’t allowed to play with them.  A good thing, since otherwise my parents would have been appalled.)

There is such a thing as appropriate measures, particularly on the part of officialdom.  It might be too much – as it was too much my aunt scolding me when at nine I took off my bikini top at the beach because it was uncomfortable – to even have told him “Don’t touch her there.  It’s not nice.”  But it would probably have been okay.  After all, it’s bad manners, and kids DO need to learn manners before they learn morals.  Manners are there to prevent huge problems before kids understand things.  Manners are fine.  A scold and telling him to stand by the fence the rest of recess would have been fine.

BUT to deploy the entire machinery of officialdom and threaten him with a record, and put her in counseling (without telling her parents) when she hadn’t complained and it was obvious he hadn’t known he was doing anything wrong, was a piece of insanity.

I was told this was driven by “policies” from the “district.”

Because the district is unable to tell the difference between a middle aged teacher and a ten year old boy, in the same way it can’t tell the difference between a toy gun and the real thing.

If I knew then what I know now, I’d have taken the kid out of the system right then and there.  I’d also have understood the trouble we were headed for.

When I told the principal and the assembled illustrious company that in my day if a  boy touched me anywhere and I thought he was getting fresh, I punched him.  They told me oh no no no no no, violence never solved anything.

But apparently bureaucracy does…

These kids are now entering young adulthood.  I suspect the trouble goes up five or so years older than them.  So up to twenty six or so.

The system has taught girls they’re fragile flowers who need a massive bureaucracy to protect them.  I mean, really, if a ten year old boy touching their behind can merit weeks of counseling, imagine what a boy telling them he loves them would do?  The trauma might never pass!  They’ll have to go to counseling the rest of their lives.

It has also taught boys it is completely irrational, and arbitrary punishment and accusation will come out of a clear blue sky for no reason at all.  Which is why boys are choosing to disengage in record numbers.

And this, hitting professional organizations and market places will bring everywhere the fun we’ve been having at SFWA.

If you have kids, and you can get them out of school.  If you can’t, make sure you de-program them at home.

If you have daughters it might seem to you that all this is concern for their safety and empowerment, but look really closely at it.  Most of the time, in most places, what they’re being taught is to be fragile flowers who scream for nanny and then cry about it.

Unfortunately, the world we’re leaving them is not a playground, not even one supervised by neurotic playground guards.

And they’re going to need to grow up.

Like our debt, this is a problem not of their making, but one they’ll have to solve nonetheless, if civilization is to go on.

*I will probably be back to fully operational status — as much as I ever get — by tomorrow, but for now, enjoy:*

The Not-As-Dark-As-Advertised Ages (At Least North of the Alps)

A Guest Post by our very own: Alma Boykin

As everyone knows, when Odoacer deposed the Roman Emperor Romulus Augustalus in AD* 476 CE*, Western civilization disappeared, learning stopped, and life came to a halt, especially north of the Alps. Until Charlemagne’s coronation as Holy Roman Emperor in 800, darkness lay upon the land, barbarians roamed free, pirates plagued the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and the few people still alive sat around lamenting the Fall of Rome. Then came the Carolingian Renaissance and the sun rose, flowers bloomed, the three-field rotation and use of manure were discovered, literacy appeared, everyone began speaking Latin again, a sudden urge to build tall churches with lots of colored windows filled the land, and there was much rejoicing. Yeah.

At least, that’s sort of what historians in the 1700s, 1800s, and early 1900s thought. They had a few good reasons for calling the period between the Fall of Rome and Charlemagne “the Dark Ages,” and some not so great reasons. The good reason was that if you only have text sources to work from, then there is very little one can know about that time, especially north of the Alps and east of Britain. Obviously, if no one wrote anything, that must mean that no one was around to write, or who could write, which means no civilization (by the historians’ definition). And what sources did exist painted a pretty dim picture of the world, metaphorically and as it turns out, literally. Several centuries passed before Europeans began producing art and poetry that rivaled the styles of the Greeks and Romans. For historians who viewed Rome as a, if not the, pinnacle of culture and learning, what came after looked pretty darn dark.

Now, these historians missed a few things, as we historians are prone to do. First, the eastern Roman Empire, aka Byzantium, lasted until 1453 and produced a magnificent culture that can still be seen in scraps and bits here and there. Second, the fall of Rome did not happen in an instant, unlike the great series of paintings by Thomas Cole suggests. Third, daily life does not depend entirely on marble sculptures and flights of rhetoric. Fourth, there were plenty of bits of Rome still around, but the historians did not know where to look. Today we do, and the picture of life between Romulus Augustalus and Charlemagne is rather different. Empires don’t fall down in a puff of dust, crushing everything beneath them. They crumble, leaving foundations and inspiration.

So, what really happened when the “lights went out in Rome,” as Kipling put it? North of the Alps, the lights had been flickering since the Marcomannic Wars of 166-180, if not earlier. After that little bout of civil strife, massacre, arson, and looting, the area north of the Alps was reorganized, defenses beefed up, and populations shifted around. In 233 another round of Germanic tribes rushed the Limes, the borderline, and a few years later another, and another. These are the same peoples who would become the Lombards, Franks, Saxons, Bohemians (not the long-haired French kind, but the beer-drinking kind) and other modern inhabitants of Europe. When that flickering light in Rome finally went out, the people who had already been defending themselves continued defending themselves. They also kept farming, worshipping, trading and building.

Archaeology, anthropology, and climatology can fill in what historians can’t find. And once you start digging around, literally, you discover that the Dark Ages, or as they are now called, Late Antiquity, were not quite the nadir of European existence. The 350 years between Rome and Aachen do not mark a period of ease and longevity, for a number of reasons, but trade continued, learning continued, and the light of civilization kept burning. The Germanic, Slavic, and Asian tribes that pushed into Europe added their beliefs to the Roman foundation that remained. Roman ideas about law, organization, and religion endured, forming a framework for what came after. The people of the Great Migration (Volkerwanderung) recycled and built on ideas just like they recycled Roman stones.

Although their populations declined, the Roman cities and towns that are now Trier, Cologne, Frankfurt, Orange, Mainz, Augsburg, Regensburg, Kempten and others did not vanish. Much of their stone was recycled, timber and metal re-used, houses rebuilt upon over and over. New towns and strong-points appeared as new peoples moved in and settled, or moved through (like the Vandals and Huns). To this day, if you go to Vienna, Regensburg, and other cities, you can spot the Roman roads and city outline under the modern town. And under is the correct word, because as wattle-and-daub or wooden houses decayed, collapsed, or were burned down, people rebuilt on top of them. That’s one reason the 19^th century historians couldn’t find a trace of Roman glory in, say, Vienna. They’d have to go down into the cellars and sewers to see it, and let’s face it, I just don’t see Gibbon or Toynbee as the crawl-through-sewers type. And where you had groups of people, you had commerce of sorts, and trade.

Trade continued, to the extent that Chinese silks have been found in Bavarian tribal members’ graves dating to the 6^th century. Gemstones from India and Afghanistan found their way up the Rhine and Rhone, while amber, furs, and slaves went south and east. Now, the trade did not reach the scale of the Empire at its peak. Even if population shifts had not affected the “European” economy, the weather shifts in the late 400s and after 526 made life much harder on everyone. No more wine from Britain or up around Mainz, no more wheat exported from the Low Countries to Rome. But archaeologists find trade. And they find continuity.

People lived in the same places (or very close), farmed the same things, worshipped, buried their dead, and tried to carry on as they had before Roman power receded from northern Europe. Clothes did not change that much, for example. Archaeologists find the same style of pins, called “fibulae,” used by women in central Europe for a thousand years. Styles changed, the pins got bigger or smaller, fancier or plainer, as time passed, and different locations had their own designs, but the basic shape and function lasted for a millennium. Germans, Slavs, Magyars might pass through or settle, but women held up their pinafores and decorated their dresses with fibulae until the Middle Ages. People grew wheat, rye, dinkel (aka spelt), barley, oats, apples, pears, and peas, raised cattle and pigs and sheep, and fled from wild boar, wild cattle, and bears and wolves, just as they always had, even though their taxes went to the local strong man, instead of Rome.

The top layer of Rome had vanished, but the ordinary, tax-paying people remained, just in fewer numbers and more scattered. One reason for this, one that remained unknown until the 20^th century, was a massive weather disruption. The climate had already changed, starting in the 5^th century, as precipitation increased and temperatures declined in northern Europe. Shorter growing seasons and wetter soil, combined with population migrations caused in part by the worse weather, were not conducive to rapid population growth. And then in 526 the sun went away, dimmed by volcanic ash. Crop losses led to hunger which made plague spread more easily. These were the years of the Volkerwanderung, the population shifts that gave us the Lombards, Bavarians, Burgundians, Franks, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and other names, some of which linger on maps to this day. Tribal structures replaced provincial government but the ideas of Roman organization survived, if only in an attenuated form, and from this came the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire and its descendants.

So what, you ask? Well, for one thing, political and economic collapse did not mean Road Warrior with chariots. It happened gradually as Rome abandoned the frontiers, then the provinces, and finally could no longer administer most of the Italian peninsula. People stepped up to try and fill in, for better or worse. A wild card in the form of a volcano that made Krakatoa look small caused problems even the Romans at their peak would have had trouble dealing with. Individuals such as Boethius, Alfred of Wessex, Cassiodorus, monastic chroniclers, and other people whose work has not survived kept ideas alive. Latin was not a dead language, although it staggered (see Jan Huizinga for details). The light of learning flickered but did not die, because enough people remembered what had once been done, and thought about trying to recreate or improve it, that out of the “Dark Ages” came chivalry, Chartes Cathedral, the Niebelungenlied (it’s not what Wagner makes it out to be, really), and other things. The Late Antiquity, while not an era of sweetness and light, wasn’t as dark as it once seemed.

 

* I’m not going to argue dating systems. If Undead Gaius Iulius Caesar wishes to use years since the founding of Rome, he is free to do so.

 

*Marshall, who is slowly being dragged to the writing side, started writing this for fun a couple of days ago, and I saw it and said “I want it for my blog.”  It ended up turning into a short story, so I’m putting it here as a preview thingy, and in a week or so I’ll take it down and put up just the beginning and a link to buy it for 99c or something.  (He has written others and more complete stories, but since he wrote them under word count restrictions for school, he now needs to expand them.  If you groan loudly enough maybe he’ll actually get on that ;) *

DaVinci’s Facebook

I have spent a lot of time recently thinking over story ideas, and of the many, one of them involves the reincarnation of several key persons from history, through DNA manipulation. Obviously I won’t go into the details of this story idea, but while toying with it, it suddenly occurred to me: What if da Vinci were one of these resurrected great people? Even more questionably, what if he somehow got access to some of the modern technology that exists and got sucked into the void that is social media sites? For the purpose of amusement, recorded from his last days in the labs, to his last day on the internet, here’s what I suspect it’d look like if Leonardo da Vinci took on the modern world and updated everyone on his adjustment to it.

Day One
“Hello there! I’m Leonardo da Vinci! The scientists here finally let me use the ‘computer’, after winning a bet that I could learn English in a week. Little do they know, that I took aardvark of them, so I could learn more about where I am.”

“Opps, I meant ‘Took advantage of them’, apparently my English still needs some work.”

“I don’t know why everyone is calling me a ’lame fake’- Really, I am who I say I am! But ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ was already taken, oddly enough. I don’t understand why some many people think I’m impersonating myself, it’s very odd.”

Day Two
“Scientists just gave me an update: Apparently I’m a clone of a famous artist and inventor- Which confuses me, because I’m nearly certain I *am* the famous artist and inventor.”

“They’re releasing me to a paid-for living space tomorrow, they say I get to do anything I want, but for obvious reasons I’ll be under close observation, starting the minute I leave this facility.”

“Apparently I don’t get to do just *anything*. Scientists discovered I am using this site to interact with the world. They’re not happy. Will keep the world informed of any new developments.”

“Update: They’re yelling a lot. It’s really starting to interfere with my research into the world.”

“Update: Apparently I’m not allowed to multitask. They’re taking my computer away for a while until I listen to their ridiculous speech, will be back.”

Day Three
“Got the full speech last night, I’m allowed only limited research; they will be monitoring my use of the ‘internet’, as they like to call it. They release me soon, and announce my existence to the world. Apparently I’m a big deal or something.”

“So much has happened! There was a huge crowd waiting for me once I got outside. Some kindly gentlemen in black suits lead me to a long, black metal contraption. I couldn’t quite tell what was going on once I got inside, but it was some sort of cart of carriage, because when I got out there stood a large white house in front of me! It has very odd architecture. Not even sure this house is safe to live in- the roof is slated in two directions. If I die because those scientists put me in a death trap, you know who to blame.”

Day Four
“Woke up to discover that one: Now, just because the *scientists* told everyone I was really who I said I am, I’m getting thousands of followers and friend requests. And secondly: I have been given what they call a ‘Cell-phone’. They said it will allow me to contact whoever I want. But judging by the name, I think that ‘Whoever’ has to be in a jail cell first.”

“Just got food delivered to me- Awful, really, it’s the same sort of food I saw all the time back in Italy. I gave the nice gentlemen in black suits that delivered it to me a formal letter to the scientists letting them know I’d be going to the a nearby market and purchasing food for myself. They seemed very confused why I was giving them a letter to deliver.”

“I’ve thrown that cursed ‘Cell-phone’ into the garden. Damn thing kept moving about sporadically on its own and producing God awful imitations of church bells. I hope to get a letter back soon from the scientists explaining why they gave it to me.”

“I just got back from the market. Awful experience, wasn’t able to trade for any food- I even offered the fancy watch I was provided with by the scientists, but apparently the vendor wasn’t impressed by the wrist-bound contraption. I expect to hear from the scientists on this as well.”

Day Five
“Got a visit from the scientists this morning. They further explained the rules of modern society to me. For one, apparently that possessed contraption I threw in the garden the other day was supposed to act like that, and was the scientists way of contacting me. They also explained that if I insisted that I buying food at the market, I must have money. They instead gave me fancy paper. I don’t know why.”

“This device is wonderful! I can update everyone from it! It’s like a computer in my pocket! Amazing!”

“At the market currently- This is far easier, I can now convey my thoughts on a more active basis!”

“I’m trying to barter with the vendor again, this time using the fancy paper I was given. Apparently they only give you discounts on sales, and there’s no negotiating prices any lower. Pah, I refused to buy lettuce at such a high price.”

“I still have no idea how this fancy paper works. I just threw all the paper I had at him and walked off with my supplies. He wasn’t complaining, so I guess that’s how you pay for things.”

“I can’t find the cooking pot in this place. How the hell do I cook my food? Pah, I’ll just start a fire in the front yard and cook it there.”

“The ‘Fire Department’ apparently wants me to starve- Probably hired by the damn scientists. They sprayed my food and fire with some awful tasting white stuff, a seemingly endless amount coming from such a small red container. I will have words with the scientists about this tomorrow.”

Day Six
“It’s early in the morning, and I’m in another meeting with the scientists. They said something about using the large metal box in my kitchen the next time I want to cook. No clue how it works, and having opened it up, I don’t know where you light the fire.”

“Just asked, apparently you don’t throw wood into the large compartment of the metal box- Which I’ve just been told is called a ‘Stove’- You turn the knobs and fire magically arises from the metal plates on top. I asked that they send me another stove so I can further study the mechanics. They seem confused.”

“I’m getting settled in, starting to get back into the rhythm of things and have begun to peruse my hobbies once more. I’ve been given copies of my old notebooks and journals- They missed a few, but I guess they spent several centuries *not* checking under the floorboards of my old home.”

“Just got visited by the fire department again- You’re not supposed to throw wood on the fire produced by the ‘stove’ either, it would seem. The scientists are very unhappy, it would seem.”

Day Seven
“Daily meeting with scientists as usual- And as usually, very boring and unpleasant. I can’t wait until they leave so I can start tinkering again.

“Made something new today! It’s a redesign of my flying contraption! I’m going to revolutionize the world with this, it’s a completely new approach to transportation!”

“Opps, just found out that apparently someone beat me to it, just saw what was either a giant bird or a large flying contraption above my house. Will have to looking into its inventor.”

“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_history Wow! Turns out that there are loads of these flying machines around! Who would’ve thought it’d come this far?”

“Update: I’m totally mentioned in the last link I sent. You’re welcome, modern flight.”

“I should find a way to capitalize upon my fame. Use it to advance my scientific needs and interests. Will figure out a way to utilize this tomorrow.”

Day Eight
“I feel very inspired, and I’ve got a new idea- It won’t advance my scientific progress, but I can still capitalize upon my fame with it.”

“Just talked to the scientists once more. They told me that they’d have a man come by later and install a ‘camera’- which they conveyed to me as a way to watch me without a person actually being there- and that it’d be installed up on the ‘telephone pole’ outside my house. I’ll have to deal with that later.”

“Standing in my yard right now, with a helpful sign I made from shelf of one of the bookcases, advertising the ability for people to be painted by me in exchange for a modern scientific book. Feel free to stop by.”

“Well, no one stopped by, except for the ‘Police Department’. There seem to be a lot of these departments. Apparently, other than some odd charges, I need some sort of license to do what I was doing. I’m a bit steamed, so I’ll stop by the store to pick up something to deal with that ‘camera’ issue I mentioned in a previous update.”

“The police stopped by again tonight. The darn wooden ‘Telephone-pole’ looks like a tree, but I’m still not allowed to cut it down. This society makes no sense to me.”

Day Nine
“Just got an update from the scientists: Tomorrow will be the last daily meeting, and then it’s limited down to weekly meeting. Thank God. Next, I hope it moves onto simply being no meetings.”

“Taking advantage of the change in meeting times- I’m working on new project to get me a bit more freedom.”

“Apparently the scientists read this stuff. I don’t know why they’re worried, I’m just inventing some new stuff- I thought that’s why they wanted me to be brought back. J”

“Need one of those carriages for my new project. The large metal ones, they keep rolling past my house. I will attempt to purchase one from someone, I just got more fancy paper from the scientists.”

“Just jumped in front of one of those carriages. The rider seemed very angry, for whatever reason. I threw some of the fancy paper at him in attempt to purchase the vehicle. Apparently he doesn’t understand why the paper is so valuable either, he just started laughing.”

“Purchase was unsuccessful. The ‘Police Department’ stopped by again, though. They seemed very unsurprised, this time. The gentlemen in black suits had to come and sort everything out for me, they’re very kind, but I suspect the scientists hired them, and that makes me suspicious.”

Day Ten
“In the last meeting. Apparently not supposed to be using my phone while they talk, they want me to pay attention to just them. My word, they are self-centered, aren’t they?”

“I requested one of those metal carriages, or car, as they call it. I’ll be having one delivered within the hour. Hopefully it’s large enough for me to store my equipment, and easy enough to study.”

“Luckily, it is indeed large enough. They call this particular version of the car a ‘van’… My word is this thing fascinating. It all works on a combination of simple machines, aerodynamics, chemical reactions and this odd stringy metal stuff, bundled in some odd material. Looking into the source of the metal strings now.”

“Found the source. I should’ve turned the machine off first, though. I touched the metal part of the large box the metal strings seemed to be getting their sparks from, and my word did that hurt! Not to mention that my clothes caught on fire.”

“The fire department stopped by again, and this time gave me one of those metal canisters I saw before. Apparently they think something else will catch fire in my presence. Either way, had a lovely discussion with a couple of the firemen while the other put the fire out on my workshop, one was even kind enough to direct me to a van with a red cross on the side, so I could get some new clothing. Knowing how this works, they’re the ‘Clothing Department’ or something.”

Day Eleven
“I’ve been up since last night researching these cars and how they work- I’ve got a couple of ideas of how to improve upon the system of the machine, and better yet, I’m getting a better understanding of what is apparently called the electrical system of the car.”

“Ouch, nope, need to remember not to touch the black box again.”

“Ooohhh, I think I’ve discovered a way to negate these electrical systems. It’s probably been done already, but I bet no one has done it using a car radio before!”

“Just turned on the radio to an interesting song, “Electric Boogie”- especially considering the irony in the fact that the button next to the ‘on’ button turns *off* all electrical system within a certain radius.”

“Scientists still read this, apparently. It’s just in case I start fires, should turn off the oven from a safe distance. J”

Day Twelve
“My project is almost done. Just need to find a large market to pick up some supplies from.”

“At the market I got my food at. The vendor there seems terrified of me. He sent me away- Probably for the better, can’t see anything that’s not food there. “

“After asking around a bit, I’ve come across this place called ‘Walmart’. Gigantic market, really. I asked one of the many men in vests to get me what I needed off my list, but he instead directed me to where to go. It’s going to take me a while to find what I need.”

“Well, I need that… But it’s a bit high up. I guess you have to climb for what you want on the higher shelves’. I better get some of the price knocked off for having to fetch these things myself like this.”

“Apparently *now* they’re willing to fetch me what I want. They got very panicky when I started climbing the shelves, for whatever reason. Ah well, at least I have the parts I need. Just need to get a couple of more things than throw my fancy paper at the vendors near the front.”

“Project is complete! You’ll all being hearing about tomorrow, and I think the scientists especially will be interested to know what I’ve accomplished.”

Day Thirteen
“It’s a good morning indeed. I will unveil my project later on today, but first, a celebration of my accomplishments! I’m off for a lovely walk and hearty lunch!”

“At lunch. Having trouble ordering wine. I’m trying to get wine passed around to everyone in celebration of my achievement, but I’m apparently not allowed to buy alcohol for miners. I had no idea mining was such a big deal in the modern world, the poor workers are forced by society to stay away from alcohol so long as that’s their profession.”

“Clarification: Apparently they mean ‘minors’, which classifies people under 18, but apparently you’re not allowed to order alcohol until you’re 21. This society has some funny ideas of when people should be allowed to drink or not.”

“Well, Good news and bad news. The good news is that everything seems to be working fine. My van is modified and ready. It has everything I need and then some. The bad news is that this will be my last post. When the scientists created me, they intended to release me to the world and see what great works I might produce. And trust me, I’ll still do this, and I have many inventions in mind, but I’ll be doing so on my own terms. This car is equipped with some of my greatest works yet, and ultimately, once I leave my workshop in this machine, I’ll be untraceable and lost to those damn scientists. I can’t say where I’m going or what I’ll even be doing, but I can never log back in and post here, because I know they’ll be watching for that. So farewell, my many readers, I’m off to change the world without a watching eye keeping me from true progress.”

I either have severe bronchitis or walking pneumonia.  The con crud seemed to get better, then it suddenly got much worse last Saturday.  I thought it was stress — you guys (well some of you) know what’s been going on, because stress in me often causes throat aches and upper respiratory distress (probably related to the fact I had asthma as a child and it kicked up with stress, just as my eczema does.  Both are auto immune.  I haven’t had asthma in more than two decades, but the upper respiratory can come from stress.)

My fans who are always like family, somehow, have been nagging me via email and pm about getting my sorry carcass to the doctor and I’ve been ignoring them because I was sure it was psychosomatic, but by yesterday afternoon I was aware that my breathing (and thinking) is severely impaired.  I’m very congested, but not coughing nearly enough.  I don’t think it’s ALL psychosomatic, and it’s highly likely it’s walking pneumonia, because it feels like when I had it before.  This time I’m not waiting till I collapse and end up in ICU for 11 days — because you guys would kill me if I don’t feed you for 11 days.  (Yes, it’s all for you, really ;) ) Also, because my sons and husband would be very upset.

My doctor has no openings, but said come on down and camp in his waiting room and he’ll work me in.  So, going now.  I’ll be back when I’m back.  If a chapter of Rogue magic has to wait till tomorrow, so be it.

I’ll take the tablet and answer comments while waiting.

 

UPDATE: It’s bronchitis complicated by severe asthma (likely stress induced.  I HATE the way my body cracks up under stress, but I’d like anyone who thinks this is a sign of weakness to know that when stress gets this bad I become a carrier as a means of relieving it.)  I’ve had some stuff, I’m breathing a little better, head is clear by comparison to what it was, and I realized I have edits due at rayguns and OMG my non fic piece at PJM.  Which comes down to “Not today” for chapter.  Sorry guys.  As is I’m likely going to nap before this other stuff.

(Or the tragic story of Ogg, Mogg and an innocent rock.)

So, once more I’m late – this time because I actually got new glasses, but the guy who was supposed to cut the lenses came in late and… — but yay, I can see.  No, seriously.  Being able to see whether I just typed in an e or an a, and whether the punctuation I put in was a period or a comma is a great relief.  Maybe I’ll get headaches less often, too.  (No, not that type of headaches.  Those remain.  Kate Paulk has suggested – because someone took the name Sarah the Slightly Mad for art, that I should fly under the flag of Sarah I Just Get These Headaches.  I will not comment on that.)  Tomorrow – for those who are nagging me via email – I shall go see the doctor, because I have at least bronchitis for sure, and I’m afraid of walking pneumonia.  I’m almost sure it’s not strep, because the throat ache followed by my voice going away just happens as a reaction to stress anyway.  So if you meet me at a con and I rasp at you, it’s probably a sign I’m holding it all in to keep the brown stuff from hitting the air-moving apparatus, and it’s a good time to either stand (way) clear or gleefully join in.

As for what specific kind of mustard got up my nose this week, that is a long, long story and instead…

Hey, let’s talk contracts.  No, not anyone’s contracts in particular.  However, I came across a bizarre notion that got up my nose in a curious way.  There was a comment left at a friend’s blog to the extent that if she expected a fair contract out of a publisher she was living in a “socialist dream paradise.”

Oh, wally, wally, wally – where to start?

Is that what they’re teaching in school these days?  That only socialism can make contracts “fair”?  Because let me tell you that’s the sort of bunk that bunk washes off its shoes after cleaning the bunk’s septic tank. It is also particularly pernicious if this is what writers believe going into a career.

First let’s talk about what a contract is, why it exists, and why it was established by humanity at all.  A contract is a written instrument to record an agreement for an exchange between two parties – because  human memory is fallible, and humans are mortal, but chiseled stone is forever.  Okay – these days we don’t chisel it in stone, but while paper isn’t forever, properly kept it is still more durable than human memory, human intentions or human life.

I always read all my contracts carefully, and determine if there’s something in them I can’t live with.  These days, I run them by my lawyer, too.  I think at this point I’ve indentured my kids to look after him in his old age, he’s helped me so much (and I can see him running away screaming if he reads this.  He’s met my kids.  Come on.  At least Robert will be nice and ALMOST certainly not experiment on you!)

Do I remember all the mental compromises I made, in every contract, at this point?  Oh, heck no.  In fact, at least one contract still extant, I SWEAR I read completely differently, d*mn it, in case you wonder why I’m not continuing the musketeer vampire series.  Ah well, I didn’t have a lawyer at the time, and this will have to be dealt with, or endured.

BUT that’s why I have stuff written down.  And they have stuff written down.  That way we know what we agreed to.

The earliest contracts were in baked clay tablets.  But you can look up at that stuff yourself.

Let’s continue exploring what a contract is – or what a deal is, since a contract is the hard-copy expression of a deal.

A deal is when you want something from someone and someone wants something from you and you decide to exchange one thing for another.  Say in prehistory Ogg had a pretty rock, and Mogg had a rock-polishing fur, and Ogg got Mogg to polish his rock in exchange for letting Mogg hold the rock now and… Hey, stop that, minds off the gutter.  This is a goram family blog!

Sometimes of course a contract is not for an exchange but for something you’re starting together.  (Leave Ogg, Mogg and their rock alone, right now.  Some privacy, please!  What happens in the stone age, stays in the stone age.)  A partnership in a business is a deal, solidified (if you’re smart) by a contract.  If you get together to sell gadgets, and one of you brings the money and the other the gadget expertise, the contract sets out what worth each of your contributions have, and how much you should get of the proceeds of the business.  A marriage is also a contract, though the proceeds you divide might not (in the sense that both of you might work and keep finances more or less independently.  I never knew a couple who kept separate finances and stayed married, but that might just be my experience) be monetary.  They might be “mutual companionship/comfort/trust.”  Or they might be raising kids together.  And though we don’t think of marriage as a contract, it certainly is, one so common that there are established forms for it. (Yes, it can be a sacrament too, but at its most basic, legalistic, secular sense, it’s a contract.)

Now I know what the feminists have to say about how marriage oppresses women and what the heck, but like most of what they say these days, they have hold of the wrong end of the stick.

Is it possible to be coerced into a contract?  Oh, brother, let’s talk about it sometime.  I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.

Is this a direct condition of capitalism, making fair contracts a “socialist dream”?  Pfui.  And bah.  Also snort.  It is a condition of capitalism gone bad.  The reason I ended up signing some really bad contracts was that publishing was an oligopsony, i.e. a form of market where the sellers are many and the buyers are few.  I won’t say this doesn’t occur in a free-market capitalism.  I will say though that usually when it gets to that point there are influences that require the market be not-quite-free and the society too.

And yet I signed those contracts of my own free will, judging the benefits of signing them – getting my work into print and in the hands of readers – worth the hair-of-the-dog clauses, the uncertain financial reporting, and all the rest, as well as taking 97% of the proceeds.  The fact that at the time it was take that or never be published doesn’t mean I was coerced into it.  I could have walked away whistling and put the manuscripts in the drawer to wait a better time.  (And if I’d known indie was coming down the pike, I’d have done just that – I’d have submitted ONLY to Baen.  Ah, well.  One of you invent a way to send a message back in time.)  I signed that deal because I thought the benefits of signing outweighed the benefits of letting my work rot in a drawer.

If I remember, the gentleman commenting on my friend’s blog also went on about publishing being a business.  Indeed it is.  In fact, it was the form of business known as an oligopsony, which is a symptom of a business in its terminal stages of divorce from demand, so that what it’s supplying is not wanted – which usually leads to the death of the business.  The beautiful thing about capitalism is not that it always creates fair situations, but that really bad business models tend to crash.  Now this is not fun for anyone involved in the crash, but it clears the air wonderfully.  The market usually finds a way to go around constipation, if you will.  The resultant eruption might smell bad and look worse, but it might also save the economy.

The whole point is that publishing is a business and, if it’s working properly, it is not an oligopsony, because while there might be a million writers, they’re not all widgets.  I.e. they’re not all alike.

When I ran a magazine in a very small way, I only bought stories I liked and thought would improve my business.  That is, I only paid for what I thought had value.  I didn’t buy stories blinding off the slush pile.  (And it’s amazing, btw, how few stories were both good enough and suited our concept.)  That means it was in my interest to pay the best I could and to treat my writers decently, so more good quality writers would submit to me and my business would flourish.

And it was in the interest of the writers to send me good stories and not to cheat on the contract by selling me plagiarized material or material they’d already sold elsewhere.  This way they avoided taking my business down and doing themselves out of a market.

That’s how a deal works.  Win/win.

The late extant oligopsony (I like that word.  Deal) instead thought of themselves as not a business but an instrument for changing the world.  So they ignored what the readers wanted to read and published what they thought would be good for the readers to read “take your medicine” being the operative word.  This is, to put it mildly, the road to ruin.  In the process they abused writers whom they viewed as interchangeable widgets provided the “right” opinions were expressed.

What remains of the oligopsony is still playing that sort of games.  “If you want to get published give me the rights to everything you’ll ever write, and throw in your first born.”

I suspect the gentleman who left the comment on my friend’s blog was of that mindset and came up through that system.  And no, the cure for that system wasn’t socialism, ie. A third party that will not suffer any consequences of the contract inserting itself in and telling you what you might agree upon for your mutual benefit.  Those tend to end in tears.

However, whether the gentleman knows it or not, the oligopsony is more or less dead or dying.  (Ask not to know for whom the oligo opsonies, it opsonies for thee!)  For one it is no longer an oligopsony, since you can just publish your stuff yourself or choose from an array of small or micro presses offering a dizzying array of possibilities.

So this idea that a contract would never be fair to a writer – which seems to hinge on the idea that what the writer does has no value to the company, an idea dying with the controlled market of the oligopsony – is not only insane, but pernicious if you’re the writer.

You have options.  You have alternatives.  Anyone who tells you that you don’t is not only selling something but the something is not worth having.

In the end, what you’re doing when you sell a story is licensing your copyright in exchange for certain benefits.  Look carefully at the benefits offered and make sure they’re worth the story copyright.

I’m not your mother.  I’m not going to wipe your nose for you or make sure your feet are dry.  You think through what you want and what each contract gives you.  Keep in mind that the inventor of monopoly got a pittance.  But then balance that against the fact that had he not sold the rights, it might have been kept in his drawer all his life and he might have got even less.

There are no easy choices in life – most of the time – and no one pays a fortune for you to come over and eat ice cream, unless there’s a chance the ice cream is poisoned.  Value for value remember?  You’re selling a copyright in exchange for something of value.

Just always remember that if your copyright didn’t have value, no one would be offering to buy it.  Value your work and take some pride in it – if not, what’s the point of doing it?

And always make sure you don’t give away more than you can afford to lose.

After all, if Mogg polishes Ogg’s rock to a nubbin, what does Ogg have.  (Okay, that.  Never mind.)

Go forth.  Value your work.  Always read the fine print.  Remember contracts are for when the worst happens, not the best.  And don’t take any wooden nickels.