And thank you for the concern of all who’ve emailed.  It’s nothing serious, only my dishwasher died yesterday, and I’m downstairs with the repairman — also, this morning my computer was acting odd, and I had to reboot and run a full virus check.  Also — no, I don’t have a witlow — I’m having mild breathing difficulties, which made for a very bad night.

But the chapter is half written.  Just, depending on when the repairman finishes, I might need to cue my post for PJM lifestyle this Saturday first, so as not to drive my editor to distraction.

Thank you for your concern — and your patience.

Years ago, when I was stuck on the Magical British Empire books, two of my friends and beta-readers (YES, TWO OF YOU) made the worst possible interpretations of some paragraphs and one of them (not the one you’d expect) started sending me videos of animals having gay sex, for “inspiration.”  (This is why Kate calls those “the gay animals sex” books.)

When I protested, the one of the two who, like me, has been through the mill of a literature degree got mock-virtuous and said “you know books  are a collaborative art form.  Once you release literature into the world, the reader adds his or her own bit.  You don’t own it anymore.”  He said this exactly as many literature professors have said it, and he did it to get my goat, because we’d discussed literary interpretation before.  (I’ll get you for this some day, young man!  Age and guile beat youth, innocence and superior intelligence.)

The reason he knew it would get my goat, is that, both of us having graduate degrees in literature, we’d shared our annoyance before over the … for lack of a better term… Modern Arting of literature.

Modern Arting, you say?  Oh, yes, Sarah, enlighten us, you marvelous wordsmith.  Shut up, I say.  And do grow up.  Honestly, it’s like you never made up a word.  You’re just specialsnowflaking it again.

The modern art I mean almost always depends on interpretation and “a story” to make it art.  I’m talking of course of the type of “art” that gives my family extreme pleasure when we go to museums and get to wander about giving our egregious interpretations of it.  (Or critiquing the trash can as an installation.)  Yes, I know you can go to art classes for years to be taught that a twisted mess of kitchen implements is art.  But being taught that don’t make it so.  (Note this is not eschewing art that is done with different materials, or in different ways.  One of the best exhibits I’ve seen at the art museum were life-sized nude clay figures that seemed to move because of light/sound changes caused by people walking through the exhibit.  Classical?  No.  We have better tech now.  But interesting, oddly beautiful and… emotionally touching.  I’d say that is the measure of art – does it touch you in a way pure reason can’t?)

A lot of literature taught in classes depends on the story, on what the critics have said about it, for the professor (not necessarily the student, who might find more value or less, depending) to consider it “art.”  The interpretation is considered an integral part of the art piece.

When I was going through college, the fad was “significance.”  A piece had to be a social critique or have “significance” to count.  When this was applied backwards it resulted in some… uh… Odd interpretations.  I love Effie Briest, for instance.  It was the only part of German literature I really liked (For some reason memorizing Wagner’s librettos failed to do much for me).  But my professor de-emphasized the adultery as society disrupting sin that was part of the novel’s conception and instead viewed it, solely, as an anti-war novel.  (I don’t think that was even a major note in the novel, though I confess it’s been a long time since I read it.  But I doubt the author was writing to condemn the military.  According to my professor, the author also, apparently, was writing to prevent WWII.  Who knew?  Writers are clairvoyant.  And powerful.  “I’m writing to prevent Hitler.”  “Who?” “Exactly. It’s working.”)

Shakespeare – bless his heart – was a Marxist, according to my professors.  Yep.  It was that time travel from Black Adder…  It would have given the loyal bard of the Tudors heart attack, but never mind.

Jane Austen?  Totally a 20^th century feminist.

And always, the “the reader contributes his interpretation and every interpretation is equally valid.”

I never understood this.  AT ALL.  Or rather, I understood it.  It benefits a certain type of mind to be able to give legitimacy to half-baked theories, or to turn history on its head by claiming they have the right to interpret things ANY WAY THEY PLEASE and every view is equally valid.

Under the name of post modernism, this theory is destroying our universities.  It’s also doing no good at all to science fiction.  It means if someone is upset at being called a lady, her interpretation that the author is totally a misogynist is valid, and we should shut the man out.  Even if he never meant it.  And if several writers object to the fact that Heinlein’s women wanted to have babies?  Misogynist author.  The fact he never mentions skin color in his early works?  Racist author.  The fact that he has a book in which he disapproves of homosexuals (and a dozen books in which he doesn’t)?  Homophobic author.

In fact, if you read Heinlein’s letters or extra-textual material, he obsessed about not… How do I put this?  Not piling on on the weak.  It sometimes had an unpleasant feel of literary affirmative action, but it was just him taking it very seriously that minorities who had no defense (at the time) should not be piled on or reviled.  However, this reading of extra-textual materials and trying to figure out what the author meant has gone out of style.  Now every interpretation is just as valid.  And besides, the reader adds his own layer on the work.

Right.  Is this a totally invalid effect?  No.  I’ve talked here before about how sometimes your subconscious is up to stuff you don’t know, how the reader fills in “an otherwise thin” narrative to give the feel and texture of a full world and perceives things you didn’t know you’d put in.  It always stuns me when someone tells me something about one of my own characters and I realize it’s true.  Then I go and look in the books, and wow, it’s true.  But I didn’t realize I’d put it there.

It is this elasticity, this interpreting of penumbras that gives people the brilliant idea they can interpret things any way they please, because it must be there without the author’s knowledge.

Er… Two things: first, you’re entitled to your own opinions; you are not entitled to your own facts.

You might decide that Heinlein’s women wear aprons as a sign of degrading servitude.  You cannot however maintain it when someone points out that clothes were far more expensive in those days, (when he was writing.  Yes, he should have foreseen their becoming cheaper, but consider he also thought we’d be bursting at the seams with overpopulation) and so you ended up having to wear aprons when doing something that might stain the clothes.  (Clothes were nicer too.  I mean, I go through a bunch of jeans and ts a year because I don’t wear aprons (stupidity and forgetting to put them on, mostly) but I buy them at $5 at arc.  If I bought them at $20, instead, I’d remember the apron.)  And just screaming “But that’s how I see it” doesn’t make it so.

Yes, people see insane stuff in my work too.  I love it when people view Darkship Thieves as a Marxist masterpiece.  (And yes, I know which of you just snorted his morning coffee out his nose, because I shared three such reviews with you.  Yes, I remember that hurts.  I still owe you a keyboard, too.  Sorrrrry.)  I don’t for a moment believe the view is valid – I’m not INSANE and my subconscious is not that subconscious-y – but it amuses me.  I love it when people see Athena as oppressed.  I love it even more when they see her as a reflection of me.  (Gosh, I wish.)  However, I don’t go to people’s blogs and play whackamole with them for having these crazy notions.  I don’t even do it when people have genuinely insulting views – Athena as a Mary Sue, for instance.  (Gosh, I wish.)  Yeah, I could argue they’re nuts, but it’s their blog and it’s their opinion, and we get into the realm of “what do you think a Mary Sue is?” and “Now give me examples of how I did that?”  “Oh, I see, you think the fact she’s enhanced is Mary Sue?  That’s not my view, but I see where you might think that.”

Not worth it.

My rule in general is this: if you want to interpret something in a way that justifies your liking it, more power to you.  If you’re a devoted communist, and think that Athena is your comrade, sail on, you glorious nutbar.  In your journey you might rethink a point or three about state power, and who knows… your kids might read it and their minds might be sown with the seeds of individualism.

My next rule is: no matter how wrong you are, if you’re wrong in YOUR blog, and you don’t come and ask me to defend why I killed a million baby bunnies in Noah’s Boy, I’m not going to follow you to your lair and beat you over the head with “there were no bunnies in Noah’s Boy.”  I have books under contract, I have work to do.  I am however not responsible if the fans find you and argue with you.  But neither am I likely to join in, unless you get personal and even then I’m not likely to bother.  Nor, btw, will I direct fans to go annoy you.  (My husband might, but even then you have to be REALLY offensive and have hit him the wrong way for him to do so.)

However, if you come to my blog and accuse me of hypocrisy with a distorted and bizarre view of my work, yes, I’m going to get offended.  No, I’m not going to stop a pile-on if the fans get in one.  And no, I’m not even going to be in the slightest bit sorry. (This is not to be confused with the pile-on that happened due to misinterpreting someone WHILE I WAS ASLEEP.  In future, people from Europe or other time-shifted continents who are being piled on, should retreat till I wake and crack heads.)

Look, this blog is my living room.  If you come in my living room and accuse me of puppy blending, I’m going to defend myself.

And while prose is elastic, it has its limits.  You can’t tell me that in your view every non-gay male in AFGM is evil and claim this is valid, when I can off the top of my head cite Sam, the universal father; Simon, debonair and more than a little nuts, but certainly not evil; Jan, the silent tower of strength; Fuse, damaged but endearing; Mr. Long enduring discomfort and putting himself out for total strangers; the kid who lets Luce out of the broomer’s lair, because Luce saved him… and on and on.

You CAN come in and say “But Sarah, didn’t you use the evil father cliché in DST and AFGM?”  And then we can discuss what “father” is, and why these people are evil, in a way that has nothing to do with cliché (there’s reasons, both in the way they were raised and the life they’ve lead that makes them evil.  It’s not just “ooh, father, evil.”)  Because that’s a valid (if in my opinion wrong) opinion.

You can – duh, every reader can – say “I don’t like this” or “it makes me uncomfortable.”  I was aware when I wrote the book that having two gay main characters in AFGM might make people uncomfortable.  I don’t even assume you’re homophobic if it makes you uncomfortable.  Certain types of characters make me writhe that I’m okay with as friends.  I don’t live in my friends’ HEADS.

Saying “I didn’t like this book because the mushy stuff” – I assure those who haven’t yet read the book that the only mushy stuff is in letters, and we never get to read it because the letters were censured by the army.  Long story – “made me uncomfortable” is perfectly valid.  You don’t even need to give any reason for not liking it – even in my blog.  You can say “I hate the Shakespeare trilogy” or “I don’t like your romantic fantasy” and refuse to say anything else. Of course, one would wonder why you would come to my blog to tell me that, but that’s something else. (BTW, the “only the gay males are good” COULD apply – if you squint – to Soul of Fire.  It’s not true, but it can be argued and it’s harder to protest.)

You can’t, however, come in and say “you’re an hypocrite because my interpretation of your work goes against what you say you did.”  If you COULD do that, and if your interpretation – unbacked – were indeed as valid as the author’s intent, then why would authors write ANYTHING?

Sooner or later, someone would come along and say “I think Heinlein liked to strangle puppies, because there is a line that says kittens are always justified, but it says nothing about puppies.”  And suddenly, the poor man many years dead would be TRANSFORMED into a puppy-hater, despite all textual and extra textual evidence to the contrary.

This is what got me so upset, well beyond the personal angle (and the personal angle is bad enough.  I  mean, would you go into someone’s living room and call them liars, because YOU THINK you see something in their work?  And not retract it when people refute what you think you saw?)

IF everyone’s interpretation is equally valid, then the past, perforce, changes more than the future.

Which means in the great, glorious Soviet present, we’re always sure about the (sad) future of books.  It’s the past that keeps changing.

And that Gulag of the mind I oppose, not just on my behalf, but on the behalf of every ink stained wretch who ever put pen to paper or hands to keyboard, or even dictated a story and who, by gum, has the right to defend himself and the text put down in the story from outrageous charges leveled against him. (And if he’s dead has the right not to have stupid charges leveled against him and living writers should pound stupid charges down.)

Or, as Shakespeare said (supposedly alluding to Marlowe’s death – maybe.)  When a man’s verses cannot be understood nor a man’s good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.

Yesterday, when I was stuck for what to blog about, I asked Robert for suggestions.  Blocking on blogs happens.  To me, it happens way more often than blocking on fiction. Usually I have a week a month when this is really hard to do, but it’s not always the obvious one.  For instance you would think that I’d have blocked hard last week, but I didn’t.  I’d sit down, and the idea for what to write was RIGHT THERE.  I just sometimes didn’t have the strength to carry it with aplomb.

Anyway, this week I’m blocking practically every night (I’m trying to write them at night, as that leaves me in better shape to write during the day.)  There’s probably other issues at work, like I haven’t gone out for walks, because I have to be on hand for older son, so he doesn’t do stupid things like fall down the stairs, cane and all.  Not leaving the house makes me a … lot weird.

So, Robert was sitting here and I asked him what to blog about and he said “Stereotypes.  How you use stereotypes as short cuts and they’re part of a writer’s bag of tricks.”

I told him no, because I wanted a topic for ATH not MGC.  And ATH is a writer’s blog, and occasionally a writing blog, but not a craft (as such) blog.  That I leave for MGC.

So he asked what the heck ATH is.  The answer was “Smashed if I know.  I talk about what I feel like talking at the time, and most people seem to go along for the ride.”

But it is, if I may be permitted to wax pedantic, actually a blog about the intersection of storytelling, society, culture and of course the inevitable (argh) politics which arise from all of those.  In the end politics are sort of a super-form of storytelling.  No?  Then why in heck would people get all heated up to vote for someone they can’t possibly know that much about.  (Particularly if they’re the party that shall not be mentioned, where the letter is never after the name when the news reveal malfeasance.)

This is why people talk about “the narrative” and it fitting or contradicting “the narrative.”

Of course, a lot of the narrative is what the press chooses to say or not say, how the politicians justify their actions, and what the schools teach people really drives the events in the world.

But here’s the thing: none of it would do much without the additional narrative that is told in a hundred little stories, fictional and non.  The stories people tell each other at the grocery store contribute to this, but they too are framed and interpreted in the light of the stories we’ve been told since childhood.

I come from a lost world, and was raised on rather moralistic pseudo-fairytales.  As in, they were CALLED fairytales (by some atavistic naming convention) but they were usually not magical and involved no fairies.  They might or might not have talking animals instead of people but often they had people too.  The story was about like Aesop’s fables, with the moral really obvious, and the morals were usually things like “Do onto others as you’d have them do onto you” “Keep a clean kitchen” (I swear.  It was the cockroach’s story.  No, I mean, she was the housewife.  No, you don’t want to know.) “Saving means you’ll have stuff when you need it.”

These stories were conveyed in tiny books – about two by three, and maybe eight? Pages – cheaply printed and sold at the checkout in stores, like candy bars and at the time much cheaper.  I think they cost the equivalent of five cents.  Mom was not likely to spring for candy bars, being absolutely convinced that chocolate was bad for me, but she always sprang for these little booklets, because it meant she had blessed silence on the way home on the bus, while I read, re-read and re-re-read the story.  Usually we got home before I was sick of it.  And I was always willing to beg shamelessly for anything printed.

These books presumed you were slow of thought and had at the end, “The moral of the story is:….”

That sentence annoyed me before I was out of kindergarten but the thing is, the “moral” was usually salutary, and yeah, it was being pushed into little kids’ heads, all wrapped in story.  Also, some of those morals are now outright subversive “Save so you might have later” for instance, denies most of the things we are now told, about how we “deserve” this or that for free just for existing.

Anyway – those little books, as much as the teaching in school, the newspaper slant or anything else – molded how people think.  You might not think it’s affecting you, but it is.

It’s gradual, it’s continuous, and the fact that until recently fiction presented a united front made it more impactful.  Our brain is really not good at distinguishing between stuff we’ve lived through and stuff we’ve dreamed about vividly – which is what good fiction does – hence the problem with recovered/false memories.

What does this have to do with “first do no harm?”  Well, when we were discussing here yesterday whether the destruction of say the belief in the constitution was purposeful or just the side effect of wanting to be in with the “cool” crowd and of the world being saturated with Marxist claptrap, we failed to take something else into account.  Sometimes all it takes is a small push.

Were most of the fantasy authors in the eighties, writing about young spunky female protagonists with abusive fathers trying to make men pariahs and suspect?  Some, perhaps.  I mean, among my colleagues there are some people who are so walking wounded that they’re more wounded than walking.  And some had personal vendettas to work off.

But I’d wager the vast majority of women getting published then and therefore around their thirties, had simply grown up with a traditional family structure.  This meant the father was usually the enforcer (okay, not in my family.  We were weird.)  So when they needed their young female protagonist to overcome a bad childhood, the culprit was usually an overbearing or outright abusive father.

This was so prevalent in the eighties, that I used to roll my eyes when I hit it.  But that’s its own problem.

You see, storytellers do use clichés.  Robert was right there.  You can’t say “never use clichés or stereotypes.”  You can’t do that.  You just can’t.  A book is not reality.  If you’re going to write about an inn keeper and instead of fat, jolly and red cheeked you make him small, skinny and harassed-looking, you’re going to arouse the wrong type of curiosity.  People are going to want to KNOW why your innkeeper is skinny.  Is the food bad?  Does he hate his job?  Is he not an innkeeper at all?

This is great if you’re setting him up as a nobleman (or poisoner) in disguise, but a royal pain if his entire point in the story is to come out and tell the characters he’s prepared them a private parlor, and the boys will see to the horses.

What’s more, when you’re telling a certain type of story, if you go against the cliché people will doubt your story – at least after the cliché is well established.

So, once the “cruel fathers oppress young women in fantasy settings” bit was set, as it were, in stone, if you had a nice and somewhat ineffective father, people would wonder what he was hiding.

It was easier, particularly for young and not very experienced storytellers to come in and make the father the bad guy.

Is this related to the way courts always favor even unfit mothers over fit fathers for custody?  The way men are assumed not to be needed in a healthy family?  The way schools look askance at male teachers?  The way young women raised by the young women who read that fantasy think that every older man is out to “oppress” them?

I’d be surprised if it isn’t.  You see, the human brain is a machine designed to create meaning out of random events.  Even the least talented of us create story out of every day things.  My family prized this, because my mom is a naturally good story teller with great comedic deliver.  She’d come home from the fair and make us all laugh ourselves into stitches by describing some woman trying to get her two year old to behave… with the most stupid exhortations imaginable.

But even that story telling or the story of what happened at the market won’t be exact (ask any policeman about witness reports.)  There’s bias in the seeing, bias in the reporting, and bias in how people hear it.

And a lot of how we hear stories is based on the professional stories we heard, particularly when they all resort to the same cliché.

Say you’re a nurse in a pediatric ward, and a kid comes in with an obviously bruised shoulder, and tells you his dad grabbed him and threw him.  If your expectation is that fathers do what’s best for their offspring, you assume there is a reason and you dig further, and find out the kid was running out in the middle of the street (actually he got his arm dislocated) and wasn’t going to stop (he was only two, and oh, boy, he could run.) so all the father could do is grab what he could get at (his hand) and pull, throwing the kid onto the sidewalk and himself out of harm’s way in time.  (Younger son was Houdini.  He forced me to do what I’d always said I wouldn’t and put him on a leash.  It didn’t work.  So I put him on an harness.  It didn’t work.  At one time I almost lost him in the airport in Paris, and he was in harness AND leash.  I looked away for a minute and he was out of both and running h*ll for leather down hallway.  Until his heart issues – now gone – were found at three he was expected to become a marathoner.  He loved running.  It’s just when he was very young he didn’t have any sense about WHERE he ran.)

But if you were raised on book after book of abusive fathers, if you saw tv shows in which all men are secretly violent, if the news talk about child abuse rings …  You start doubting the story, even when the entire family tells you the same thing.  You start wondering what they’re covering up.  And you make their life very uncomfortable for an afternoon, even if in the end you can’t detain them longer.

Now part of the narrative conformity was enforced from on-high.  Publishers tried very hard to sell the same package in everything – and it absolutely was coordinated with the news and the teaching, either because they did so intentionally or because they all attended the same schools and “everyone knows.”

All you had to do was try to have a heroic man, an evil woman, or a hundred other anti-cliches, and the establishment would tell you either that it was outright wrong or they wouldn’t publish you.

And this is how we come to a world where every woman thinks every man is trying to “oppress her” or “put her down” – when reality is so much more complex than that.  Yeah, some men are insecure gits who try to put others down.  So are some women.  Some men are helpful and protective.  So are some women.

BUT these days every woman (except us gender traitors!) tends to assume that every man is out to get her – a state of insanity that doesn’t bear describing – and that is the result of the continuously dinned  in and reinforced narrative.

So – now that the gatekeepers are gone…

First, do no evil.

Yes, clichés are easier and sometimes they’re unavoidable.  But think before you use them.  Couldn’t your protagonist have an equally hard childhood if she was raised by her father and was at the mercy of idiot bureaucrats who suspect all men of abominable evil?  Does it need to be her father who is bad?

Sure, if you make every hostler ruddy and fat and jolly, the sour faced, bulimic hostellers are going to hate you.  But no one looking at a skinny hostler is going to think he’s actually fat in real life.

In the same way, can’t your rich guy have acquired his riches honestly (most did and do, you know.  Yes, recently there have been a few trying short cuts, but that’s part of their being convinced that’s how you get rich.  Stories again.) Can’t he be a philanthropist? (a lot of them are.)  Do all your poor need to be deserving?  Sure it’s a cliché since Dickens, more or less, and the cliché is so strong that even when it’s obvious most homeless are drug addicted or mentally ill or both, people call you heartless for saying “What we’re doing isn’t working.  We need a separate system for families in temporary homelessness, because they shouldn’t have to live with this.  And we need to figure out what to do about the permanent homeless.” They tell you that you’re just trying to remove inconvenience because, well, in stories all the victims are worthy, right?  (Except in Pratchett, bless him.)

In reality we know very well that just because you were treated badly doesn’t mean you’re a saint.  But we tend to forget that, after reading/watching a dozen or a hundred stories.

So I’m asking you… First do no evil.  First examine if you can get away with not using the cliché without distorting the story.  And then figure out if the cliché is harmful.  (Some aren’t.  I have too got a Latin temper, but if anything having the reputation serves people warning they’re dealing with a fully loaded Sarah and that she can go off at any moment.  Useful.)

If you must err, err on the side of breaking the clichés that condemn whole groups of people, particularly if these people are designated “oppressors” in Marx’s fake whirligig reality.

Of course you’ll have to have villains.  And sometimes your villains will have to be rich, or white, or male, or all, but give them some reason why they’re villains beyond “they’re privileged” (which most white males aren’t, btw.)  And if you can make the reason something more than “he was beaten when he was three.”  Freud notwithstanding, humans are more likely to commit villainy in pursuit of what they view as wealth, or status or power (or all of the above) or even “just” security than  out of the remembered trauma of childhood.  Most of us were traumatized enough that we created scar tissue.  It’s called being an adult and not overreacting to every event, as though this were the first time we met with it.

More often than not, you’ll meet this in revision, not on first writing, because you naturally fill in blanks on the sides of the story with clichés.  But in revision consider changing it.

And if you’re a reader, learn to be sensitive to the clichés and to remind yourself that just because the story says it, it ain’t necessarily so.  It will ruin some of your reads, but it might just start turning things around.

First, do no harm.

Different post up at Mad Genius Club.

You know that talk about what you write for?  Why you write?

When I came in to the profession, given realities that weren’t exactly too hard to suss out, I stood a better chance of having a 19^th century Eastern European prince get sucked up in a cross time vortex, fall in mad love with me at first sight and shower me in the crown jewels than of ever making a living doing this fiction writing thing.

When I started writing it wasn’t for Baen and that Baen has a limited number of slots in its publishing stable.  I knew the factors were things like “being able to attend tons of conventions and making up to editors and what can loosely be called opinion makers in the field” and that satisfying that requirement required other things like “don’t tell people when they’re being frigging idiots.  No, not even if they’re being frigging idiots right in front of you.  No, not even if they really, really deserve it.  No.  Just no.  For heaven’s sake, go to your room and scream it into the pillow if you have to, but make sickly sweet smiles when people explain to you they’re really victims because their father looked at them with patriarchal disdain when they were two.”

Somewhere there’s a bunch of pictures of me at conventions between oh, 1999 and 2008, and I am sure I look as though I’m wearing a corset, and also possibly as if I’m terminally constipated.  It was the effort of holding my opinions in.

In the face of all this, and knowing that the field rewarded exclusively loud and convincing parroting of talking points, I persisted in writing stuff and trying to make a living.  (Yeah, I even tried some talking points, but I was never good at it – possibly because subtexts kept creeping through.)  It is probably a testimony to my stubbornness that I actually remained published for over ten years, particularly given the times in which I was working.

But why, dear lady, you’ll ask yourself.  What possessed you?

When we were talking about it yesterday, some of you said you wrote because otherwise people would come and put you away in straight jackets.

This, of course, is completely ridiculous, as are all suggestions that writers suffer from a mild form of dissociative disease and that—

Yeah, basically.  You’re basically right.

Sort of.  Sideways.

Remember that thing in Stranger in a Strange Land when Heinlein has Mike realize that laughter is what you do when things hurt too much?

It is sort of like that.  For me at least.

I’ve said before that I wouldn’t write as I do if I weren’t being paid for it.  This is true to a great extent.  I mean, would I stop writing?

I once stopped writing.  It was glorious.  It lasted almost two weeks.  I cleaned the house, organized my books, took the boys to the park to play.  And then an idea ambushed me and poured out of my fingers with such intensity that I couldn’t stop myself writing it.  And after that, I had fallen off the wagon for good.

However, two and a half years ago, when Kris Rusch told me about indie, I was ready to walk away from it – at least walk away from it as a way of making a living.  As much as I enjoyed working for Baen I couldn’t work just for them and hope to survive, and besides if I only have one publisher I start worrying about things like whether the cover sends the right message, and I’ll drive anyone who works with me up the wall in no time flat.

So, if I had walked away would I have stopped writing?

Totally.  Er… not.

I might have stopped writing under my own name and as myself, but by now there would be fifty fan sites with a very odd writer, sometimes writing fan fiction for shows she’d never watched.  (I’d probably also have tried to write Shakespeare fan fiction, so it would be a dead giveaway.)

The thing, would it be as time consuming as it is now – no, of course not.  Would my writing take in account that people might need to read it?  Almost certainly not.  Given the erratic nature of my mind, these fan pieces in alternate reality are probably full of allusions and deep embedded significance that only I and maybe two people on the planet will get.  (And I don’t mean because they’re so smart and erudite – I mean because like me they have some truly weird mental associations.  Like the smell of chalk reminds them of pomegranates.  And don’t you wish you knew?)  Like there will be quotes from Asterix comic books unattributed in otherwise perfectly serious situations.

So would my writing be less stressful?  To an extent.  It would be mostly more erratic.  My muse trips on acid when left to its own devices.  Or behaves as though it did.

But I’d still write.  In heaven’s name why?

Because reality doesn’t make sense.  And the only way I can process things without writing fiction about them is by trying to make them make sense.  This means, btw, that the best way to upset and baffle me is to act completely irrational.  I can get someone being upset at me because my personal style annoys them.  I can get someone being upset at me because I once did something to them, even if it’s something I don’t get.

However, if someone comes at me and says “you know I hate your guts because penguins!”  I’ll spend the next three weeks obsessing over these words and trying to figure out what the person meant by “penguins” and any real or symbolic penguins that might be involved in my life at any given time.

The two things that completely confuse me are rudeness and making no sense.  This has probably been obvious by how long it takes me to deploy the troll hammer when a troll, cunningly, manages to combine both.  (Though I’m learning and I use some of you as canaries in the mine.  If these people make you sound like you want to stomp bunnies, the hammer descends.)

But my interpersonal failings notwithstanding, people who are irrational and refuse to fit any logical category are easy.  At fifty I’ve learned that most of these aren’t worth a second thought.  I either wall myself off from them completely, or I hold them in the container of “is okay, but periodically goes off meds.  Ignore the off meds stuff, but never trust.”  Sometimes, on rare occasions I go “Is okay but went through really painful, bad phase due to – illness, pregnancy, menopause – is safe to trust again, now.”

What drives me to writing like it drives other people to drinking is the big, societal, huge,  massive things that SHOULD make sense and don’t.

Like, say, a party that proclaims itself concerned with the rights of individuals running around making sure that people vote ONLY by mail, where vote fraud is huge and implicit.  (No?  How many people will resist voting for grandma, who is not quite there?  And that’s before the incentives for fraud at the top levels become clear.  “We’ll just find a box of ballots in the trunk.  We know people would vote for us if they voted their interests.”)  And yet managing to keep the appearances of being concerned with allowing people to vote – that’s all.  This even as it strikes down laws that would prevent non-citizens from voting (through verification of status.)  This even as it ignores certain groups intimidating other groups at the polling stations.  As in, New Black Panthers.  Brandishing clubs.

Like, say, a party who says that they want you to be free and express yourself and sex is beautiful endorsing codes of conduct and speech in campuses that would make Victorians go “whoa, that’s to far.”  Only of course, the codes are against men (asking for a date is sexual harassment!) which would baffle the Victorians even more.

Like, say, the IRS using its power to punish political enemies of the party in power and then a grown woman, an attorney at the highest levels, saying, with a completely straight face that no, she didn’t realize the Tea Parties didn’t apply to both groups on the left and write.  She thought “Tea party” was a generic term, like Kleenex.  (I wish I were joking.)

Like four men being abandoned to die in Benghazi, while those who should have sent rescuers to them refused to let rescue happen… And then spent a week blaming it on some Coptic Christian’s craptastic movie on Mohammed, to the point of making an apology-commercial to play in Pakistan.  (That filmmaker by the way is still in jail.  Yes, yes, parole violation.  Really?  This justifies being yanked from your home in the middle of the night?  Being put in jail and virtually having the key thrown away?  Not to mention publicizing your name so members of the religion of peace and Theo Van Gogh you?)

Like guns run into Mexico.  No, they weren’t tracked as they’d been in the previous (ill advised) Wide Receiver.  They were just sold to Mexican nationals of dubious associations and not tracked at all.  You see, wide placed people in the administration had kept insisting we needed gun controls in the US because, well, the guns were going to Mexico’s drug war.  But it turned out research revealed they weren’t.  Most guns there were foreign.  So…  So, if you are a person who thinks reality should conform to your idea of it, you send guns to Mexico, so they’ll be found there, and you have a reason for gun control, because it is the right thing to do, of course.  (Because it has worked so well in Europe.  At least in these people’s minds.  – and yes, I hate the above explanation, but if you find another explanation for Fast and Furious I’d like to hear it.)

Like the NSA scandal – spying on everyone, all the time, so the NSA is reading this post last night, hours before you get to see it.

Like, using the EPA to attack political opponents.  Like, blackmailing organizations into supporting Obamacare.

None of these is unexplainable, you say?  There are reasons, rooted in the fantastical, fanatical and frankly a little scary religion known as Marxism?

Sure there are.  But none of that explains how all these things are revealed, one by one, and yet life goes on, and the person on the street has no idea, and cares even less.

Ask them what Fast and Furious is, and they’ll say the movie.  Ask them what Benghazi is, and they don’t know.  Show them clips of people at a political convention saying we belong to the government, and they don’t howl with outrage.

And we’re not talking about completely disconnected people: writers, scientists, college students, all of them will look at you blankly and say “oh, that’s just a way of speaking” or “Oh, that’s just some weird political scandal.”

You see, even as trust in the media plummets, people trust it for one thing: if it were important, it would be reported.  It might be badly reported, but it would be reported.

Only it isn’t.

And how do you explain that?

I don’t know.  The press, like most of our intellectual class is blinded by Marxism.  It’s such a pretty little system.  Like a rube Goldberg machine it does nothing useful, but it’s so complex, so interesting…  So they want to believe in it.  And wanting to believe in it blinds them to reality – with which Marxism has not even the narrowest of contact points.

So they think oppression and totalitarianism wears jackboots, goosesteps and has racial obsessions of the “if you’re not blond you die” type.

Anything that doesn’t fit this stereotypes, and anything that comes under the shiny coat of Marxism can’t be bad.  Because fighting for the downtrodden is never bad (and anyone who is not blond, male and gooseteppish can be interpreted to be downtrodden.  I mean, surely you were yelled at once in your life.)  Because wanting to take care of others is always good.  Because no one should have anything more than others: material, physical, mental.  We should all be equal, and then there would be paradise.  (Because Marx said so.  In fact, having seen what envy can feed on–  Never mind.  Marxists remind me of Muslims who want every woman swathed in sofa-covers to save them from the sin of lust.  We’re all supposed to be poor to spare the poor Marxists the sin of envy.)

And so obvious abuses and obvious infringements can’t be a sign of encroaching tyranny.  They can’t be.  Because if they were the journalists would react.  And they’re not reacting, because it’s with good intentions, and it’s the good people, and it’s—  Well, do you see anyone goose-stepping?  No.  Then go home, and go back to sleep.

It is this irrationality that makes me write fiction.  There is no way to fully express the anger, the baffled, frustrated anger that stops me up, that makes my hands shake, that makes me … clean the basement really well.

Only sometimes, after a while, my subconscious comes up with something and pours it forth.  And through it, I “get” it.  This was why I wrote A Few Good Men.  (And for that matter Sword and Blood.)  And it is why I’m working on Through Fire.

Because sometimes you need to go deep into a lie, to find the sort of sense you can’t find in the truth and to come to terms with the world as it is: irrational and often prejudicial.  More than that, it’s the only way to figure out the way out – to find out how to escape the nonsensical reality, how to shake the globe just right to make things make sense again.

In City Clifford Simak has people use kaleidoscopes to rewire the human mind to understand what it’s like to live in the other worlds of the solar system: and to want to go there.  As with Heinlein’s psycho-linguistic program it’s something that makes me squirm.  People should decide of their own free will and logic, and not because they were manipulated.

But sometimes you have to go deeper than logic, and sideways to reason to make sense of things.  That’s the place where fiction operates.

Hopefully – and if it works out – that’s where fiction operates for both the writer and the reader.

Afflict the comfortable?  Don’t make me laugh.  These things are mostly a good story, unstoppable.  And if afterwards you stop and go “Wait, but if that’s true then–” that just happens because of the what the story is, what it has to be.

It is not preaching.  It’s a kaleidoscope, through which the world makes a form of sense anew.  It’s the oldest of all human art forms.  It is language and thought and emotion.  It is what makes us human.

And when it works, it is what makes the world less insane.

 

So what is the purpose of this strange thing?  What do we do when we tell stories?

This is prompted by Amanda’s post on Saturday about the Harlan Ellison interview, where Ellison proudly proclaims . . . that’s what writers are supposed to do, afflict the contented.

My first reaction to this was that it was “leftist boomer twaddle.”  Some people took offense with it as being boomer bashing.  We’ll go into that in a later post – what and who is a boomer, why there is a tendency to bash them and how defensive people get when “boomer” is used.  But I actually meant something very specific.  Note the modifiers leftist modifies boomer, which yeah, okay, modifies twaddle.

What I mean is, to me at least, the sixties were the era when people – particularly leftists, particularly young, so by definition boomers who turned 20 around sixty five – came up with this odd utilitarian version of society.

Oh, it wasn’t just them, of course, and it wasn’t even originally them.  I’ve said before that I think Western civilization is dying of World War I.  The generation after the war tended to look for “greater meaning” and reject what had brought about the war (at least in their mind) including all the old values of the society they’d been brought up in.

But the thing is, this was mostly an affliction of the wealthy enough to angst about whether what they were doing was “useful.”  Artists, sure.  Some writers.  (Okay, a lot of writers.)  The wealthy sons and daughters of wealthy families.  They worried about whether they were doing was “important.”  Most people were just trying to survive, just trying to get by.

The boomer generation was the first time a significant number middle class people were both wealthy enough and educated enough to take on these ideas and to want to “make a difference.”

It didn’t help that this was the height of the cold war, and that the Soviets had rather active agit prop branches.  Communism – Marxism – is a philosophy that appeals to most young people, because it’s so “neat” and “internally consistent.”  It usually takes a while to dawn that the way to achieve this is to have absolutely nothing to do with reality.  For certain people it never dawns.

And the sixties (and subsequent decades) was the first time that it became feasible for large numbers of young people to hold onto these ideas long past the point they should have grown out of them: particularly people in the arts, in education, in the sort of “business” that has little contact with reality.

These people are “leftist boomers” or if you prefer “beardo the weirdo” – particularly the women!  — They probably started to the left of most of their generation, and they’ve taken refuge in echo chambers where it got worse, and where their pronouncements spun more and more out of contact with reality.

At least that’s the only way I can justify this bizarre, otherworldly idea that the primary purpose of writing – which in this sense means of course storytelling – is to afflict the comfortable?

It’s a common enough view.  I got it from various types of college professors, who – if they demeaned themselves with science fiction – would have loved Ellison.  I also heard it as a statement from one of the major editors in the field.  A lot of English teachers and professors will also tell you “Our job is to do a critique of society.”

And yes, if you dig around, you can read pretty much everything, from Shakespeare to Jane Austen as “critiques of society” – but frankly, I can ape it, but I never bought it.  Oh, sure, Shakespeare says pretty acerbic things about his time, but they’re almost incidental to telling his tales, and in the end he was the Tudors tame playwright.  And Jane Austen makes needle-witted observations on the condition of women but only of the sort that frankly any women of her time might have made, in safe company.

Mostly their stories are something else: they’re about people, about relationships, about eternal things.

You go back far enough in time, and why did people tell stories, whether imaginary or supposedly historic?

You can tell stories to inspire. I imagine when someone got up after a dinner, in pre-history and launched into one of those long sagas of which the Illiad is an echo, people got tears in their eyes at the feats of heroes and a warm feeling at the idea of this great, shared history.

You can tell stories to dream – truly, the stories were told of monsters and gods, and beautiful nymphs and lands where men had no heads, and the vegetable lamb.  Humans like stories of the wondrous and the miraculous, and stories can introduce the idea of possibilities, of things to explore into people’s humdrum lives.  It satisfies the “exploring” need when you can’t.

You can tell stories to educate and enlighten.  I will tell you right now these are my least favorite type of stories.  I never enjoyed the lives of saints.  But there is a certain type of people who likes these and even finds them edifying.  And of course the writer’s idea of right and wrong always shows in a story, and that’s okay.

You can tell stories that allow people to escape.  I’m telling you that through some of the worst times in my life – through fear, instability, grief, illness – stories saved my life.  They allowed me to forget my pain long enough, to go elsewhere long enough that I could face my problems with new perspective afterwards.

But none of these were enough for the leftist boomers when they came of age.  An affluent enough society, with a wealth of young people (and it’s a wealth we desperately need now) viewed it as the most important thing that storytelling be for some great collective purpose.  “To critique society” – i.e. to bring communal living to that semblance of paradise that is not achievable to mere humans.

This is rather akin to pulling down walls because you can’t build houses.

If your purpose is to make people writhe, to yell at those who disagree with you and those you think stand in the way of making society “perfect” you’ll always find victims.  They’ll never be the right victims, either.  I mean, if you truly attack the powerful in society, they won’t buy you and they won’t promote you, and they will even actively work against you.  Make the feminists writhe and… well… look up “storm in a B cup,” aka the late SFWA kerfuffle for how much that will enhance your career.

But even if you yell at the least powerful, and enforce the rules of those in power, in the end, all your work will be is a long screaming tantrum of dissatisfaction at a world that seems to forever fall short of your demands.

Pardon me – my kids could do that at a day old.  It hardly requires learning to write.

So why write?  Why tell stories?

Like Robert A. Heinlein, I like to answer “first, I write to feed my family.”  But that is a bit of a cop out.  If I were looking at strict bang for the buck work output for money input, I should have stuck with translation, which pays much higher fees per word.

But I don’t enjoy translation, and I enjoy writing.

In the end and to a great extent, I enjoy writing for much the same reasons I enjoy reading.  I enjoy the day dreaming and the escape.  In fiction situations can be bigger than life, heroes more inspiring, villains more villainous.  You can build an elaborate dream and share it.  And when people buy it – when people forego a chicken or a six pack of beer to buy your paperback, and when they love it so much they write you a note about it… It’s the best feeling in the world.

But what about afflicting the comfortable?

First I’m not a sadist.  I don’t particularly like afflicting anyone.  (Okay, limited discomfort because I just killed your favorite character excepted.  Deal. You have to experience that to be really happy at the ending.)  Second, who is the “comfortable” – do we mean the rich?  Do we mean the powerful?  Or do we mean those who have never thought over their unexamined assumptions?

I’ll confess that if I can I’d like to make people think – not agree with me; not hiss the same villains and cheer the same heroes, or not necessarily – just make them pause and bring out things they always assumed were right and give them a good look-see; make sure they really do apply.

However, that’s a distant ambition.  If I can amuse the reader; if I can take them away on a wild ride, make them forget that their job is in jeopardy and the baby has a cold (again) and the cat really needs more food–  If I can do that, and make someone’s life better or more interesting for two hours or so, I’ve done my job.

If I can make a living at it (and I’ve sort of managed the last few years) that’s even better.

Making them think?  Good, but not got to have.

Using words as whip to chastise those who upset me?  Bah.  That’s secondary.  And a mean aim for fiction.

Inspire, dream, build – that’s what I want to do.  Why would I settle for less?

 

SOME QUICK NOTES: for those who missed this before, Sabrina Chase has arranged for an opportunity at promotion and wishes to share.  We’re thinking a human wave garage sale and/or humble bundle.  Sound of in the comments if you’re interested and/or go and find Sabrina’s email address in Satruday’s comments and email her.  Copy me if you have my addy handy.  We’re thinking early August.

Also, lending credence to the fact that Dave Freer and I are pretty much the same person, he hit a similar theme to mine in his post today at Mad Genius Club.

And finally, I’ve updated the subscriber’s space, and those fortunate enough to subscribe (!) get to see some of what I’ve written this week.  On condition, of course, they talk it up.  (Yay.)  And now I’m going to prepare the suburban fantasy stories for publishing.

 

I’m going to write a soppy post.  It’s Father’s Day and I’m entitled.  I don’t think it’s Father’s Day in Portugal, they have different dates.  But later today I’m going to call my dad and tell him I love him, anyway.

I’ve talked, in the past, about how moving abroad robs you of the years you’d have had with your loved ones at home.  It is not something undertaken lightly.  Well, it might be undertaken lightly if you’re still within easy distance of home, but it’s not if you are going to cross the ocean and if going back costs thousands of dollars, and demands serious time away.  (Yes, there are tons of things my family has given up because we try to go back – the four of us – every three years.  My parents always help with the flights, but it never quite covers it, and then there’s other associated expenses.  I can honestly say without those trips, we would probably be able to take a moderate vacation every year, more exciting than two days and a night in Denver, which is our “normal” vacation.  [One year we went wild and crazy and spent four days and three nights in Denver.  It was awesome.  We still talk wishfully of affording that again, someday.])

The two people I had the hardest time leaving were my paternal grandmother and my dad.  Understand what I’m saying here: it’s not that I don’t love my mom or don’t miss her.  I do.  It’s that my relationship with dad was less verbal – still is.  Our phone calls take all of three minutes.  He’s uncomfortable on the phone – and therefore more hurt by the distance.

Dad and I liked hiking together, and visiting monuments together, and sitting side by side on the sofa reading, and, sometimes, swapping books.

I’m as bad as he is about the “I love you” thing.  I have been trained to say it to my husband, but it still sounds like it should be said drunk.  So I used to buy dad warm socks and make him his after-dinner coffee just the way he liked.

He used to save all the new bills he got, from the bank, and give them to me.  What I mean is, when he got a bill that looked newly minted, he’d save it and give it to me.

(My relationship with grandma was similar.  She was a woman who did things and was awkward about conversation.  Sometimes she just told you everything she’d done that day, because she had no idea what to talk about.  Weird, since she told wonderful stories.  But follow her around and listen to what she said as she gardened or looked after the animals, or whatever, and you’d get conversation and information.  It was just the phone.  Maybe because of course she didn’t grow up with a phone.)

I first became aware when dad was home it was the weekend.  He worked halfway down the country and what was then a long and expensive train ride away.  So he came home on Fridays and left midday Sunday, so he could be at work on Monday.

It was rough.  I think it was rougher for him than for us.  As a mother, I imagine it must have been particularly hard when I was a very sickly infant and young child.

Mostly I remember his coming home when I was well.  And in my head it’s always spring or summer or fall.  Dad would take me out of the house on Saturdays, so mom could clean the house without me in the way.  We’d jump the wall at the back of grandma’s garden and go off for hikes in the woods.  Often this entailed natural history lessons (what dad didn’t know about local plants and animals wasn’t worth knowing,) history lessons – there were ruins in those woods , and language lessons – he deciphered Latin inscriptions to me.  We got tadpoles in buckets.  He taught me to make a flute out of a reed.  He lifted me up to see eggs in the nest, then told me about the birds.  We took bread crumbs to give to ants, and watch them carry them back.

In fall we’d come home with my hat or his handkerchief full of blackberries, and in my mind (I’m sure it wasn’t always that well timed!) we came back to a freshly-scrubbed patio, a clean house, and tea all ready for us.

In summer, we’d walk out in the evening to the local pond, so I could see the fireflies.

In December, he’d take me by train to downtown Porto to see the lights being put up, and we stayed to see them lit, after night fell.  At this time there were usually vendors selling stupid toys downtown.  Hard to explain.  Think the level of a MacDonald’s freebie.  It was a ritual to carefully select and buy me one of those before we went home.  Weirdly, the only one I remember was the plastic chicken that laid plastic eggs.

But there were times when I wasn’t well.  Those are hazy, possibly because I was low on oxygen (grin.)  Mom – poor mom – of course bore the brunt of those night when I couldn’t breathe, and had to fight for every breath.  She’d stay awake and watch through the night and then the next day she’d work, because she actually made about twice what dad made at the time, and we needed her income.  I remember those nights of fighting from breath to breath.

But if dad came home and I was in crisis, he’d stay awake all night, carrying me in his arms, singing to me.  And if he got me to sleep at all, he’d put me in bed next to mom (we lived in a shotgun apartment cut out of grandma’s house.  My brother slept in the little hallway space between kitchen and bedroom.  Mom’s workshop was in the living room.  There must have been all of 500 sq feet.  There simply was no room for me.  When I was well, I went next door and slept with my cousin, Natalia.  When I wasn’t well, I slept with mom.)  He would then take a blanket, roll himself in it, and sleep on the bare wood of the hallway floor.  Sometimes I think he netted maybe five hours of sleep the whole weekend, then turn around and go back to work.

I was happy when he was transferred back to town, and could live with us.  It’s a funny thing, because in Portugal the father is assumed to be the disciplinarian.  So as the day for dad to come work in town approached all the old women in the village told me “Now you’re going to have to behave, or dad will make you.”

This amounted to insanity to me.  It wasn’t even understandable.  Dad was the person who let me get away with stuff, was always ready to plead my case, would sneak me forbidden treats (ice cream!)

He yelled at me three times in my life.  I can honestly say it hurt him more than it hurt me, and even then I knew it.

When I got married and decided I wanted to be a writer, mom’s reaction was along the lines of “You’ll starve in the gutter.” And also “why don’t you take your degree and flush it?”  Dad’s was “How can I help you?”  He has over the years sent me research books, given me very brief (remember, three minute phone calls) pep talks, and sent me money – all in the name of keeping me writing.

One of the things that always amused me was strangers’ reactions to my dad.  Dad was six one (he’s shrunken some) and built – for those who know them – like my younger son.  Not exactly brick shithouse, but one of the better class of Roman statues.  In Portugal when I was little, and even a young woman, this made him very large.  Pugnacious little men who came to the window of the car to “have a word with” him about his driving, would turn meek and appeasing when dad got out of the car and stood to his full height.

The thing is, only humans were fooled – by his size, his stern look.  Animals never were.  Dad could wade into a dog or cat fight and pry them apart without getting hurt.  He petted strays and ferals.  Cats, dogs and rabbits came to him.  I suspect they still do.

When I was in college he became “everyone’s dad.”  If one of my friends got in a sticky situation, I was the one they called, and this was partly at least because of my dad.  If a friend had gone to a party with some guy who was trying to pressure her for sex, or threatening to leave her out there with no transportation; if a friend had gone out with friends and found they were all doing drugs; if a friend got drunk and needed a place to stay till she got over it, so her parents wouldn’t kill her, she’d call me.  I’d wake dad.  He’d put on his clothes – at two, three, four in the morning – and drive miles with me to go pick up the lost sheep.

One of the compensations of growing – my younger son looks so much like my dad that sometimes it hurts a little.  He has the same gestures, the same tastes.  It’s funny to talk to dad about Marshall, because Marshall apparently hits the same developmental points at the same age dad did.  (Dad is still not very good with the “I love you” so every time we go over if Marshall admires one of his shirts, or his robe, or his scarf, he gives it to Marshall.  He also gives him brand new, freshly minted bills.)  I have great hopes Marshall will grow up to be just like his grandfather… and like his dad.

You know that thing about women marrying men like their dad?  Well, not exactly.  Dan is not as massive, and he grew up in a different time and place.  He’s not as much into natural science, not as much into history.  He certainly doesn’t have a thing for Latin (that’s older son.)

But he has the same quiet strength my dad had.  He will trade everything, just about, for time with his kids.  He too used to take the kids to see the Christmas lights lit.  For a while when they were little, he’d get them out of my hair on Saturdays so I could clean.  (Mostly they went to Garden of the Gods and came back with pockets full of pebbles and rocks.  Guy stuff.)  As the kids got older, they bonded over movies, over computers.  His idea of a really great time is when the family goes off to the museums (Bohemians, I tell you.  We sure live it up.)  And when the kids need him, there’s never any doubt: he drops everything to take them to the hospital or even – if it’s something they want to do, and I can’t take them – to take them to a movie, or to go to them to an art Gallery.  He’s gone without stuff for himself to buy the kids movies or music they wanted.  And, given half a chance, he takes young ones: the kids’ friends, fledgeling writers, under his wings and goes all paternal and protective.

I’m privileged and honor to have such good fathers in my life.

Happy Father’s day, everyone.

UPDATE: (Still by the inimitable, pants-wearning Sabrina who is offering us all an opportunity at promo —  Calling all Human Wave authors! A group promotion is being planned for early August. All you need is minimum one available ebook and a willingness to price it at $1.99 or lower for a week. I’ve got publicity planned for some high-traffic blogs to announce it, too. I’m calling it the Human Wave Garage Sale but my mutant talent is NOT marketing so better ideas are encouraged. Send smoke signals if you want to join in.

A guest post by the inimitable Sabrina Chase (who-wears-pants and everything!)

Createspace for the Lazy

An ancient software principle is that laziness is a quality of a good programmer. They hate writing extra code so they get very *efficient* at what they do. I revel in my laziness, and have figured out a lazy way to do CreateSpace print books. I’ve formatted six books so far, and this is the system I figured out.

First, a bit of prep and the Naming of the Parts. You will need…

• One (1) complete manuscript in Word format. In my case it is originally written in OpenOffice (because Word is evil and puts all sorts of goop in that is bad when converting to HTML for the epub/mobi versions). However, I also convert a copy to Word format for my editor (may her name be blessed) so she can do the official markup thing. You want a version in Word, with styles, that has all the edits done.
• Cover art. My artist very kindly puts my name and the title of the book in the actual graphic file for me, but it is simple to do yourself if you need to.
• a CreatSpaceinteriortemplate for the trim size of book you want to produce (I have standardized with 6×9 for no particular reason). I have also customized the base formatted template for my own needs, putting in my standard end matter, Also Published, author bio, and other non-book-specific content, because, lazy. Get the templates here: (link)
• Some kind of graphics manipulation software. You can get a free version of Photoshop here, (yes, perfectly legit just no longer supported software) but be aware it is a computer resource hog. This is what I am using. Anyone with experience using Gimp or other graphics programs, please chime in.
• Once you have completed Part 1 below, you will need a covertemplate from CreateSpace, but you need to know the *finished* number of pages so we’ll do the interior first.

Part 1: the interior

Using the CSinteriortemplate (use the formatted one, at least at first) will get you a professional-looking print book, but no bells and whistles like drop-caps or other, truly professional layout features. I’m not a layout expert and frankly neither are most bookstore owners so I argue it doesn’t matter. All of my detailed instructions below assume Word 2003. If you don’t have that version don’t panic–you just may have to search around the web to find the steps to get to that particular thing.

1) Open the template in Word and decide which sections you want to keep. For example, I usually remove the table of contents unless I have funny chapter titles I think the reader would enjoy anticipating.

2) WARNING! Here abides math! Simple counting math, but it still tripped me up a few times. After removing the sections you don’t want you need to make sure the page COUNT and the page NUMBER match. Because the template puts the gutter, the margin that meets the spine of the book, on one side or the other depending on whether the page is odd or even. It’s magic. Therefore it is crucial that the even and odd page COUNT match even and odd page NUMBER.  A page can be the third page in and be numbered 7 and that is OK because they are both odd. All of those previous sections you removed? They had page numbers even if they weren’t displayed. You may need to insert a blank page just to get the page numbers to work out. The way you check is at the very bottom of the Word window, it will have something like “Page ii  Sec 2 4/40”. That means page (roman numeral) 2, second section, actual page 4 out of 40. Make sure as you go through that every even page has an even number, and also that all 40 (or whatever) pages are there. Somehow you can make it think there are invisible pages if you delete sections, I have no idea why. Just humor it. If there is a missing page add one to the previous section using CTRL-Enter.

3) Change to Header/Footer view by clicking View in the upper menu, then selecting Header/Footer. You will be doing this a lot. Go to the beginning of the first fake chapter. Notice that at the top of the header it says “same as previous”, meaning it is copying the style from the previous section. A handy little menu bar should have popped up with header/footer stuff. Disconnect the style from the previous style by clicking on the icon with two little pages with a dotted arrow going from one to the other. Do this disconnection procedure for the next two pages (this cleans up First Page, Odd Page, and Even Page styles). Start the page numbering at 1 in the footer of the first page of chapter 1, add your author name in the header of the first even-numbered page, add the book title in the header of the first odd-numbered page. Format font style according to taste.

4) (this is the fun part) From your original Word document, copy the whole bloody thing, from “Chapter 1” to “THE END”. Select the section of the template from “CHAPTER 1” to the beginning of the end matter, and paste.

5) No, not done yet but it’s just a mopping up operation from here.  First, open up styles by going to the menu, clicking Format, then clicking Styles and Formatting. The handy list of available styles is displayed, including a lot of CSP-Blahblah that came over with the template.

• Convert your styles to the equivalent CSP-STYLE WHATEVER for first para of chapter, chapter title, and regular body text. See why we use styles now? Put the cursor on a block of text with your format. Look over at the format list, scroll down until you see the format name in a blue box, and right click on it. It will have an option to “Select (x) instances”, click that. THEN you can pick the equivalent CSP-style, click that, and hey presto, everything changes over. the first chapter section you get for free, but now you need to go find each successive chapter and do a section break insert (select Insert in the menu bar, then break, then section break/next page) between the last line of the previous chapter and the new chapter title. This will make the pages and margins all happy. DO allow header and footer inheritance and continue the page count from the previous section.
• Styles are where you can set your font. I usually go with Garamond 11, the important thing is being consistent in the text. (Although I use Times New Roman 9 for the header and footer and nobody has yelled at me yet).
• If for some tragic reason you didn’t use styles, no time like the present. All you really need are the chapter title, first para, and body text. Search for your chapter titles, select the text and pick the CSP-chapter title style, select the first paragraph and set its style to CSP-first paragraph, and the rest of the chapter to vanilla CSP-body text.

6) Gross violations check. *quickly* skim through the whole thing without reading. strangely you will be able to catch a lot of egregious formatting bobbles this way. You won’t get ‘em all but that’s what the proofing pass is for. Usually in my case it was some rogue style that weaseled its way in when I wasn’t looking. Select the offending section of text, pick the correct style and continue on.

7) Extra Credit: Fleurons. I use clever little graphics instead of # for scene breaks. There’s no style for that, so I go through and make sure they are centered and look right. Sometimes the AutoProofer (see below) complains that they aren’t flattened images, but it’s a warning and not a failure and it always comes out looking fine.

8) Get the final page count. Go all the way to the end of the document, past the end matter. (note page COUNT not page NUMBER) That’s what you need for the CS Cover template (link).

Part 2: The Cover

This will all be done assuming Adobe Photoshop CS2 , which is the only graphics program I know (and none too well, at that). See the introduction for a link to a free copy if you have nothing.

Go to Creatspace for a CS Cover template (link). Here you will need to decide the paper color (color makes it thicker or something, who knew) and use your previously determined page count and trim size. Download the handy template, which is an image format Photoshop can handle.

1) Open up the template in Photoshop. Admire the ghastly pink borders, and treat them as lava. This means, no text or important graphics can appear there. You must also avoid putting important stuff in the reserved area for the bar code. Swaths of pure background color are OK. Don’t worry, the ugly stuff will go away when we don’t need it any more.

2) Open the graphic file of your cover art. This will be a separate window in Photoshop. Click to select, and drag over to the template. Resize as seems best to you, remembering to avoid the pink lava areas. What I usually do now is use the Rectangle Tool, click and drag to create a rectangle that completely covers the front cover area (including the pink) and then use Fill to make a nice background for the cover image. Selecting a color already in the cover art using the Eyedropper works well. If you can’t see your art, that’s because the fill layer is on top of the art layer. In the layer menu just click and drag until everything is in the proper stack order (the template layer should be at the absolute bottom).

3) Use a similar procedure for the back cover and spine (I usually use a single rectangle for the whole area). For extra credit, I also sometimes copy a section of the front art that looks cool, expand it, and set it at something like 40% transparency for the back. Again, stack the layers with the fill under the transparency if you use one.

4) Text: Clever but readable fonts for front cover tag lines (“She thought the penguins would save her. She was wrong…”) and the spine title and author name. Use the Text tool. I like to assemble my text then select it with the Move tool. If you move it a handy menu appears that lets you rotate the text exactly 90 degrees for the spine. Text for the back copy (“Marooned on the ice station, menaced by penguin pirates, Mary Sue longed for a cruller. By the award-winning author of “Where’s My Walrus?”) should be non-fancy, readable and professional. Make each paragraph of back cover text a separate Text box to make rearranging more convenient.

5) Extra Credit: Press Logo and Book Style. Since I have my own publishing company and a cool logo, I put that on the back too. I have a consistent “house” style for the placement of the name and logo, which I have saved as its own file (lazy!). Opening a previously formatted book cover, I line it up with my new cover and make sure everything looks the same as much as possible.

6) Cleanup: By selectively turning off layers (click the eyeball icon next to a layer to hide it) make sure no critical graphical elements are in the Lava Zone. Turn off the layer with the template, and save the whole thing as a Photoshop PDF. Make sure the Layers checkbox is not checked.

7) Yay, you have a cover!

Part 3: Uploading

Go to CreateSpace. If you haven’t already done so, start a new project with your book title and fill in all the pertinent information (be consistent with your trim size, paper type, etc.)

1) Upload the interior text file. It will take a while to riffle through it electronically with their automatic checker. Definitely open the proofer, even if it finds no issues. CHECK THE PAGE NUMBERS and the header/footer behavior. If pressed for time still check the first chapter and last chapter. If the auto-proofer comes back with hundreds of errors it’s probably just our friend the odd/even page problem, so refer back to Part 1 and the importance of page number continuity. Easy fix. Keep fixing and uploading until it says you don’t have any issues.

2) Upload the cover. Submit the whole thing for approval and wait. (If you have more books, just proceed with them). When your book is approved, order a proof copy (REALLY recommend this) it is cheap, about $4 and you will catch all sorts of errors.

3) Thoroughly proof the proof. Check the headers, page numbers, styles, etc. again. Make sure the cover doesn’t look goofy anywhere and the whole package looks like something you already have on your bookshelves.

4)Fix any problems in interior and cover and upload again. I usually don’t order a second proof copy but when it is approved I do check it out in the online proofer to make sure my changes took place and didn’t screw up anything else. APPROVE THAT SUCKER! and start picking out the custom features you want on your yacht.

5) Picking the sales channels. Here you may want to hedge a bit. I didn’t pick extended distribution the first time around because who was going to buy a print book anyway, and it cost $25 per book. Also, I found some goofs in my print versions I didn’t catch in multiple rounds of proofing (I’m better at this now). If you make a change in a book *after* extended distribution is picked, it costs an extra $25 per change of file, so that saved me a lot of money when I fixed them, then signed up for Extended Distribution. You may well want to order that second proof copy but it takes a long time to ship, and it might delay your yacht order. Depends on what you want and what you can put up with.

6) That’s it!

 

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

Come Into My Web

The Honorable Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage:

The carriage started trundling along at last.  I’d tried pulling back the curtains on the windows, but they seemed to be of some magical material that would not budge to all my frantic clawing.  I was at the point of considering using magic, though in a container with unknown magical potential that was playing with fire near a pile of lint, when the carriage stopped.

The stop was odd.  There was no slowing down, and no sound of the horses’ steps spacing further apart.  Just one moment we were bowling along, and the next moment we were completely stopped.  Just before that moment there had been a tingle, as though we’d crossed through a veil.  I filed this away for future thought, though I had no idea at all what it might mean.

When the door opened, I was shocked to find that the outside was enveloped in such dense fog that there was no seeing anything much past the tip of my nose.

Through this sort of grey-whiteness, I perceived what looked like the guards who’d picked me up at my house, but it was impossible to see them clearly through the fog.

In front of me was the open door of an house that looked very much like the building in Cheapside where Seraphim had made the offices of the Witchfinder.

I looked at the door with some misgiving.  There was no reason at all to be wary, except that the fog didn’t feel right, that carriages don’t go from full gallop to a complete stop in ten seconds, and that I’d forgotten to scan the envoys for their origin.  A glancing magical probe aimed at them now, showed them covered in the full protection of his majesty’s magic, but by that time I didn’t trust any of my senses, including magical.

I considered running in another direction – any direction but that door – but I had a tingle down the middle of my back, and the uncomfortable feeling that if I ran, there would be nothing under my feet.

So I went to the door.  At some point a man has to trust in his magic and in his dagger – of which I actually had three, concealed about my person.  I always did, because sometimes you come to a point where you need a blade and it saves your life.  There was this one time, when Freddy and I were boxing the watch–  I swept the thought away from my mind.

As always when I felt in danger, I also felt awake and alive in a way I never managed at other times.

Inside the open door, in the comfortably dim but not dark hall, I noted that everything looked like the ante-chamber of Seraphim’s office.  Don’t ask me why, but this made me more suspicious than ever that it – in fact – wasn’t Seraphim’s office.  Perhaps it’s a defect in my character?

In front of me a page who looked strangely indistinct, considering there was no fog inside, opened the door and sang out, “The right Honorable, the Earl of Savage, Jonathan Blythe.” And I walked into Seraphim’s office.

There was a fire burning in the fireplace, and Seraphim himself sat behind his massive desk which was, as always, covered in papers.  I’d been in Seraphim’s office often enough to know that the desk looked just so, including the two cups of coffee forgotten atop a pile of paper who knew how many weeks ago.  Seraphim’s servants at the office were afraid to touch anything, lest they disarrange a field of magic that the prince consort was keeping carefully tamped down.

The man behind the desk was looking through a pile of papers, and said without looking up, “Hello, Jonathan.”

This too was expected and normal, since he rarely did look up.  But I had it now, even from this angle, and with the grey light from the windows playing sideways on the man’s bent head and his features.  I sighed as histrionically as I could manage it.  “You have an odd sense of humor, your majesty.”

The man looked up.  I read unguarded surprise in his eyes, and he cleared his throat.  “The prince consort can be addressed as his grace but not as his majesty,” he said, sounding vaguely hurt.

I pulled at a nearest chair, felt it with both hand and magic, because in this place it was hard to tell whether it was real or not, then dropped into it.  “Yes, indeed,” I said.  “I’m very nice on all matters of etiquette, your majesty.  I’m fairly sure that I wouldn’t call the prince consort his majesty.  Just like I wouldn’t call the king of fairy your grace.  Give up, Penn, do.  I remember you from Eton.”  When he’d been considerably less insane than at this moment.  I wondered, fleetingly, if it was the amount of magic that fairyland put out that made its inhabitants insane.  Mind you, Gabriel Penn, given his family’s peculiarities and the fact he’d managed to be at the same time a son of the house and a servant, depending on who was judging his status and how it suited them to act, had more than enough reason to go insane long before becoming the king of fairyland.  But with all that, he’d always seemed, with Seraphim, fairly sensible for a Darkwater.

Now he looked so disappointed he might have been a child promised a sweet and given a kick.  He dropped to sitting on his chair, behind the desk, and stared at me, “How did I give myself away?”

One of the things all the fey delight in is fooling humans.  I’d never expected it from Gabriel Penn who until a few months ago had been full human, or at least passed as such, but I wondered if it was a need of fairyland.  I ticked his mistakes on my fingers, “The carriage stopped too suddenly, there was no sound of hooves slowing down, there was no sound from the horses in the front of the carriage either, the fog was a bit much and didn’t feel right.  It was like being inside clotted cream.  Oh, and Seraphim calls me Jon, not Jonathan.  And if he’d been fool enough to send for me, as though under arrest – that didn’t ring true either, your majesty – he’d have kept those two men one on either side of me all the way in here.  Because he doesn’t trust me more than he can help.  Perhaps with good reason.  Oh, and your spoofing of the Avalon king’s magic was too perfect, like… like a memorized spell.”

To my surprise, he grinned at me.  He looked a lot like Seraphim, though if I remembered correctly, at least when he’d been fully human, he’d been somewhat shorter.  He had the Darkwater aquiline nose, the oddly bright eyes, and the dark curls that had all been the old Duke’s – and very liberally spread all through Avalon and not a few other countries besides, given the old man’s proclivities.

Gabriel Penn, a year older than Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, but not legitimate and therefore not the heir, had been raised with the family from childhood, and had attended school with Seraphim, rooming with his younger brother and occupying a slippery position between roommate and valet.  As far as I could tell from their interaction, Seraphim considered him a brother and roommate, and Gabriel Penn considered himself Seraphim’s valet.  This made it impossible for any one else of us to know how to relate to this strange figure in our midst.

He was still a strange figure.  Perhaps more so, since through a series of odd circumstances he’d become the king of elvenland almost a year ago.

His smile discomfited me, and now that he wasn’t bothering to hide it, I could see tendrils of his power spreading all over, so that the person I was facing, what used to be Gabriel Penn, my classmate at Eton and Cambridge, was … something fully powerful and not fully human.

He sighed, a very human sigh, removed one of the several rings on his fingers, and played with it nervously between his hands.  “I was hoping,” he said.  “To have a little more time to lay out the problem to you, which is why I thought if you believed I was Seraphim…”

Which would be like his believing I was a bunny.  Again, what is it about fey magic?  Does it render them all a little mad?  Gabriel had lived in the world of men and knew the rules.  Surely he could have pretended better?

He seemed to read my thoughts, something that always discomfited me.  “Time is odd here,” he said.  “Or perhaps it is that the change was so great.  It feels like centuries since I lived on Earth.  One forgets details.”

One might very well, but this one, I thought, was rumored to visit Earth often enough, to consort with his lover, my brother in law, and to spend time with his half-sibling and other family, that one would think one would maintain some grasp on earthly realities.

I didn’t say it.  If you argue with a king, you’d best be prepared to kill him.  Instead I said, “I have a meeting with Seraphim at noon.”

“I know.  I wished to talk to you first.  You can decide how much to tell him.”

“I thought you told your brother everything, your majesty?”

He looked puzzled.  “Seraphim and I have different…  I don’t want to burden his conscience unnecessarily.”

“But you’d burden mine?”

“You have one?”

Touche.  I raised eyebrows at him and said nothing, though in fact, I do have a conscience.  It’s just constituted differently from other people’s, and I do not even know why.

“Very well,” he said.  “My brother will have told you the magic has gone rotten.  What he’ll not have told you…”

He sighed.  “You know there are many other worlds?”

“Elementary.  Else the need for a witchfinder to rescue the magical from a world where it’s forbidden would be none.  Besides, we learn it in nursery.”  Fine, so fey really made these people mad.

“Indeed.  Well… we were taught when very young that fairyland was a parasite world, which sucked magic out of other worlds, and that in fact some of the known worlds without magic were sucked dry by fey.  As you know that has been revised to fairyland being the spoke on the magic wheel, the one thing that keeps magic flowing.”

I nodded.  All this had been explained through our late and rather unpleasant adventure.

“So…”  He brought the fingers of his hands together, tip to tip, a very Gabriel Penn gesture, and leaned forward, colored motes dancing in his eyes in a way that was nothing human.  “Suppose there really is a world that is a parasite.  It has for years been confused with fairyland, partly because humans ascribe divine attributes to both – erroneously, in our case at least.  We’re just… more magical.  A world that needs human worlds to survive and that has been careening from world to world, hitting where might, stealing magic and moving on?”

“I’d need some proof before—”

He waved that away.  “I can show you proof.  Proof enough.  Mathematical proof.  Marlon worked it out for me.”

Ah.  My brother in law was one of the true geniuses of our generation.  All the same, I’d talk to him outside this cursed place.  Fairyland is not good for even part-elves and it can twist their reason, and if this king was going as mad as the last one, Marlon wouldn’t be far behind.  Propinquity and all that.

“So, what would this world be?” I asked.  “A… anti-fairyland?”

The thing that had been Gabriel Penn pursed his lips and looked for a second wholly human and very worried, at least if one ignored unseen magical winds making his hair flutter and the tendrils of power extending from him, power that would be enough to kill a mortal man if he held it for a second.

“You humans called it, among other things, Olympus.  Also, Valhala, also many other names.”

Part of the reason I wrote what I did yesterday is that this last week has been difficult.  Look, all I have is a resurgent sinus infection.  It isn’t even anything particularly bad.  It makes me want to nap rather a lot and I’m a wee bit congested.

The effect on my mood is all out of proportion: I feel tired and rather hopeless about everything in general.  If I wrote about politics right now, it would be “witness to the apocalypse” stuff.  Of course, a lot of people are writing in that same mode.  I wonder how widespread sinus infections are right now.

I’m trying to finish short stories, because there’s deadlines on those, but lifting enough of a thought to make a coherent post seems way too much effort.  Go figure.

Right now it seems well nigh impossible that humanity even got this far, given its sheer inability to find it’s *ss with two hands, braile instructions and a seeing eye dog.

Never mind.  This too shall pass.  I’ve learned long ago that when I’m ill this sort of mood passes as I get better.  And actually, it is often towards the end of the illness that the mood gets worse.

Part of it is this sense of tiredness and weakness that makes any request, any effort an injury.  “How can you ask me to walk across the kitchen?  Can’t you tell what an imposition that is?”  It makes me think that if I make it to ninety I will be an evil-cranky-old-woman.  Which is fine.  Makes me think of the crazy old woman in the village and wonder if she was crazy or just had found out that keeping the elementary schoolers away from her house equaled peace and quiet.  She used to stand in front of the house shaking her walking stick and screaming: May you be sent to the congealed seas, where there crows neither chicken nor rooster, where there is no bread or cheese nor good red meat.

We were terrified of her, though I don’t think we ascribed her any superpowers or supernatural knowledge.  We were just afraid she’d get louder.

I think I just discovered my plan for old age.  (Nah.  Screaming scares the cats.)

So, I’m taking today off.  The sinus infection ate my homework, yadda yadda yadda.

Tomorrow morning (I’m posting this on the night of the 12^th) and until mid afternoon, I will be unavoidably detained by obligations (yes, yes, I’ll be spending time with more important people, people who wear pants!) but I’ll be back to hang out after that.  Hang out somewhat, at least.  I do have writing to finish.

Oh, yeah, wildfires: we have friends in the affected zones, but none that seem to need us so far.  (Most of our friends are near, but not in the evacuation zones.)  And, unlike last year, the chances of the fire coming to us are REALLY low.  To get to us it would need to burn through most of Colorado Springs.  Let’s just say it would be a disaster of Biblical proportions.

So, unless another focus of fire starts, I’m safe.

Oh, yeah, I have it on reliable information (mom) that tomorrow is St. Anthony’s day.  The Portuguese summer is marked by St. Anthony, St. John and St. Peter in quick succession a week after the next.

The holidays are truly not even vaguely religious, at least not in a Christian sense.  I’m hazy on St. Anthony because it is celebrated mostly in Lisbon, but I presume it’s the same as St. John.  St. John – Sao Joao (with two tildas over the last two letters) was celebrated (at least when I was a kid) by going off downtown all night, roaming in vast groups singing folk songs of the “it was a morning in may” type, hitting people on the head with elephant garlic at the end of stalks and then later (as the holiday became more civilized) with giant plastic squeaky hammers.

Somehow, everyone made their way to the seaside by morning, often two by two.

In the village – people not of an age to go maying – St. John was celebrated by lighting an immense bonfire in the center plaza (everyone contributed.)  Young men jumped over it to show bravery and couples often jumped over it together.  I have it on good authority that early on this was considered a legal (or at least ritual) marriage.  Oh, yeah, people gave each other pots of basil.

If you stayed up till morning, and you were supposed to you had breakfast of café au lait and toast before going to bed.

The whole thing is such a mess of traditions accreted to what I believe was originally a Celtic mid-summer holiday that it’s almost hopeless to try to pull it apart.

To make things more completely insane, kids in my day built outdoor nativities: with plaster figures, much cheaper than the expensive (or in our case severely incomplete.  It’s a long story) nativities used at Christmas, but far, far more elaborate.  It was sort of “nativity meets model railroading.”  It wasn’t unusual for these to include all of Bethlehem with figures of people going about their lawful occupations.  Some of us —  okay, some of me, I think I was the only girl to get this involved – would actually put in rivers and fountains.  Anyway – again, to make things odder – by tradition kids under ten would run around with a figurine of St. John clutched in their fist hitting up every adult in sight for “a penny for the saint.”

I completely got Guy Fawkes when I first heard of it, and at the same time I wonder if both have a common substratum, or if it’s just that kids are shameless beggars and take every opportunity to monetize popular sentiment.

Let me point out that at least when I was young, Portuguese were so bad at publicizing this that tourists caught downtown at St. John’s often looked between excited and terrified, since they had clue zero what was going on.  They’d go bouncing along with the dancing groups, but their eyes would be going “Is this where they kill Americans?” (It was usually Americans.  There was a higher chance the Brits knew something like this.)  When I was between fourteen and sixteen I spent a lot of time explaining St. John in broken English to the visitors.

Anyway, St. John’s connection to bonfires seems grim in Colorado just now.  Robert told me that firefighters would probably take it badly if we run over to the fires and hit the firefighters on the head with squeaky hammers.  This led to a discussion of where the hammer might have come from: the hammer as both symbol/tool of artificer gods like Vulcan and Ptah and as a symbol of warrior power: Tor.  The discussion shed more heat than light.  It usually does.  But we had much, much fun with it.

But it makes it clear to me how insane it is to read too much into local rituals or mythologies because the layers come in and drift, and after a while it’s hard to tell what the pots of basil have to do with the cafe au lait and the toast.

It also makes me wonder how much we really know about civilizations that we know only by representations of events on pots, and by fragmental literature.  Perhaps if we could go back in time, we’d all be “Is this when they kill time travelers”?  (I now have a great wish to read The Fox In The Forest by Ray Bradbury.)

And it seems I wrote a post after all.  Disjointed and odd, but a post.  And I’m perhaps a little less depressed.  Maybe tomorrow I’ll buy some potted basil.  The cats will eat it, but that’s not the point.

So, behave yourselves till I get back.  Absolutely NO setting fire to the internets, and no bonfires on the blog.  And I’m CERTAINLY not giving you a penny for the saint, even if you say you’re under ten years of age at heart!

When you look into the mirror, who looks back at you from behind your eyes?

Those who read me know that this is a central theme of my work (as self important as that sounds.)

It is one of the things that worries me and disturbs me, and intersects with writing science fiction in weird ways: If you upload your personality into a machine, who are you uploading?  Will it change?  Why not?  You change.  What if you could live forever?  Or even two hundred years?  Will you be you?  After all that, will you be you?  Are you the same you that you were at three?  At five?  At twenty?  How much less would you be you if you’re now, say in your forties, two hundred years from now?  Would you have studied/read/learned/lived things that made you someone quite different?  Perhaps someone quite scary?  Or perhaps detached and tired?

Being a woman, I can tell you my reactions are different not only depending on when in my cycle you hit me, but also which time of life.  As I approach what used to be called euphemistically “the change of life” I am becoming bolder and more… myself than I was in my twenties and thirties.  But it’s not just women.  I live with three guys and they’ll react differently to the exact same event if they’re tired, hungry or just out of sorts.  If the shock they get is the third in a row, they’ll react differently than they do to the third.

Right now, I’m finding myself being vaguely tired by the resurgence of Colorado fires, after everything we went through last summer.  No, we probably won’t be affected, (except, as last summer, by needing to give shelter to friends who were closer to the turning point.)  Or at least we won’t be affected unless new flash points appear – then all bets are out.  Because we live in an older part of town, full of Victorians, which in this climate might as well be firestarters, if one corner catches we’ll barely have time to run.  So, I’ll bring down the cat carriers tomorrow, and make sure all my backups are in my purse.  Then, if there is enough time, we grab the laptops and the fireproof safe with all the other papers.  But even if the personal danger were much higher, the excitement would be much lower (not a good excitement, but you know what I mean.)  We realized last year that there are certain things that matter: documents (for convenience); my work and living things.  The stuff that’s hard to replace.

How different would my reaction be if this were the 200^th wild fire in vicinity of my city?

I don’t know, and neither do you.

I can’t even tell you if I was myself when I got concussion and went around for six months in a complete daze.  I mean, my thoughts weren’t right.  Was I me?

What we identify as “I” – the person behind the eyes – seems to be less a set of beliefs and more a set of feeling.  I am the one who feels.

I know how to do this for a character.  I do not know if I’m different.  For a character, you can have them change love, interest and life-ambition.  BUT to keep the character “himself” you have to have a certain set of things you can’t break.  Your character who loves children cannot suddenly start killing them (unless he thinks by killing them he’s protecting them.)  This cheap trick of breaking the character, beloved of pseudo-psychologists, in fact renders the story gray goo.  It’s one step above (below?) making the character go mad and do things randomly.

Is it the same with you?  I don’t know.  Several times in the last couple of years or more, sometimes on matters personal, sometimes on matters professional, sometimes on matters national, I felt like I needed to talk or stop being me.

Inconvenient this.  When the principles of the animating character push the character to act, in a way that might break the character.

And yet I’m still here, and I’m still me.  Right?

And you’re still you.

But would we remain the same… as time goes by?  If the future turns out as fantastic as we hope, would we still be human enough to meet it?

A different and slightly more coherent post (it’s the sinus infection, I swear!) over at Mad Genius Club.