According To Hoyt

I  was going to put up Sabrina Chase’s post on create space, but she sent it to me on Google document share.  Since my only google email is Goldport Press, I had to ask permission to view it and… argh.

So…

The other post I was going to do (if you get the idea this is one of those “I was going to do this” days you are right was on old friends – old books I read and re-read when I’m too fried for anything else.  (Reading new material requires emotional investment and half the time I just don’t have the spoons.)

But I woke up thinking again of Wombat Socho’s question “Why are so many SF writers on the left?”  He could have expanded it if he moved in my circles to “Why are most writers on the left?” and this could be expanded to “Why are most artists on the left?” and “Why are most professors on the left?” and “why are most soft scientists on the left?” and “Why are most journalists on the left?” and “why are most civil servants on the left?” and “Why are most teachers on the left?”

I’m going to attempt a more comprehensive answer than I gave before.

Part of it is that in SF at least, our “ancestors” were men of the left, at least for a period of time.  This came in early 20^th century and was part of a belief in “scientific governance.”  (Avert your eyes, my friends.)

Part of it is that any non hard-scored field in which a vile prog gets a foot in power will become completely vile prog within ten years.  This is because we hire for a lot of things but vile progs hire for only ONE thing, and they will bring in more of them and ONLY more of them.  This is how foundations started by conservatives are to the left of Lenin in three generations.

Part of it – at least in my opinion, and I saw this stuff on three continents – is that the Soviet Union made the “commanding heights of culture” an objective to take over, and paid for it.

All of those are contributing factors, and I’m not denying it.

On the other hand, we might take in account the … essence of the field.  The way you become successful in a field, the way you’re picked for your chance at success.

Something I’ve always been very aware of with my own field is the enormous role “luck” plays in it.  Okay, not always.  When I was a green writer, knee high to a grasshopper, I thought that if I got ANYTHING rejected, it was all because there was something wrong with it.  This leads you down the chute of the “must rewrite” and you might never emerge.

Was something wrong with my early efforts?  Tons.  My first world in and of itself was unpublishable in any sane world (now that the world isn’t sane I’m contemplating an imprint and name JUST for it.  It will probably sell two copies.  OTOH the world being infinitely insane, it might make me a millionaire.  I’d like to be a millionaire.)  Then there was the fact I had to LEARN plotting like babies learn to walk.  Tons of tumbles.  But, of the 13 years till I sold my first short story, I’d say for a good ten years I was doing publishable work, some of it brilliant.  (Well, DST was written in this period, and though re-written before publication, large swathes are the same)  Three other books written at this time have been published, as have about 50 short stories, most of them at pro rates.

So, why couldn’t I get anything but straight out standard rejections?

Well, there were tons of reasons, including the fact that in my day you were more likely to get an acceptance if the editor knew you by sight, and I had no money to go to conventions or workshops for most of that time.  Then a lot of it is that I didn’t get the political slant.  BUT a lot of it was just luck.  Later on, as an established writer, I had two occasions (one a novel series, and one a short story) in which I got rejected then accepted by a publisher who had no memory of having rejected me.

I suppose this is gone, in the era of electronic submissions, but in the times we sent out paper submissions, between the “send back the paper” and the “You may discard this copy” there was a shining moment for serendipity.  Say editor got your story.  Read it, or at least gave it a cursory look.  He already has an evil cow story for his magazine that month.  Toss your story on pile on desk, send back rejection.

Two months later he’s putting together a new issue and starts clearing the old submission pile.  Comes across your story.  Wow, evil cows.  He could totally use that.  Reads it through, sends you an acceptance.

Now, by the times this happened to me, I was a “pro” and those sales were nice, but not make or break.  BUT when you need those essential first sales for the cover letter, luck like that can make the difference between another year spinning your wheels and not.

By the time I broke in, I was very aware of this element of luck.  I had friends who wrote as well as I did or better, but hadn’t sold.  And other people – my husband – sold his first short story to Analog after about a year of writing.  Now, he’s talented – of course – but the luck was also with him.

In fact, one thing we quickly become aware of is that talent is sort of pre-requisite, but from there one…

Well, we’ll put it this way, you have to be COMPETENT to have a career (though not to publish) but how much success you have from there is dependent on other factors.  In our field, other than luck breaking in, you needed luck with covers and with a publisher who REALLY would push you.  The last often had more to do with your physical appearance, whether you’d gone to college with the editor, and your political color.

Add all those factors in, and what it meant is that the difference between a mega bestseller and someone with ten novels under the bed and no credits was… luck.

This is a corrosive state of affairs.

Yes, I’m aware that the world isn’t fair.  BUT humans feel a need to believe it is.  This makes us very uncomfortable in any situation in which we have it rubbed in our nose that the world is very far from fair.

And because we are “fair” we NEED to believe that other’s success – and ours too – is all the result of merit.  Even when this is OBVIOUSLY, PATENTLY false.

(Hell, even when it’s true.  I recognize “voice” when I see it.  As in “this work has a very strong voice.”  And voice hides a multitude of sins, including silly plotting.  BUT I can’t tell you how to get “voice” or really what “voice” is.  All I can tell you is “this has it” and “this doesn’t.”  THAT fails to explain much of anything.)

Go back and look at those fields.  What are those fields?  Fields where gatekeepers determine your success.  The decision might be made on some element you just don’t see.  Or it might be made on your political views, on the fact you’re cute, on the fact the gatekeeper owes you a favor, or sheer luck.

Throw all those factors in and “random” is the best description for those who make it.

So… so… Humans being wired for fairness, under the old model most struggling and mid-list writers were sufferers of Stockholm syndrome.  We convinced ourselves the gatekeepers were right, and we piled on behind their decisions.  (Sometimes I still catch myself doing that.  No, seriously.)  Add to that that kissing upward might be the only way to help your career, and you have a caldron of hypocrisy and dissimulation, part of which involved lying to yourself.

The other side of this was envy and resentment.  Because you can only lie to yourself so far, if you’re even halfway good, you’re going to resent everyone who gets bigger and who is worse than you.  (And there will be a lot of those.)  But you can’t say anything – gatekeepers, remember? – so you seethe in silence.  There were writers I simply couldn’t read because it was like having my face rubbed in their oh so obviously inferior craft (and yes, voice.  I know it when I see it) but they were getting pushed and outselling me by a thousand.  And everytime I came across their pap political correctness that earned them the push, the book would get thrown hard enough to dent the walls.  We only have so many walls.

This has changed.  It is still this way for the Prisoners-of-Traditional and over the next couple of years, as the system crumbles, there will be some interesting episodes of hysteria.  I suspect stuff like “you will not call us ladies” is an effort to distinguish oneself in the “lefter than you” category and get some push or – the state the field is in – some sales, under any circumstances.

But for those of us in Indie…

I’m not saying luck doesn’t have a place.  Yes, it does.  But luck is understandable.  And most of the time it’s not exactly luck.  I can look, say, at a mil sf novel selling better than anything I have out indie and go “Well, there’s huge hunger.”  And what is keeping me from writing one?  Well, I don’t want to.  I don’t think I can do it competently.  BUT that doesn’t mean I can’t write space opera with military overtones.  It just goes on the back burner.  As does writing romance.  And I collect data on what does well and try to reason why, which satisfies my feeling that my fate is in my hands.

That’s the huge difference.  In traditional publishing, the gatekeepers had all the power.  To succeed you had to surrender.

I know it’s the same in the soft sciences, in education, in journalism.  The difference between a superstar and a competent practitioner is… How do hit the gatekeepers?  Do they like you?

That system breeds the sort of double think last seen in the soviet union, where even the victims of it pretend to support it.

Fortunately most writers who want to take the opportunity are now free.  Which means we can support and help each other, and this is enough.  We can also take control of our own fate.

I look forward with interest as innovation sets the other fields free.

The totalitarian mentality will remain for a while, out of habit (as I said, even I have to fight the reflex, now and then.)  But in the end it will be individual ability and responsibility that will win out.  And I think that will change the type of work and the type of mind in those fields.  (Except maybe federal bureaucrats, unless our system REALLY changes.)

For now, knowing the lock is approaching the key is enough.

You know, as though I didn’t have enough to worry about, particularly when it comes to A Few Good Men, a book I worried about before it was even written, after it was written, and now that it’s published, the world has now gone bananas.  I mean, more so than usual.

I expected some people would object to the character’s sexual orientation.  It never occurred to me that ANYONE would take issue with the Usaian religion.  At least it never occurred to me someone would take issue with it seriously.  I thought people might roll their eyes, or grin, or say “OMG, don’t go L. Ron Hubbard on us, Sarah.”

Then came this review of a game by a colleague of mine, over at PJM:  Walter Hudson, on the anti-gospel of Bioshock Infinite.

First, let me point out that I have no interest in the games and that the best I can say about the designers is that the worldbuilders are the product of American self-hating schools and were probably raised on the gospel of Howard Zinn.  However, Hudson’s pov is, to put it mildly, weird also.

I particularly like the point where he more or less concedes that to make a religion out of adherence to the US constitution would be evil and anti-Christian because, well, all humans are evil and stuff.

Having wakened this morning to find out that the tough grrrls purity brigade Ladies Victorian Morals And Purity Society that SFWA has become is now hunting for Mike Resnick for the dual crimes of a) calling women “ladies” and b) pointing out that skin on covers sells to women as well as men, I feel like I’m inside a tiltawhirl.

When did the two sides exchange places, again?  When did the left, once upon a time the purveyor of free love, freer skin and the more pervy the better stories become the purity squad, and when did the right decide that there would be something wrong with believing in the constitution?

In other words – have you all gone frigging mad?

I’ll deal with the Resnick issue later – aka the “SFWA makes itself even MORE irrelevant, now approaching black-hole irrelevancy levels” fuss.  That will probably lead to several columns and allow me to set several pious and self satisfied ladies grrls on fire.

Right now I’ll explain the why and wherefore of the Usaian religion and also why – while of course Bioshock is doing it WRONG – to consider it a terrible idea that someone should believe in the constitution with religious fervor is inane from someone purporting to be a conservative.

First let’s define religion.  Religion is a set of beliefs that can’t be fully justified by rational observation.  A lot of our nominally Christian – or atheist – population in fact holds fast to several religious beliefs.  For instance, the belief that calling a woman a “lady” is a mark of disrespect.  Or the belief that only males like to see the opposite (or same) sex naked. But I digress.  Then there is the belief that every single human being is harming planet Earth by existing (as if you know, we were somehow intrinsically different from every other species on the planet); the belief we’re “overpopulated” at a time when people enjoy more living space per individual and better food than at any time in history; the belief all cultures are equally valid, particularly those that cause death and horror; the belief …. Should I go on?  I could go on for years.  All of these have the force of religion in influencing everyday life, often in contra-rational ways.

But Sarah, you’ll say, most of these beliefs don’t promise heaven, and they’re not supernatural.  Were you under the impression all religions needed to be?  At its most primitive, religion is a set of appeasing, fetishistic (not in that sense, grrrls purity league!) behaviors that are supposed to keep the wrath of the gods away from you.  And actually, in most cases these modern versions do believe in a paradise of sorts “if everyone were enlightened like me, then we would live in this sort of paradise.”

Given humanity and the limits of the human mind – unlike Walter Hudson, I don’t believe we’re inherently bad.  I believe we’re inherently limited and unable to fully grasp the results of our actions and about evenly divided between good and bad impulses (as a species.  As an individual, your mileage may vary.) – we’re all going to take in any number of beliefs as a sort of unexamined religion and adhere to them with cultic fervor.

My idea, of course (though it started as a joke in Darkship Thieves) is that the Usaian religion was created rationally and on purpose by people who knew history and who believed that the best way to ensure the return of the constitutional republic was to encode those beliefs they had anyway as a set of dogma and ritual.  This would both bind their community and give them the ability to transmit the religion forward through the generations.

The idea was something like “we all got to believe in something.  I believe I’ll create a community which will lead to a society in which eventually individual liberty can flourish.”

But Sarah, you say you’re a believer.  Isn’t that heresy?

Why?

Did I at any time say that no Usaian could have another religion (or none at all?)  I don’t believe so.  In fact, I explicitly stated the opposite in the book.  There are people who are Usaians who don’t believe in G-d, but who believe that the principles set forth in the constitution are the best form of organization any society has ever had (as judged by results.)  Some others (some are explicitly Christian subgroups) believe G-d especially blessed the US and will make sure the idea doesn’t vanish forever from the Earth.  Yes, that is a form of heresy.  But many of us believe G-d helps those who help themselves, and also that he wants the best for us, and this nation conceived in liberty is the best for us.

But when things get tough, people default to community and religion, and having the beliefs explicitly stated and surrounded by rituals gave them a chance of withstanding the centuries.

But… but… but… you had stuff about the founders as prophets, and the return of the George.  Yeah, well.  I grew up in an OLD culture, where a lot of pre-existing religious beliefs got accreted onto Catholicism.  I kind of have a feeling that sort of thing, through five hundred years, would sort of develop.  Though I’ll point out that’s a “folk religion” version, not the religion that unites them all.  There’s also hints that at least some of the people (the Remys – or at least the Remys as viewed by Lucius, which is NOT the same thing)  believe in reincarnation either earthly or into a world of liberty elsewhere.

Am I promoting the idea that the founders were prophets?  Well, I’m allowed to believe anyone and everyone can be divinely inspired, and I think there was a miraculous convergence of events and men at that time.  (If you want to know how miraculous read about it.)  On the other hand, no, I’m not lighting candles before statues of Ben Franklin who likely would have pissed himself laughing at the idea, anyway.

What I am doing is starting from an idea, and then having people behave as people.

This is where the Bioshock designers fail.  Starting from the constitution it’s D*mn hard to get a fascist state, unless you toss the constitution out the window and replace it or make it irrelevant (something we’re on our way to doing.)  Starting from communism, it’s inevitable that you WILL end up in a totalitarian society.

But to say they are wrong because humans are inherently evil is yet another form of heresy.  If man were inherently evil then the path to redemption would be making itself not-man.  This leads to some of the more interesting heresies of the middle ages, newfangled cults like the Heaven’s Gate Cult, and of course Environmentalism.

As a religious person, I believe that humans are inherently FLAWED.  I believe that G-d can help heal our flaws while keeping us human.  That’s my religious belief.  You’re not required to buy into it, and I’m not going to argue it.

As a human being who has studied history, I believe the American system of government has the best results – flawed though it is – of any other system ever tried.  And I will do my d*mndest to make sure it neither vanishes from the world, nor, should it vanish, remain forgotten.

I am a Usaian.

UPDATE:  In case you’re confused about the disappearing post: it’s over at Mad Genius Club, where I’ll be conducting a Cover and Blurb Clinic.  That is if any of you want to play.

*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 this week, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

In The Halls Of The Fish King

Miss Helen Blythe, Sister of The Earl of Savage:

I beg the gentle readers of this tale to believe I’m not a ninny.  I was not the sort of little girl who demanded her brother bring her kitten back to life – oh, I admit, once, but I was very young and Jonathan explained to me the idea of necromancy and I didn’t do it again – I didn’t cry when I got hit on the face by a ball, I didn’t complain to nanny when Jonathan’s friends played horrid practical jokes on me, and I never cried to mamma that I was left standing in the chaperon corner, without dancing, ball after ball.

Life and its unfairness were early apparent to me in that mamma preferred my insipid sisters to Jonathan, who might be a rogue but is certainly interesting.  And by the age of five, I’d come to realize that unfairness cannot be stopped or cured.

So it was a shock to hear the words emerge from my lips, in the wowwwowww tones of Betty’s cry, “But I don’t wish to marry youoooooo.”

It is gratifying to me to report this must not be the image I present normally, because the fish man looked shocked.  His eyes widened as he stared at me, and then he glanced sideways at other fishmen who stood on the steps of his throne and were probably his counselors.  You know the type of look.  It’s exactly the same look gentlemen will give you when you start crying at a ball because someone stepped on your flounces and tore them.  Not that I’ve ever done it.  Well, perhaps my very first ball, but only because the gentleman – would you believe an officer of the Private Guard? – tried to convince me it had been my fault that had somehow got my flounces under his big clumsy foot.  After mamma had given me a lecture about how one didn’t argue with gentlemen, certainly not in public, and how this would give me a reputation as an archwife, I’d decided that was another of the manifestations of unfairness and kept my mouth shut, even when gentlemen would say blatantly false things, or talk about my inferior female mind.  Instead, I’d amused myself by thinking of replies to give them, but had never uttered.

Of course, mamma says it’s because of that that I spend so much time in the chaperones’ corner, even when there are more gentlemen than ladies at a ball.  She thinks it’s because I refuse to utter and glare at gentlemen as though they were “the lowest thing in creation.”  I don’t think so.  I think most of those gentlemen are used to being glared at because they are the lowest thing in creation.  I believe I stay in the chaperones’ corner because I’m not beautiful, and I’m not even plain in the common style.  My face is too narrow and long.  My chin is too pointy.  My hair looks rather like overgrown black brambles, and my eyes are dark and with no brilliancy.

Which is why it would be better for everyone if I became a pirate, but certainly not if I became the wife of a fish man.  For one, mamma would never approve.

The fish-king looked scared like any mortal man would at my wowowowow exclamation, but then laughed, as though the looks on his henchmen’s faces had reassured him.  “And yet, madam, you will undoubtedly marry me.  Your enthusiasm is not needed, only that you do it.  And when I marry you, you shall have the consolation of a great position and domain over all my subjects.”

And then, before I could realize what he was about to do — not that I could have done much about it, with his guards behind me – he came down the steps.  His movement struck me paralyzed with horror, because though he looked like a man and he wore a gentleman’s clothes, he didn’t move like any man I’d ever met.  There must be extra joints in his legs, if legs they were, or perhaps they were merely articulated like the tail of a fish, because when he walked his legs swayed and rippled, in an entirely wrong way.

I felt my gorge rise, but could not move, and next thing I knew he was holding me in his arms.  His arms were very cold, and he smelled overpoweringly of fish.  And then he kissed me, and his kiss tasted of day-old sardines.  Fortunately I must have repulsed him as much as he repulsed me, because he let go almost immediately and looked around at his court, and forced a huge smile – this up close, you could tell it was forced – and said, “Welcome my bride, denizens of the deep.  With this marriage we shall keep the intruder at bay and the doom from befalling us for yet another generation.  With this marriage we shall be saved.”

The din was unbelievable, and their voices were as weirdly wrong as his walk.  Once, when I was very little, I’d tried to talk into a glass of milk.  Their voices which were fine individually, when in a chorus sounded just like that.

And he really must not like the feel of me, because as soon as they shut up a little, he looked around and said, with an almost frantic effect, “Take my bride and her attendant to the royal chamber and attire her for the ceremony.”

I had a strong feeling no ceremony engaged in down here would be binding on me, though Mama was quite likely to make me abide by it, because it would get me off her hands, mind.  On the other hand, if they used magic, they could bind me to this man… well… man shaped heel, and make it impossible for me to escape.  That meant I must escape as soon as possible.

I couldn’t do it from this room.  Too many people.  People shaped sardines, at any rate. I wondered about the bridal chamber. Perhaps there would be fewer.

As though in answer to my prayers, three fish-ladies detached themselves from the crowd.  I noted that they were pretty, or at least would be considered pretty in my world, if they didn’t move in as weird a way as their king.

They undulated towards me, on whatever passed for their legs, and they bowed to me and to Betsy, for whom the novel experience was shocking enough to keep her thankfully mute.  I think they introduced themselves to me, but I paid no attention at all, though I retained the vague knowledge that they all claimed to be princesses.  Whether that meant they were the sisters of the fish-king I didn’t know.

Mama had once gone on a tirade about how one could never be sure of foreign princes and princesses, because what Russians called a prince might mean a member of the royal family, or, for all we knew, might mean a really good lawyer.  She was exaggerating and perhaps exercised by the recent intrusion into our king’s court by an endless stream of personages claiming to be high Russian nobility.

But if one couldn’t be sure with a human court, how much less could one be sure with a fishy one.

For all I knew they all thought they were princesses compared to land people.  But I followed them, and they showed a very proper deference, turning back to bow at me, only I wish they wouldn’t, because, really, they did not move right and it made me feel queasy.

They took me into a vast, vast room, as large as the throne room, made of an upturned ship and filled with what must be salvage.  At least I don’t think they could – anywhere in this watery world – find enough wood for that highly wrought vanity, that massive four poster bed.  And this left aside the row upon row of dresses hanging all along a wall.

The dresses had been embellished sea style with pearl rows and bits of shell, but they were undoubtedly material from my world.  At least they didn’t look water stained, so I thought likely they’d been taken from sealed trunks in ship’s storage area, and not from the bodies of dead drowning victims, a thought that caused me to shiver.

Upon a chair was the most ornate dress I’d ever seen, and from its cut not less than fifty years old.  Yards and yards of silk lace, and row upon row of pearls and rubies.  I wondered what ship could have sunk unnoticed with such a cargo, and then I thought that since this watery world wasn’t really in our world, that meant that it could have sunk anywhere.  Then I wondered if it had been caused to sink so I would have a dress, and I felt as though there were ice inside my stomach.

And then…

Betsy was crying quietly.  The silly goose had got her soaking handkerchief from her sleeve and was attempting to dry her eyes with it.

And my attendants were repeating for the third time, that I should undress, so that they could help me into the dress.  Well, then.  It was now or never.

I’d best, and quickly, get rid of them, so that I could get out of here.  I didn’t know if they had enough magic to stop a transport spell, but they might manage it, or else they might come with me, which would be just as bad.

When leaving home I’d used a purchased spell because I’d thought that would make me harder to track.  Well, so much for that.  This time, I’d do this in my own way and with my own powers.  As for where to go – home to recoup and find out how to go anywhere else, would have to do for now.  Mama would be shocked at my hair, and likely watch me like a hawk for a while, but she’d soon forget because Jonathan would do something to scare or shock her.  And then I could try again.  Given my recently acquired aversion to fish maybe pirate queen wasn’t the best profession for me.  Maybe I should become a mountain bandit.

I put on my most haughty airs – it helps to imitate mama – and said, “I will not undress in the presence of strangers.  Leave us.  My attendant will help me.”

To my surprise it worked.  They bowed and left.  But I was sure they’d be watching at the door, and when Betsy started warbling, “Oh, miss,” I put my finger to my lips to keep her quiet, then put my arm around her waist, and started to build the transport spell.  It felt like I was working against a great, wet weight, like trying to jump from under a soaked wool blanket, but I was always good at contriving ways to do magical things, mostly because I could never do them the normal way.  Possibly because of papa’s elven heritage.

Just before I put the last bit of spell in place and thought of home with all my might, I saw a long, long coil of pearls on the vanity.  GOOD rosy pearls, which should allow me to endow my sisters and have enough to live independently my whole life.  Maybe I’d not need to be a mountain bandit after all.  I reached over, took them, clutched them to me, and, holding Betsy, put the last key in place and thought home.

In the next moment I was falling onto a man.  The impact of my fall caused him to fall backwards.  Betsy landed beside me, on her behind, with a splash.

The man landed with a splash too.  We were in bracken water to our ankles, and if this were home, someone was going to get told off for flooding the basements of the house.

“Who are you?” I asked the man.

But he didn’t answer me.  He was looking behind me, his eyes wide, and he said one word, “Hell.”

Yesterday one of you reprobates called my attention to a post in Stacey McCain’s blog, by co-blogger Wombat-socho, about sci fi, mil sci fi, the attraction of sci fi authors to totalitarian philosophies, and the seeming monopoly Baen has on Mil SF.

And I realized it had been a long time since I did a post on the state of SF.  Or the state of the state in SF.  Or something.

I posted a comment with my human wave post, thinking it would answer at least some of it: I do talk about sf being taken over by grey goo and our chance to take it back.  But I knew the post was at best tangential and his questions needed more explanation.

So, let’s start from the top – Wombat points out that we, the Odds, the Geeks, the kids who could quote from Star Trek in High School (yeah, I could too, though you’d have needed to use the iron maiden to get me to admit it.  In public I’d tell you Star Trek wasn’t “real” Science Fiction.  That was Simak and Heinlein and others.), the people who grew up able to debate for hours the comparative strengths of Heinlein and Asimov…  We’ve won.  I realized this when there were programs with battles of robots on TV.  I realized that when things like Myth Busters became nation wide successes.  I realized that when most new blockbuster movies drew on science fiction.

Wombat goes from that to the politics of non-Baen Sci Fi authors without ever touching a central question in this: possibly because he’s not aware there’s a question to be asked.  He might not know that despite the phenomenal ratings of movies with sci fi or fantasy themes, despite the fact that sci fi and fantasy has leaked into everyday life, despite the fact that you can mention games and movies with a basis in sci fi and fantasy and every will understand…  Science fiction and fantasy books almost don’t sell.

There are exceptions to this, of course.  George R. R. Martin has a license to coin money, but only because of the TV series.  However, almost every other sci fi or fantasy success has to lean heavily on another genre that does well on its own.  Thus Harry Potter really leaned heavily on YA and on boarding school adventures (which used to be wildly popular in Europe in the twentieth century.  I know, I grew up on them.)  And – arguably – the most successful sub-genre in science fiction and fantasy, currently is the Urban-fantasy with various shadings of paranormal romance which leans heavily on romance and – at the other end – on erotica.

But by and large, your average science fiction and fantasy author going through conventional houses for the last twenty years was cautioned that he or she had in fact found a way to go broke slowly.  We were told to have another job.  I was strongly advised to get a job teaching in college to support my writing habit.  I was told that print runs for science fiction and fantasy were small and getting smaller every year.

No one tells romance writers this.  They do tell it to mystery writers and more on that later.

The exception to this is Baen.  Baen makes its living on Sci fi and fantasy, and doesn’t seem to think we need either YA or insane amounts of sex to make it saleable.  There is a reason for this too.

Part of the blame for this is Robert A. Heinlein’s.  It pains me to say it, but there it is.  You see, in the beginning there were the pulps.  The pulps were written for those the glitterati hated: schoolboys, young men in manual professions, young women who’d never admit to reading them, anyone who wanted a sense of adventure.  Great literature they were not – nor did they aspire to being.  They were what comics used to be before they got all snooty and “graphic novelly.”  If you were caught reading a pulp mag you were assumed to be no great intellectual shakes.  However, there was a good chance that the people you went to school or worked with were reading them too.

They were entertainment for normal people.

It is part of the history of science fiction that Heinlein made the genre respectable, dragging it from magazines to the book shelves, and giving it respectability.  Parents who scanned his YA were more likely than not to approve.  The books dealt with serious themes in a serious manner, just projected to the future.

Unfortunately this made the genre respectable enough that the generation who came next – the new wavers – tried to get it a seat at the table of “respectable literary fiction.”  This folly lead to a whole of lot of nonsense, mostly belly-button-gazing, dystopia, a heck of a lot of sex and a “I Hate Humanity” ethos.  (At least Athos only hated women.  Never mind.)

This happened because by the time SF/F tried to get taken seriously as Literature, Literature was going through its hysterical retreat phase.  What I mean is that literature, like most other arts of the Western civilization went into a sort of denial of themselves after WWI.  It is something I’ve mentioned before.  The entire civilization is seriously shell shocked and kind of up its own behind, and the arts reflect that.  Part of what Western Civ arts have become is a toy of the elites (aka status markers) and at the same time a way to deconstruct civilization.  This is why we get “installations” of an author’s excretions acclaimed as art.

Literature got kind of like that too.  I know.  I have a degree in the stuff.  I still remember – not fondly – the novel that tried to get away with “deconstructing the idea that something has to happen.”  But the sad thing is that most modern novels try to do that too – and sci fi jumped immediately on the high literature bandwagon.  A lot of novels that are taken seriously are literally about nothing.  In fact having a lot of sex (because that proves you’re mature, doncha know) a lot of victimhood (particularly female victimhood, because we’ve run male readers off the genre in droves) and a lot of nihilistic despair passes for deep thought and philosophical maturity.

The problem is that science fiction lost its vast number of middle-of-the-road readers with this. The people only looking for fun.  On the other hand, it failed to gain the high brow readers it craved.  In the world of snobs, sci-fi origins in “bug eyed monsters” tainted it.  People like Margaret Atwood writing – mediocre – science fiction refuse to admit it’s science fiction, because that would make them “non serious” and stop their award money.

Sci fi, in fact, resembles the high school girl who left her nerdy boyfriend to compete for the captain of the football team, and the more the jock rejects her, the more hysterically she tries to ape the cheerleaders and proved she’s worthy.

It is more like that than you think.  Because the only people who remained behind in science fiction were those who were truly odd and who liked the themes so much that they’d endure everything to get their sci fi fix, the field started suffering from its own kind of “isolated culture” syndrome.  They had to prove – to themselves, if not to anyone else – that the reason they were shunned and considered weird was that they were smarter, better, more “special” than the crowds.

So sci fi (and to some extent fantasy though that was almost always more popular, first by relying on Tolkien and producing an endless stream of quest fantasies, and then moving on to historical fantasies and others – fantasy was less part of the pulp culture and, I guess, had less to prove) became weirder and weirder.  It also became further and further left, an effect of most of the gate keepers (editors, agents, publishing houses) being men (and women) of the left, and of sf wanting to earn “recognition” and “legitimacy.”

By the time I came in, the structures of what we’ll call “recognition reward” in SF were so far to the left that having a “young communists” club among sf writers is a given, and that people proudly proclaiming themselves communists at panels is also a given.  However, I once was treated to a half an hour rant by an editor who thought libertarians were the devil incarnate, and also thought (!) they wanted to ban the internal combustion engine.

Whether the genre by itself also attracts statists is something completely different.  I don’t think so.  It did, early in the 20^th century, but early in the 20^th century people ASSUMED that the future was statist.  It was part of the view of history then.  It’s possible that the idea of creating a world and setting up how the future will go is, inherently, something that attracts people who think society should be planned.  Again I don’t think so.  I think the reason this happened was the gatekeepers and their twin drive for recognition and “improving message.”

If you refused to play that game, you were considered at best a light weight and at worst an enemy.  And then your only chance to be published was Baen.

I said Baen was doing better with the public – if not with the critics – than most science fiction for a reason. The reason is that Baen does sci fi as the movies (and games) do sci fi.  It is the pulps cleaned up and with real science (and history.)  While the books can have a message (us SF folk are horribly opinionated.  Part of it is that we read so much history) the message is not why the book is written.  The book needs, most of all, to be about people who have exciting adventures in a future that can be wonderful or horrible (or in the case of my futures, yes) but which must be interesting.

And that is what makes Baen different.  The fact that Baen also publishes every political color on the spectrum makes them a pariah with the con organizers, the award givers, and the layer upon layer of status seekers, but if one of my kids’ friends read sf at all, he was likely to read Baen – and I once got a huge discount on an appliance purchase because I wrote for Baen.  (Turned out the entire staff of the store read Baen.  You’re not going to find that for any other publisher.)

Now, is Baen a mega blockbuster selling house?  No.  But when you consider that until the last two years or so it was hard to find Baen in most stores (the store managers, too, and their bosses, were status seekers and knew Baen was “fascist” because it publishes writers of every political stripe, from communist to libertarian.)

As for Baen’s affinity for mil sf – part of this is because when you write the big stories, the important stories, in a future history, you’re going to end up with battles and wars and revolutions.  Even I, who am not a mil-sf writer (not that I have anything against it, but I lack the background) have ended up writing a story about a revolution.  Well, several novels.  That’s why it’s called “the Earth Revolution.”  I think it will be four books.  Or maybe five.  Could be six.  The other part of it is that men as readers have been run off sf/f by men-as-wimps and men-as-villains.  You literally couldn’t sell a novel with an heroic male except to Baen when I broke in.  You might still nto be able to.

Part of the problem with the rest of SF is that it’s tied itself to such a fringe leftist philosophy that with few exceptions, they can’t even write mil sf or if they do it is to prove that “war never solved anything” which means the average person who has graduated Kindergarten is going to throw the book against the wall with gusto (and occasionally with disgust, too.)

Now… is Baen serving the entire market available for this?  I don’t think so.  Since the advent of indie I’ve seen the hunger out there for the old style, fun SF.  Did you know that right now if you want to make a mega hit right off the gate in indie publishing, you’re better off writing mil sf or even space opera than Romance?  And Romance, as a genre published by traditional publishing outsells science fiction more than ten to one.

But the hunger is there, and it’s unsatisfied.  And it turns out the market for fun science fiction (and fantasy) was not dead, just sleeping.  Men (and women, but men were the ones who walked away in droves) who thought they’d gotten over science fiction are coming back in droves and making some authors very happy.

It’s a great time to write science fiction and fantasy.  We not only have a shelf of our own, but it’s an exploded shelf fitting for an expanded universe.

All those people who like sci fi movies and themes?  They’re only waiting to enjoy books that are as much fun.

The critics and the status seekers won’t like us, but that don’t make no never mind.  We’ll overwhelm them with a wave of human-positive, fun science fiction and fantasy.  A Human Wave.

There is a very powerful paragraph in one of Heinlein’s juveniles, a note repeated again when he’s talking about American exceptionalism, and again when he talks of the need to go to space.  It is apparently a paraphrase of a well known quote, which I found attributed to Albert Schmidt, and also as anonymous, and also as being written in some museum, but as that page is no longer available, I can’t say where.  Also, apparently Maya Angelou (!) mentioned this quote.  Of all of the people who made this statement, it fits the spirit of Heinlein’s juveniles the best. “The cowards never started. The weak died on the way. Only the strong arrived. They were the pioneers.”

This in Heinlein’s juveniles is often related with going to space, but it occurs to me that it’s any new technology and any major change in society driven by technology (not the vapid ideas of politicians.)

Changes – major changes of any sort – are always scary to an established society.  History has shown time and again that people will endure near-unendurable conditions rather than revolt, but they WILL revolt against change.  Because we know we are surviving – sort of – right now, but will we after the changes.  And most of us want to be able to visualize what things will look like after the changes.

Which is why when tech starts changing too much too fast and hitting the social structures, people go nuts.  The French revolution was the fruit and manifestation of the industrial revolution.  So was our own revolution, think on.

And if you look at it right the fourteenth century and its unending barrel full of misery was not because things were getting worse, but because there had been some developments that had made life better.  Hence, war plague and famine, of course.

Now, think about it, the fourteenth century was the result of changes accumulating through the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth, but that was still too fast for us.

The twentieth century… there’s a reason that it was even more blood soaked than the fourteenth.

And now, it’s much faster and much worse.

The revolution we’ve facing, in a hundred different ways of doing things, from manufacturing to data processing (including that peculiar form that involves fiction writing) to a million other things, is so radical that it might be that long waited trans-humanistic thing, even if it doesn’t mean we’ll all live forever or look like the borg.

Just computers will affect the way we mate – both by bringing together unlikely mates (I managed it the old fashioned way.  By stealing time at the phone booth!) and by moving the nexus of work to the house (no, not yet, but like the ebook revolution it’s coming and it will be sudden when it comes) and thus favoring mates in the same profession, who can share work.  It will affect the way we live – I am one of those people who like people, and for me it probably means going very urban so I can, you know, live where I can go out to a coffee shop, or something.  But for other people it means living in the middle of nowhere, working in the big city and shopping wherever you want.

My guess is that no one alive today will see the end of this transformation.  It’s that huge and shattering and it feeds other transformations.

As for people who say “but it’s always changing.”  Sure it is, but it’s punctuated equilibrium.  For a while things seem to be stationary and then it accumulates and it comes crashing on society as a disruptive and sudden force.

Writing is going through it.  I’ve given my opinion a lot of other professional fields are headed for it.  I’ve also said, until you’re probably all tired of it, that this in conjunction with the current political insanity might meant the end of jobs as we know it.  In the future we’re all contractors, with both the risks and the benefits of it.

It’s not a lifestyle that suits everyone, but neither was 9 to 5 and yet mid 20^th century it consumed almost everyone who needed to work, and influenced everyone else’s life.

So, in that spirit, and based on what I’ve seen in my own field, here is my take on what will happen and what you need to know.

1 – If your job entails prestige, be willing to make a choice between that and making money.  Right now a lot of writers are not just refusing to go indie, but screaming at everyone who does, and complaining it undermines the prestige.  A result of the “indie revolution” coming everywhere will almost certainly be an end to credentialism.  People will respect what you can do, not where you went to school.  Sometimes they’re related.  More often they’re not. Right now institutions, particularly large ones, rely on credentials to avoid complaints of discrimination.  But when hiring contractors for the job, the job will be more important. Fortunately for me, I was born without any social graces!  But you might have a bigger adaptation.

2- You must work.  This is the biggest barrier, and why managers still dislike sending people home to work.  They’re under the impression people just won’t.  This is silly, since if they don’t, they can be fired.  OTOH because we’ve equated work with time throughout the 20^th century, they might be afraid you’re working very fast and goofing off the rest of the time.  Both the stupid laws penalizing employers over a certain number of employees and a certain number of hours, and tech will defeat that.  My kids are used to doing their homework and tests (even) by computer, and to doing group work via computer too.  When their generation rises to managers, they won’t have our prejudices.  And perhaps they’ll be better at working remotely.  My guess, though, is “no.”  Unless you set up a completely separate place in your house, keeping up work surrounded by home and family is difficult.  Almost everyone I know who works from home has issues with it.  It’s a skill, though.  Learn to cultivate it.

3- You must have time off.  Yes, yes, I know.  Sarah, take your own medicine.  But I’m in the time when to launch my career I MUST work hard – very hard – at many things for a few years.  Still, I’m considering taking Sundays off.  I must read SOMETIME.  The point is, if you’re of a certain type (my husband and I seem to be) working from home means working ALL the time.  You forget to quit.  You must control that because

4- Regardless of whether you like people or not, you need to have some people contact, now and then.  In person, not just over the computer.  Even if it’s just your family.  Also, make sure the family knows you don’t hate them, you’re just busy.  Make time for time with them, or you won’t have them.

5- This is important because, you should never, ever, ever count on indie/contractor being easy, or even easier than whatever you’ve been doing.  Yes, going contractor or indie gives you freedom to work the way you want to.  That means you places your bets, you takes your earnings – and sometimes you’ll goof.  (Everyone does.)  It’s important not to build up a beautiful image of the fleshpots of Egypt in your mind.  What I mean is, don’t, in retrospect make “jobs” and the way things are done now into a wonderful thing.  Remember it too had difficulties.  Also remember if you’re one of the ones breaking out in your field, or whatever, that you’re a pioneer.  You might not be on one of Saturn’s moons, but some things as unpredictable as ice storms will destroy your hard-earned stability.  Look at what happened with Rusch and Ella.  Sometimes you’ll be knocked to zero and have to start again.  This doesn’t mean you’ve done anything wrong.  Just that the high-change state is unstable and the landscape changes ALL the time.

6 – Related to five.  Stay alert.  Keep up with what’s going on.  Ever since I came into writing, people have given me advice that’s out of date.  This is how I ended up writing short stories for years, because I thought that’s how one broke into novels.  This was no longer true when I tried it.  However, people could still give you advice a year or two old and it would work.  Now?  Ah!  I keep up with Rusch and the Passive Guy and a dozen other blogs, plus take recommendations from friends more plugged in than I am, and things still blindside me.  As in an alien planet, keep moving, keep ahead of the shifting landscape.  And evaluate each mutie on his own.  Some are friendly.  Some will eat you as fast as look at you.

7- There are no guarantees.  The future is being built under our eyes.  NO ONE CAN PROMISE what you try will work out.  So keep your fingers in as many pies as you can without killing yourself.  What moves might NOT be what you expect.  (For instance in publishing I’m doing large press, small press and indie.  Because I feel safer that way.)

8 – Help others on the way.  This is not necessary so much as it will help you in the long run.  Except for some right bastards (actually mostly left, but that’s neither here nor there) most people return good with good.  You don’t need to make the trade explicit.  You help a lot of people, some will be there for you when you’re down.  And all contractors have ups and downs.  Cast your bread upon the waters and spread your generosity widely.  And remember to pay it forward.  (This is already making relationships between writers much better than the old hierarchical model where publishers picked winners and losers.)

9- Have a hobby that can become your main profession if you need to.  Yep, if this writing gig goes south, I’m a recreational clothes ironer (totally a word.  Deal.) and a middling filet crochetter – for the win.  Oh, who am I kidding?  I’ll rant at people for a living.  Actually have two hobbies that can become your main profession.  And accumulate as many abilities as you can.  Yeah, okay, I learned seven languages because I thought it would improve my chances of employment.  Then I moved here.  Not the smartest move.  BUT some of them work.  I’d carefully cultivated a knowledge of science fiction for instance (otherwise called how I wasted my youth) and it came in handy.

10 – Don’t brow beat others.  Yes, you’ll be very afraid at times, but projecting your fear onto others and saying if you can’t do it no one can is contrary to the bread upon the waters thing.  It’s also contra productive.  The cowards never started – but lower than a coward is the one who tries to make other cowards.

On a related note, my post at Mad Genius Club today is on Fear.

Now go forth and instead of being scared of this innovative times of ours, be excited about them.  You’re a pioneer.  That means you get to shape the future landscape for your grandkids.

Like most pioneers, you’re being forced onto it by circumstances and by the status quote becoming untenable.  But it doesn’t mean you can’t take the opportunity to build something better.

Now go and do it.

UPDATE:  My PJM Column is up.

We emerged from Memorial day weekend with the certainty that it wasn’t long enough and the funny thing is I don’t think I had a single drink all weekend, and we didn’t even do anything fun – mostly because we used it to change stuff from the loaner freezer back to our regular freezer which seems to be – fingers crossed – working.  We also had to buy younger kid a new mattress.

Well, had to is a form of speech, but he was sleeping on a bottom-grade seventeen year old mattress, in a bed that was first ours, then his brother’s and finally his.  The mattress has been horribly broken for at least ten years, and he was too big for the bed and had to sleep corner to corner.  We’d meant to buy him a new one two years ago, but we hit a rough patch financially and it was impossible.  Also we had the vague idea he’d move out “any year now” and so we’d get him stuff when he left.  But with him fixed in the house at least till he finishes his BA (two and a half years) and the bed grossly inadequate…  well… The royalty check for DST – supposing the agency ever passes it along (rolls eyes) – should take care of it.  And they had a really good sale on a floor model.

Of course this means getting rid of the bed which joins a long collection of stuff we need to put up for sale soon.  That’s okay.  One of the hardest things to learn in life – from my POV – is that I can’t do things instantly.  Say I decide to write a novel – I can’t try to finish it all in a day.  The work doesn’t fit the time.

This seems subtly wrong.

Stuff like “I painted the room, but it will have to wait till tomorrow to finish moving stuff in” seems even more wrong.  Go figure that.

And just when I got used to the idea a task can take multiple days to complete, I find myself getting older and running out of spoons sooner, so that everything seems to take a completely unreasonable amount of time.  That’s life.

In the middle of the night — when my brain tends to come up with really strange jewels of reasoning like “the entire motor of human history is the flip flop shoe,” which seem perfectly logical in the middle of the night but when I wake up in the morning make me wonder what exactly goes on in my dreaming brain – I came up with this strange mirror moment.

You know how at least in my writing – I don’t know if anyone else uses this.  As far as I know I came up with the expression as it applies to writing – my characters face a mirror moment somewhere just before or after the black moment.  This is when they see themselves as they are, with no illusion, and it usually allows them the impetus to race to the finish with new energy/goals.

Well, for the last several years I’ve been having trouble getting things done in what even I think is a timely manner (meaning not a novel in a day) as well as organizing my day. I know part of this – which got worse after the possibility of indie – hinges on the sheer amount of confusion and work raining down on me.  The solution would seem to be to organize myself so I write in the morning and publish in the afternoon or vice versa.  BUT unfortunately these things are never that simple.  What happens when one of the cats is sick all morning?  Do I move the writing to the afternoon?  Do I go ahead and skip it?  What if something is due in writing?  Do I just skip publishing?

What ends up happening is that, in many ways I try and it all gets overrun and I give up.

But the mirror moment was more fundamental.  It was something like “I keep looking for little breaks and little consolations, and in the end destroy my concentration and my ability to finish things.”

Look, I suppose in many ways I had a fairly dreary childhood.  That’s not how I remember it.  And it sort of depends on how you squint at it.  I had free roaming rights of most of the neighborhood, I had books that I kept finding tucked away in weird places by my various ancestors.  I had grandparents always ready to entertain me and any variety of pets.

What I didn’t have, and this is in common with most people until this past century, was “variety.”  I was fourteen the first time my family went on vacation together.  Any book I had got re-read to shreds, because you never knew when I’d find a batch of new ones (buying them was really not an option till I was twelve and had a bus pass.  Then that’s where my birthday money went.  Asking relatives for books was worse than useless.  Even my dad seemed to think I should be reading fairytales, when I was in my Dumas phase.)  Even in terms of food, I woke up and it was a weekday, it was probably fish and rice.  (Sunday was chicken and rice.)  I could count on one hand the number of times we ate out till I got married. Chocolate had to be imported because Portuguese-made was indistinguishable from a bar of soap, so we usually got a couple of bars brought by immigrant relatives who came on vacation and stretched it.

No, I’m not complaining.  I wasn’t hungry (not till much later, and that limited) and I had clothes, and I had a warm place to sleep in.

BUT I got certain things stuck in my head as what we’ll call for lack of a better term “feast days” – I don’t mean liturgical feast, but special days, marked by something extraordinary: my mom baked a cake. We went on a picnic (this happened twice a summer or so.) We visited a castle or a museum.

There were things that got stuck there as “consolations” too – usually having to do with food.  For instance, if I was in finals and going nuts with anxiety (the kids come by it naturally) my mom would quietly come and put one of her hoarded chocolate squares next to me.  Or she would buy me a few (sugar-lemon) cookies when she went to the bakery in the morning.  Sometime after I finished the school year, grades being satisfactory –no more than two Bs though I was allowed a C in crafts and drawing (curiously though I’ve seen found I have a natural talent for it, that permission meant I never had more than a C.  The permission was granted because my brother can’t draw understandable stick figures – and my parents figured if he was allowed Cs I should be too.  Anyway, not sure what that means about motivation and talent.  I didn’t find out I had talent for it until I no longer had a class.) – mom would take me shoe shopping.  This usually – at least as I got older – extended to purse shopping, school bag for the next year shopping, hair ornament shopping, and just generally a day’s worth of girly things (it was in one of these we came across the hole in the wall dusty family shop where, high up on the wall, in shelves, they had between the wars (or possibly pre WWI) vintage millinery which the elderly lady sold at the price marked.  This is how I went through college in silk lace stockings.)  The trip ended up at a coffee shop which served something like fifteen scoops of ice cream in a cup that looked like a Viking helmet.  It was called The Viking, and it was doused in chocolate sauce, whipped cream and stuck with wafers.  Mom used to say she got ill just looking at it, but I loved it.  She would sip her tea and watch me eat it.  (Those of you who’ve raised kids know just how much fun that is.)

Dad was more likely – from the time I was twelve or so – to pour me out a little Port wine, or something of the sort, though weirdly – though I have a drink now and then (like twice a month) that didn’t get stuck in my head as a red letter day.  Probably because it was rarer than mom’s indulgences.

If you’re thinking I had an awful lot of fun – that’s true.  But what you’re not getting is how rare it was.  Same thing with say snacks between meals, or with taking the day off to do something fun.  I had to live on the last of those experiences for weeks, sometimes months.

According to my mirror moment, the problem is that once I was able to indulge myself, I started giving myself all sorts of consolation moments, until my entire life is nothing but a string of consolation moments, which leads to both difficulty keeping commitments, and to weight issues and other stuff.

Now, this is not strictly true.  These middle of the night insights are always odd and exaggerated.  I mean, lest you imagine I sit around munching bonbons and reading Museum today all day, I don’t.

On the other hand, it occurred to me I got into some bad habits.  You do things you have to do to survive tough times.  The toughest here, probably, were when I was trying to raise very small kids AND break into publishing.  I remember getting up in the morning at five am to get two hours of writing before I had to get the kids up.  From then on my life ran on rails – meaning there was a scheduled station every few minutes.  Drop kids off at school.  Come home and clean (or go shopping, depending on week day.)  Get smaller kid back at noon.  Feed him lunch.  Put him down for nap.  Do laundry. Get older kid from school.  Start preparations for dinner.  Have dinner.  Clean kitchen.  Get kids ready for bed.  Rinse, repeat.

When you have a day like that after day after day after day, the temptation to have just another square of chocolate or to bake a cake because you – and the kids – deserve it, is immense.  It is no coincidence my fall from grace after losing a lot of weight on low carbs came on 9/11 when, unable to take it anymore, I started frying batch after batch of doughnuts.

The problem with that sort of thing comes when the pressure comes off a little, though.  Suddenly you can take a day or two to just read.  You can go for walks because you can.  Take a day off and go bother the animals at the zoo.

And after a while your focus has shifted and work is an interruption in your consolations.

Is it that bad?  No.  Do I indulge myself in way too many “times off” (usually of an hour or so)?  A bit.  Maybe a couple of times a week.

But the focus is a problem.  Even though I don’t take weekends off, metaphorically speaking I’ve been living for the weekend, orienting my life to those escapes, rather than to what I must and want to do.

I need to refocus.  I need to wake in the morning, not with “I hope I can go for a walk today” but with “I must get this and this and this done.”  And maybe then I can hard schedule a day off a week.

It’s worth a try.  Or it’s possible that the middle-of-the-night insight made as much sense as flip flops as drivers of civilization.  We shall see.  Changing the focus to what means something instead of the little escapes seems a worthwhile endeavor, anyway.

I know why I shifted the focus away from it.  When I was going traditional publishing only, and everything was out of my control, to focus on the work would just make the burnout worse, so I focused on the hope of reward, of “break” which started coming all too often.  But that has changed.  And the mind must be retooled.  (Which for both individuals and societies is the hardest thing to do.)

I’ll put up some very slight subscriber content in an hour or so, (I’ll start it after I get another cup of caffeine, but I’m accounting for possible interruptions) and you should definitely read Mad Genius Club (Amanda Green’s post) today.

I’ll be in the back, building new hardware for my head.

 

Forgive me for quoting myself (from A Few Good Men):  Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.  Did you think it would be easy?  Did you think it was just a game?

And now I’ll quote a better writer: No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and, in the long run, no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: “Come back with your shield, or on it.” Later on this custom declined. So did Rome.– Robert A. Heinlein

Neither of the boys is on track for military service, though both considered it (hard) at one point.  Their plans might yet change.  I hope their plans aren’t forcibly changed.

However, on how motherhood of adult sons changes your perspective.  This story (via Ace of Spades) would at one time have been sad, but now I found myself sobbing halfway through the song.

The story behind I Drive Your Truck.

Yes, the idea of one or the other of the boys — or both — dying in a war almost destroys me.  But I’m aware it might come to that.  And if either of them chose (or chooses) the Service I’d be behind them all the way.  I told them from the beginning that regardless of where they want to go, their service and their sacrifice might be needed to keep America safe.  I couldn’t but be proud if they chose to do it.  Proud and scared.  They haven’t chosen to do it.  Not yet.  But if circumstances require it, I know they will.  They’re my sons, yes, but they’re also American boys.  Americans do what has to be done.  And I wouldn’t have them any other way.

I was going to take the day off today.  I’m trying to finish a short story, which – for whatever reason, but probably mostly because it’s been so long since I wrote short stories – is taking me forever.  So I thought “I’ll put up a holding pattern and go write my story.”

Only…

I was reading the comments and Foxfier had the dime drop on her, for part of the reason that the Jewish people were hated and suspected of everything and “otherized” throughout most of history.  I’ve “known” this for some time, but had never articulated it and its implications fully.

We won’t go into the theological reasons, or why it suited the Roman Empire once it became Christian to put the blame for the execution of Jesus on the Jews.  Those are obvious, as is why it stuck throughout the middle ages. Besides, if you guys get into another religious argument, I’ll stop this blog, come back there and give you whatfor.

What we’ll go into instead is what Foxfier said: They lived by different rules.  A lot of their rules allowed them to escape the general maladies of their fellow citizens in what for lack of a better term we’ll call “dark ages Europe” – between the decadence of the Roman Empire of the West and soap coming into common use.

Their food rules kept them from eating (too) contaminated meat; the cleanliness rules kept them and their children as clean as it was possible to be in the middle of filth; even their strange habit of teaching their women to read and their general dislike of physical violence from husband to wife, made them live better.  In a world where healing knowledge was generally kept by the woman in the family, a woman who could read had not only her own notes, but those of her mother and grandmother for things she might not have faced before.

No population likes strangers in their midst.  That’s a human thing.  We’re tribal.  But the pervasive anti-Semitism throughout history, starting with the Romans, had another origin.  “The Man is Hiding The Stash.”

When people in your midst live by blatantly different rules, which you know – because you’re tribal, and of course, your tribe must be RIGHT – are self evidently stupid, and yet SOMEHOW those rules allow them to in general live better than you, the fault must not be with your tribes rules.  The other tribe amidst yours MUST be cheating.  The man is hiding the stash.

It is probably the reason for the strong anti-Mormon prejudice, too.  I’m not Mormon.  I do have a lot of friends who are.  Leaving aside the more uh…fringe sects of the religion (every religion has fringe sects and some are very weird and leaving aside theology altogether, because one man’s religion is another man’s belly laugh) Mormons live among us, as modern people, except they have these WEIRD rules.  Like, they don’t drink alcohol, or coffee.  Like, they have a home evening a week where the family is supposed to commune and share and you know, spend time together.  Their kids tend to dress better (Robert is routinely mistaken for Mormon) or at least more traditionally.  They tend to be more polite.  Mormons have a strong community that comes through for their members in time of need.  And in general – though of course there are exceptions — they have this way of doing well in life.  Which, of course, must be due to double dealing and stealing because it couldn’t be the way they’re taught to live their life, which is conducive to doing well.

Leaving aside religions, this applies to practically everything else.  Even the terms we use “privileged childhood” or “underprivileged background” “gifted child” – all of it assumes that what makes for success or failure is something external to us and vaguely unfair.

We’ll start with gifted children.  I was identified was such early on.  I’m actually weird, and I blame it on at least three instances of brain damage, because my verbal reasoning is very high, my math is a little higher than average (except for digit switching) but my visual spatial reasoning is next to non-existence.  The other day I shocked the boy who does 3-D puzzles for fun and who’d nagged me into buying him a new form of the rubik’s cube that the only way I could even solve one of the basic of those was by removing the stickers and placing them in a solid block per side. I spent hours in my youth trying to solve it, because well… I was supposed to be “smart” and all my friends could do this in seconds.  Never happened.

Anyway, so I got to see this from both sides.  Yes, give me an assignment where I could bs my way, and I could totally do it with no effort.  Give me a math assignment and it was easy, except that I had to keep track of digits so six didn’t become nine, and so that I didn’t scramble digits in a multiple-digit number.  This required effort.  If I did what came naturally I failed every math test.  (This also happened if I was stressed or mildly ill.)  Give me something with a visual base, like… the periodic table, and it took me days to get to where people got in minutes.

Yet, I kept consistently at the top of the class, because it never occurred to me there was an out.  I never thought I could say “I don’t have the gift to do this, so I can’t do it.”  I never thought of it, because my mother would scream for DAYS if I brought home anything below a B.  And heck, depending on class distribution of grades, sometimes if I brought home a B.

I suppose from the outside it looked like being “gifted.”  I just wafted on the breezes of my high intelligence or something.

At one point, later on, I was tutoring kids who were having issues with their school work.  A lot of them were what I would call “gifted” – i.e. high IQ – and nine times out of ten, curing their school issues consisted of telling them that they still had to study.  It was just the effort required was far less than other people had to put out.  But it wouldn’t look that way from the inside.  (Yes, there were other factors.  Teachers tend to prefer normal-high-iq kids, and kids who are genuinely brilliant discomfit them.  Also, I know having raised the boy-genius, kids who are brilliant still lack enough knowledge of the world to make informed decisions/opinions, so what they come up with can often seem morally aberrant or just appalling, and it takes time to trace it back and figure out where they went wrong.  Few teachers have that kind of time, even if they knew HOW to trace it back. So to the kids it looks like they’re being discriminated against for no reason.)

And one of the times I’ve been most furious in recent times was when trying to give words of comfort to a starting writer, about how at least he didn’t need to go through the insane mill of the publishing houses and the push system, how he should stop the nonsense with trying to get published by tiny and increasingly shadier presses, and instead just put stuff up there and learn from his failures as well as his successes.  I was told that I was “lucky” enough to get traditionally published and therefore I didn’t understand his “need” to see his books on a shelf in a store.  Lucky.  Like the failure of my first three books, which was held against me personally, even though the first book came out one month after nine eleven.  Like, the seventeen proposals (with seventeen beginnings) I had to write to get back on the saddle.  Like the year I had to write six books, and incidentally, none of them made it onto the shelves of regular bookstores.

Lucky.  Not insane work.  Lucky.

All of this is relevant, not from the POV of “humans suck, they discriminate against those who are different”  (If you thought you were being born into a race of angels, I have news for you – you are human.  Your mind might conceive of things angelic, but you were built on the common clay of an ape, which brings us things such as tribalism, because at one time they helped your ancestors survive, so you could be here, now.) but because the success and failure of – not just an individual, but a species – depends on such things: on “hardware in the head” – culture, that is.

The bourgeois culture that replaced the aristocratic mind set gave us a belief in striving, keeping your nose clean, working hard, saving, being innovative in how you did the work.  Not only was cleanliness next to godliness, but so was thrift and good manners, and tidy apparel, and industriousness.

At one time, as hard as it is to believe now, those bourgeois virtues meant that you were a good person; and those who succeeded were universally regarded to have been living right.

Was this true?  No more than any other human myth.  A lot of the people who succeeded were given a leg up, or cut some shady deal or used the favor of the government to insure against competition.

That’s human.  BUT in general, if you applied those virtues you did better than if you didn’t.  It might mean you still didn’t do spectacularly well.  In a society in which the solving of a rubik’s cube was essential to holding down a job, I’d still be unemployed forever.  But being cleanly and working hard, and striving, might allow me to eventually have a cottage industry of refurbishing  used rubik’s cubes.  I’d never occupy the executive suite, but I’d succeed, to the limit of my abilities.

Why is this relevant?  Because since WWI and markedly since the sixties, when creative control and media control were enough to propagate this unified myth, we’ve been tearing this idea to shreds.

If in movie or sitcom or book I hear of an executive who lives a clean life, is married to his first wife, has a passel of clean, cheerful kids, goes to church and is nice to animals – I know I’m going to find out he’s secretly a Satanist Mass Murderer.  In the same way, the unclean beggar in the corner or the thuggish young man are always some sort of secular saints who have suffered.

I am sure there are some homeless people who are there through no fault of their own (but most of the time they are there because of mental illness or addictions.  The first is arguably not their fault.  The second not so much.)  And I’m sure some young thugs just need love and understanding.

I’m also sure the number of those people per million could be counted on the fingers of one hand. In the same way, some clean-living executives might really be Satanist mass murderers.  In about the same proportions as saintly vagrants, I’d say.

Now, some executives – maybe a lot of them – might be crooked.  But part of that is the culture nowadays which assumes that to get ahead you have to stab others in the back.  (I’ve actually found the best way to get ahead is to help backward and pay it forward, but maybe that’s just me.) This means a lot of companies, particularly big corporations which, by virtue of size, are more divorced from economic laws than small businesses, end up fostering this kind of culture.  (Until the small startup eats their lunch.)

However, if you have a small child, and you need to entrust her to someone for two hours, who would you pick?  The executive in a suit coming out of an office, or the homeless guy who reeks from a distance, talking to phantom people at the corner?

If you picked the second, you’ve lost all contact to reality.  Yet the movies, most books and ninety percent of the TV programming would make you believe that was the way to go.

The built-up image of society in our heads is of a world where if you’re not crooked you’ll never get ahead, therefore the crookedness is ASSUMED if you succeed.  At the other end if you’re a complete failure, you MUST be saintly.

The problem is that we, as humans, are too likely to justify ourselves that way.  It’s all “they were lucky.”  Never “I didn’t work hard enough.” (And if you’re wondering if I should take my own medicine?  I do.  I did.  Actually that was the mechanism that kept me from suspecting the publishing world was rigged for the longest time.  But finally the fact that the population is NOT uniformly left leaning but that 99% of the books that go mega bestseller have to be at least marginally left leaning sort of broke through that.  You can be paranoid, and yet they still might be out to get you.  The fact that the control is breaking and sort of validating my perceptions helps.  For instance, one of the best ways to break out as indie is military sf.  It’s even better than romance.  BUT before it wouldn’t even make it on the shelves, except from Baen.  No, I still haven’t written my mega bestseller.  Part of this is a fear of flying – more on that later – and part of it is breaking through the structures that supported my mid list existence [my own daily life arrangements, I mean.] More on that later also, probably.)

To have an ingrained system, propagated uniformly by TV and movies and books and newspapers, and all means of mass communication that there’s something wrong with spectacular successes and that failure by itself anoints you as “good” is precisely the wrong message to send.  To either people coming anew to this country or those whose parents aren’t the best model (the children of the fractured families of the twentieth century) we’re saying “fail.  Glory in failure.  It means you’re good.”  We’re also incidentally promulgating the lower class lifestyle of promiscuity, indiscriminate spending, violence and dependency as the way to be.  This is what makes you “authentic”.

Is it any wonder they look at the alien tribe – we used to call them civilized men – who is clean, law abiding, keeps stable relationships, raises clean-cut kids, as somehow cheating, when that tribe succeeds?

The fact is that the rules for doing well in life haven’t changed that much throughout time.  Sometimes societies just forget them and promulgate instead the rules of the crab bucket and the idea that failure means you’re good. It always ends in tears.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.   This is known as “bad luck.”

– Robert A. Heinlein.

Alexander Dumas, of whom I am moderately fond, said of his historical fiction that there was no use at all raping history if you weren’t willing to conceive a child by her.

And though it might turn out that Alexander Dumas was more of a book doctor than a writer – there have been rumors around this for years, and I’ve discounted them because, well, they were mostly based on “he wrote too fast” and that makes me chuckle.  OTOH The Black Count, a largely sympathetic account claims that at least The Three Musketeers were originally written by someone else, who sued Dumas for part of the proceeds.  On the third hand, this is the “original account” people talk about which they say was somewhat short of the charm and delicacy of a barracks story, so the book is still Dumas’ – I found out while writing my first trilogy that this attitude was the only way to stay sane.

There were so many, equally credible and well regarded contradictory reports, that I had to choose one.  And sometimes to make room for my story I had to go “Well, that didn’t happen.”  That was just dealing with Shakespeare – whatever the partisans of X-was-Shakespeare say, Shakespeare is actually one of the best documented, non-royal people of the last four centuries the problem being NO ONE even from the early 20the century is THAT well documented.  You Run into the ten-witnesses-ten-accounts problem you find when you try to get a description of an accident. – and even with the out that I wasn’t writing a straight history.  Couldn’t be.  It had elves in it.

When researching Jane Seymour (Henry VIII’s queen, not the actress) it got worse.  She was a royal person and you’d think things such “where she was married” would be a matter of public record.  Turns out not so much.  I ended up going with the version of the present-day-descendant of the Seymours, figuring that he brought with him unspoken family legends to add to the brew but also because he adduced reasons why the more traditional version makes no sense.  (If she’d got married at her parents’ place, there would be a local record of a royal visit.  Henry VIII middle aged was not the sort of man to make incognito drop ins.  And a royal feast was something that would have near bankrupted the region.  Besides, there’s no record of Henry VIII taking the time to travel there.  So the legend that she got married in her parents’ barn probably harks to some engagement celebration given while she was ruralizing there so that it wouldn’t be so obvious she was waiting for Boleyn’s head to drop..  And then my copyeditor found a website and tried to “correct” me and I had to take a mile-wide patch out of her hide, but that’s something else.

Anyway, all these things become vitally important when you’re writing, and you end up having to say “this far but no farther” and “from here on I’ll remember this is just a story.”

But there are other pressures.  I made a rude comment about Dan Brown’s latest oeuvre, and one of my readers did a note and tagged me on Facebook, from which I assume the comment that you can’t write authentic history, you have to write what people THINK happened, or else they won’t accept it, and to document the contrary would be very boring, so you just don’t write the truth, you write what people expect, and to make disparaging remarks is a stupid thing to do.

Maybe so.  It is debatable.

I mean, there is a point up to which you have to write what the people expect or at least what they’ll accept (which is not the same.)   For instance, in writing Shakespeare I didn’t mention the scarcity of bathing and clothes washing.  The people who know it know it, but the vast majority of people don’t want to be told that Elizabethans killed body-lice more or less constantly because they were all infested.

In the same way, I didn’t mention some of the more unsavory aspects of daily life.  And I made Shakespeare almost a man of our time, or at least willing to become a man of our time – because that’s what the public wants to believe.

With the Musketeers —  where I have a little more leeway because I’m dealing with a sort of Dumas fanfic, and Dumas’ work is not exactly historical to him (i.e. it’s set pre-revolution, ostensibly but Dumas didn’t let anachronisms worry him too much, so there’s a dash of Dumas’ own time in there – I found I had to make some radical changes to “sell” them to modern taste.

The very first one is that I had to give him some modern sensibilities.  No matter how they felt in the Dumas books about Huguenots or the bourgeoisie, in my books they couldn’t hate people because of their religion or social status; no matter how funny that scene is in The Three Musketeers, I couldn’t have the musketeers beat their servants to keep them in line; no matter how funny Porthos’ stupidity is in the original, nowadays people don’t want to READ about dunces.  (They want to watch dunces.  That figure has moved to sitcoms.)  In mysteries particularly, I couldn’t have one of the characters be a bumbling fool.  So I made him inarticulate, and a man whose brain works too fast for his mouth.  Also, Athos couldn’t be silent.  Not if I was in his head.  I still tried to have him talk more directly (and less) than the rest but not to the point of people suspecting he was mute, as happened in Dumas.  Also I didn’t let them run horses to death, because that was ick even to me.

This was all in the service of the popular conception of the Musketeers as being chivalrous and noble which is what the public expects and I couldn’t break.

But there was more.  For instance, I had to give the musketeers a uniform, when they were actually much more likely to dress in bits and pieces of stuff.  I called the Cardinal’s guards “guards” even though their name was “the red musketeers” or “the Cardinal’s musketeers.”  And of course, I made the Cardinal Machiavellic and super-humanly smart.

These are near-irrelevant details, so firmly fixed in people’s heads there is no point trying to dislodge them.

Even so, I fell afoul of pre-conceptions.  Part of the reason I ended up selling the book to Berkley was the bizarre rejections I got from the other houses, all of them based on the idea that in the main book D’Artagnan was a minor character and not the narrator.  One of them actually said “When you announce something with the Musketeers, your first chapter shouldn’t be narrated by D’Artagnan, because that’s like having Sherlock Holmes narrated by his maid.”

This was a pre-conception I didn’t even know was out there, but it’s at least widespread enough that four houses seemed to all have this issue.  (Maybe it’s part of an ivy league education?)

So, you should be starting to see some of the compromises an historical writer makes.  It’s a very bad idea, therefore, to base your view of ancient Rome on “This character was perfectly modern, in this novel” because that’s unlikely to be realistic.

On the other hand, if the writer is at least semi-competent, you could say something like “Romans had frying pans, because one was used in such and such a book.”  (And when an author is forced to put in a detail they know is wrong, or which at least they can’t verify, they should put a note on the back.  That’s the contract between author and reader.  Because otherwise I could write the Flintstones version of the pre-history and well, it’s my license as a writer.  You’re either writing historical or you’re not.)

In fact, what Dan Brown seems to have done in his latest – at least according to this review (yes, it’s a Catholic book site.  It’s also incredibly funny) – is closer to the Flintstones version of history than the careful compromises of a historical writer.  He’s not so much catering to or trying to bridge his readers’ pre-established notions, as he’s making stuff up out of whole cloth because he’s either too lazy to do proper research or he doesn’t care enough.  (In fact, we knew someone who knew him in his salad days, when he wrote his first three unheralded books and the answer to those is “yes.”)

I will upfront confess I haven’t read the DaVinci Code.  Even if it were a masterpiece, it is not my type of book – I read very few thrillers.  The fact they package F. Paul Wilson as a supernatural thriller kept me from reading his books for years, which was a shame.

My husband read it though.  And you need to understand how this works around this house.  When Dan is reading something, he will read me vast stretches of it because he finds them interesting, amusing or wants my opinion.  This means that I heard probably 2/3 of the book – the effect being rather as if I had skimmed it.

I also read an interview with the author and I read the book on which the author based this one: i.e. the book that comprised his ENTIRE research.  This is not a secret.  He named the two characters in his book after the authors of that book.  Also, the authors of that book – Holy Blood, Holy Grail (I keep calling it The Sword and the Chalice.  No idea why.  Deal.) – tried to sue DaVinci for plagiarism, until it was pointed to them they had to pretty much admit their theory is fiction.

I read HB, HG more than twenty one years ago, because a friend of mine managed a New Age bookstore, where the book was a big hit, and he thought I might like it.  (He also knows I’m fond of nutty conspiracy theories, the nuttier the better.)  Afterwards, either to wind me up or because he was genuinely interested, he asked my opinion of it.

The fallacies (the book has little else) took hours to list.  I will go with the two easier to grasp, though: the book posits that DaVinci was part of a secret conspiracy going back fifteen hundred years, give or take a few.  (This is sort of kind of sorta possible, with modifications.) And it posits that the royal family of France is descended from Jesus Christ and Magdalene.

We’ll start with this last.  Let’s suppose Jesus Christ actually had children (there are Christian sects that debate this, as well as the idea he was married to the Magdalene and that was why he could forgive her and be heard.  I’m not going to get lost in THOSE weeds.) Do you know who his descendants would be?  You.  Me.  The entire human race.

As someone has recently proven, except for very few, very isolated populations, you are descended from everyone who was alive a thousand years ago.

Genealogy makes you think otherwise because it concentrates on a few lines.  However, if you think about it, all those women the guys marry (or vice versa, if you’re a militant feminist) have to come from somewhere, and they too had lines of ancestry going back…

This is why all our presidents are descended from Mohammed, who, btw, didn’t even live that far back.  (For geographically close countries, you’re probably related to everyone 500 years back, particularly if you add in the genetic sieve of the black plague manifestations.  I mean, it’s entirely possible someone who lived 1000 years ago has no living descendants today – in Portugal, the black plague caused the loss of several family lines and it wasn’t even as bad as in the rest of Europe – but if they have descendants, they have everyone. Now this doesn’t mean they show in your genome, because genes don’t work that way, but you can rest assured if they’d died celibate, you wouldn’t be here exactly as you are.)

Also when I read that the royal family of France were descended from Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene, I snorted ice-water out of my nose.  I rarely come up against this  nonsense anymore, where I feel completely foreign, but this was one of those moments.  What went through my mind was “the things Americans will believe.”  In this case, the authors of the New Age book swallowed this hook line and sinker because  well… they hadn’t read enough European history to know that EVERY ROYAL HOUSE claimed this.  It was their way of making an end run and claiming to be descended of G-d Himself.  They also probably believe that everyone in the South was descended from Bonnie Prince Charlie.

There are other points, such as the fact that they based their entire theory on a DaVinci painting which was grimy and which they saw in reproduction.  Since then the painting has been cleaned and made a mockery of their theories.

But let’s imagine nefarious parties ALTERED the painting so as to give them the lie – if you read enough New Age conspiracy books, you know parties nef like nobody’s business – let’s examine the whole idea that DaVinci was part of a secret conspiracy that knew the truth about what happened at the time of Christ.

Was DaVinci part of a conspiracy?  Oh, heck yes.  Probably dozens of them.  Conspiracies were to the educated or professional or artistic man what writers email lists are to my ilk.  He probably belonged to several overlapping ones. They were faulty and weird, and almost as crazy as the UFO conspiracies these days, but through them science advanced because some decent knowledge would get transmitted with the dross.

Was he part of an unbroken conspiracy that had transmitted secret knowledge since the time of Christ?  Brother.  Can I interest you in a lovely bridge in Brooklyn?

First, why would someone only five or six hundred years from us know something about events fifteen hundred years back from them that no one else – not all learned men, not all the researchers, not everyone who has access to the scant documents remaining – could find?

Second HOW would such a conspiracy be transmitted and maintained?

Look, the recent weeks have shaken my faith in the idea that three can keep a secret if two are dead, which is what I used to think about secrets and conspiracies.  It is entirely possible I think to keep secrets for a limited time that involve a vast number of people, if you hold their livelihood under your power.  However, it explodes – as we have proof daily.

Now… conspiracies involving all the notable persons in Europe (some of which were less than sane even by the standards of the time – yes, DaVinci included) that lasted thousands of years?  Through wars, revolutions, changes of heart, changes of mind?

At best what you’d get by the fifteenth century was the equivalent of theology put through a game of telephone.  And there would be some proof of the original stuff, beyond the paintings of a half-mad genius from Tuscany and the relentless Vatican assassins (To quote older son “If the Vatican had assassins, I’d consider the priesthood”.)

To transmit it would require unerring choice of successors; unflawed character of those receiving the secret and, oh, yeah, superhuman memory.

In fact we know that the “secrets” we got via that sort of transmission – mostly Greek and Roman “science” — did look like something that went through a game of telephone and until we found the original texts/ surpassed their knowlege, we had no idea what they were talking about.

So much for the New Age book on which Dan Brown based his book – yes, he admits this.  He also believes in it, including the “great mother goddess” past, a bit of insanity our descendants will giggle at. – Dan Brown added his own insanity.  That review mentions the “austere” Spanish Cathedrals.  Never mind that.  There were more obvious things, such as the fact the Portuguese assassin has a name not pronounceable in Portuguese.  (I’m sure Dan Brown took it from someone he knows who is “Portuguese” – possibly from Africa or Asia.  Or perhaps only part-Portuguese.  One of the things he did in his early books was use the name of all his professors and classmates, so it’s probably no different.)

So… do I have the right to sneer at Dan Brown?  Doesn’t his success prove that he was right about people’s expectations?

I don’t know.  His success came through huge push (partly because he pushes the whole utopian matriarchy cr*p.)  It came at a time when it was easy to make someone a great success by making sure he had huge distribution.  Then the “everyone is reading this and I must too” operates.

On the other hand a lot of people (mostly pseudo educated people) are also stone cold stupid.  One of my art teachers, at one time, was extolling the careful research of Egyptian history in the books of… Anne Rice.  Egyptian history!  (Bangs head on desk.)

That is neither here nor there.  The traditional publishing establishment maintains their superiority over indie because they have layers and layers of fact checkers. Who clearly are all on heavy barbiturates, to let those elephants slip by.

I have private opinions on the morality of people who distort history to serve today’s political correctness – such as the entire stupid idea of a feminist utopia in pre-history.  OTOH they probably can’t understand why I don’t do it since it guarantees push and wealth and fame.  I’ve often wondered, myself, if this wish to be able to look at myself in the mirror, in the morning, is in fact a form of brain damage.

On the other hand, I don’t know much, but I know evil when I see it.  And convincing generations who are largely illiterate of history that history is something completely bizarre that could not have happened is evil – it’s evil because it robs people of the tools to deal with the future, and it does so unnecessarily.  Yes, his book would have fallen apart without the conspiracy theory, but nothing prevented him from putting on a post script saying “this is almost certainly not true because of this and this, but it makes a wonderful story and so I—” Certainly, nothing forced his publishers to publish it without that note.

AND – and this is what I was SNEERING about originally – nothing forced various academics to tell us that Dan Brown’s books were exquisitely researched.

Nothing forced them to do any of that except their meretricious craving for power and money, which can only be obtained by hewing to an ideology of lies.

Which means, at the end, I am entitled to sneer at them.  A writer can sneer at whores.  More importantly, someone who rapes history in order to conceive a bastard is entitled to sneer at someone who has snuff sex with history and leaves her bleeding corpse in an alley, entrails ripped out, unable to conceive ever again.

And that’s what I’m doing.

*  This is something I normally do on Friday, though sometimes on Saturday when things get… difficult.  It is a free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  You get it free in pre-draft format, glorious typos and all.  If you want the edited, formatted and cleaned up ebook when it is done, a donation of $6 will get you that once it’s ready which could be a year or so (if you put in the field that it’s for Rogue Magic.)  Once I put it up on Amazon or other outlets, I plan to price it at  $9, but I can give readers’ of the blog the price break that amounts to what I’d receive from Amazon.  I will probably also have paper editions, but I can’t promise to send those out, as I think the costs would soon become prohibitive.  For previous chapters, go here.  It is a sequel to Witchfinder which will soon (we’re looking at early July) be taken down (once edited) and put for sale.*

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case this week, 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

Chapter 9

Wolfe Merritt Superintendent to the Manufactories and Lands of The Earl of Savage:

 

The Earl didn’t check the provenance of the arresting officers – if such they were – but there wasn’t much in that, as anyone even with my limited magic could see, from the power coming off them, that they were powerful enough they could only belong to the Royal House.

Of course, I thought with a pang, although it normally didn’t occur to us, travel into our universe being difficult, since we had more powerful magic than almost any other, it didn’t necessarily mean they were envoys of the king of Avalon in our world.  It was something to remember when someone had just said that the Lady Helen had gone to another world, and also when it was obvious that we were getting a streak of rogue magic from another world.

But the Earl didn’t do anything obvious to check it, and I hadn’t even thought about it till it was too late.

As my mother used to say, what can’t be cured must be endured.  This looked like one of those times to me.  I turned to the chit of a maid, who sat there twisting a very pretty apron that was obviously ornamental, being all white and without a single smudge on it.  “You heard what the Earl said,” I said.

She nodded.  She looked mortal scared, as though she were afraid I’d turn on her and accuse her of some crime.

Look here, I know that I have one of those faces only a mother would think beautiful and even so my mother always told me things like “it’s not how you look, it’s what you do” and “You’re very well to pass” which I took to mean she wasn’t as easily deceived as mothers are supposed to be.  Or perhaps that I was uglier than normal for mothers’ sons.  It had never bothered me, and my homely face did all the turns I needed a face to do.  Only perhaps, briefly, I’d wanted my wife to love me, but I think the problem there was that I was human and she was fey.

However, my face, such as it was, had never cast anyone into despair or made them afraid for their lives, as this little creature seemed to be.  She was maybe fourteen at most, far too old to be my daughter, far too young to be my sister, but she reminded me of my sister Jane who is always afraid of strangers, so I tried to speak kindly to her, “If you would please, Annabel, show me to the Lady Helen’s room, so I may take a look at… at what they left behind and see what magical readings I can glean from it?”

Her eyes widened a little and she said, “You’re a magician, then?” which either meant her magic was very little indeed, or that she was being mendacious.  I didn’t answer.

She dropped a curtsey and said, “If you would, sir.”

I didn’t correct her, but followed her, up the back stairs of course, and through a maze of narrow corridors that I identified as the servant part of the house.  They were well enough, mind, and clean, but there were no rugs on the floor, the walls were white washed, and the glimpse of the one room I caught behind a half opened door was narrow enough to be a monk’s cell and furnished as one would expect of a monk’s cell, with narrow bed, a wooden box at the foot, and a little table for your candle at night.

None of this was strange to me, as my sister Agnes is in service, and I used to visit her when I was much younger.

We went up two flights of stairs and around a few corridors, and then Annabelle opened the door to what was clearly the main portion of the house.  At least we came out onto a landing paved in yellow and black marble, with a gilded table against the facing wall and a mirror in an elaborate frame above it.

She looked one way and another and led me firmly down the hall to a door, which she opened.

The room was not what I expected.  I don’t, in faith, know what I expected.  Perhaps watercolors on the walls, some musical instrument or some note of femininity.  I’ve never, as such, been invited to female bedrooms, certainly had never been inside a room of a well to do female, but my sisters while they lived at home had furnished their space with embroidery and lace, and pretty things, as they could afford them.

This room was somber, almost dark, with a four poster bed in the middle, with a plain white cover over it.  There was a vast leather chair next to a very large table covered in books.  There was a heavy and ponderous armoire, which managed to have piles of books on top.  Various tables, scrupulously dusted, supported yet more books.

For a moment I was taken aback, because I’d never have taken Lady Helen for a blue stocking.  But then some of the titles on those books jumped at me, and I realized these books were in fact those things commonly called novels: made up stories of mad passion and dazzling adventure and sometimes both, which contain very little factual knowledge and which in fact, according to preachers, pave young girls’ path to perdition.

I’m not wholly sure about that, as m’ mother likes a good novel, and we’ve all been known to read them when they’re adventure, taking turns reading aloud in the evening, while the girls are busy with their needlework and the men with other small tasks that might offer – and so far as I can tell none of my sisters has found that path to perdition and my mother might be the least perdition-ed woman ever.

But surely these many novels, crammed in every portion of the room, seemed to betray a great urge to run away or to have adventures, or both.

No wonder I thought, but then wondered if it was the novels that had caused the urge, or if in fact without the novels the Lady might have done something worse long ago.  I had cause to think that I, myself, would long since have gone insane without the ability to dream of a better life, even if the dream would never come true for me or for that matter for Jimmy.  Certainly not for Jimmy.

I realized that while I’d been looking around at all the novels, I’d missed Annabelle lifting the mattress.  Under it, like spilled gold and onyx were piles of hair clearly from two very different heads, one pale and sunny and the other black and twisty like an ivy plant.  I thought of those dark curls framing the Lady Helen’s face and thought how well they suited her.  If I hadn’t known the real thing and far too well, I’d have said her face had a touch of the fey – something not quite human and irrepressible.  Only, of course, the fey aren’t like that.  That is just what humans think of them.  They are in fact almost totally devoid of emotion, or at least of emotions we humans can understand.  As lief discuss poetry with an oak as have a talk of love with the fey.

I said, “That is the hair?”

Annabelle nodded.  She still looked scared.  I reached in and took a double handful of the stuff, and told her she could drop the mattress, and she obeyed, and then, as I lay the hair on the table, I asked, “Why do you look so fearful?  Know you something you haven’t told me?”

Her eyes widened in startled shock, then she shook her head, then she said, “No.  It’s only…”  She shook her head.  “There is very wrong magic… I felt very wrong…  I don’t know how to explain it.”

It was possible she was telling the truth.  I put my hands on the hair, and tried to divine where the possessors of the hair had gone.

The smell of spoiled fish, the roaring of the sea and the feeling of magic hit me so strongly I almost fell.

I let go of the hair, and blinked.  I knew now what Annabelle had meant.  Wherever these girls had gone was where the strand of rogue magic originated.