According To Hoyt

My husband was talking to me this morning about the snake called fer-de-lance. Please don’t ask why.  If you’re going to ask why my family talks about crazy things, we’ll be here all day.  Why, older boy yesterday was talking to us about the kidneys.  Something – nephrons, I think – caused me to say “weren’t those guards in ancient Egypt?” And from there we went off on an Egyptology tangent, though briefly and amusingly we also entertained the idea of Egyptians in people’s kidneys.  (No, you can’t kill us for being crazy.  At least I don’t think you can.)

Anyway, from Fer-de-Lance we went to Rex Stout.  I told Dan that not only was Fer-de-Lance the first Rex Stout I read, it was the first mystery I read, about a year after I started reading Science Fiction.  This is strange, since dad’s bookshelves were FULL of mystery books, this being his favorite form of reading.  (Though until recently he also read “great books” i.e. those that received much acclaim, until he decided they received acclaim on the basis of politics, not fact.)

The thing is that dad had told me that mysteries were not “appropriate” and “would likely give you nightmares.”  Now, let’s pause for a moment in wonder at a father’s understanding of his daughter’s mind.  By 12, when I started reading mystery, I’d already read a lot of science fiction, most of it dystopic 70s stuff, soaked in sex and violence (and don’t tell me “but most 70s stuff wasn’t like that.”  I believe you, of course, but you have to remember this is what European literary agents chose to buy and publish in Portuguese, and in the seventies – and still – high culture in Europe is all Sturm und Drang.  As I’ve said before, it’s been stuck in the goth teen mood since at least World War I, reveling in how terrible things are an how there is no hope.)  Worse, he knew – had to know, he’d given me the books – that I spent the summer I was eight reading (among other things) Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty Four.  And we won’t mention people like Dumas, or the wonderful collection of – leather bound, with the GORIEST lithographs – Captain Morgan’s adventures.  However, he didn’t want me to read mysteries, because… they had murder in them, and this might bring me nightmares.

Remember what I was talking about?  How parents and children are opaque to each other?  Well, from that end, my being a sensible kid (as sensible as kids get – at least intellectually.  We won’t discuss my emotional development, which seemed even slower when contrasted with my intellectual development) it made no sense at all that dad put those books off limits because they centered on murder so…

Well, the Portuguese culture at the time at least had a really hard time distinguishing between mystery and horror. You can see why, if you read some of the goriest procedurals of the time, and compare them to what I call “blood and guts horror” of the same period.  And someone in the publishing line (yes, there was only one.  We also had only two TV channels, shut up.  There was also only once SF line, it was called Argonaut.  When I had to establish my own press, I desperately wanted to call it that, but Alas, there was already an Argonaut press) was called vampire.  No, seriously.  And the emblem on the back of the covers was a bat.

I did – still do to an extent – have problems with most supernatural horror.  (Not romance disguised as supernatural horror.)  I tend to find that it does give me nightmares.  So, since daddy knew me, these must be supernatural horror.

Here I must explain the weird system of publishing in Portugal, when I was a kid.  Each of these lines put out a translation a month.  That was it.  They also had a limited print run.  If you didn’t grab it the first two weeks of the month and it turned out popular, your best bet was to find it later in one of those postcard-type-racks at some forgotten beach resort (where I cleaned out on Heinlein at 14.  Yes, the covers were faded.  Like I cared.)  They didn’t do reprints.  (It’s a very small market.)  The print run was also usually on the tight side.

Now, if you read knock off regency romances (most of them written by the yard by Portuguese authors using English pen names) or Westerns (ditto) you got four a month and you were spoiled for choice.  But I didn’t.  My brother had told me Romance was the opium of womanhood (more on that later) and the Westerns were so bad even I could see the mistakes – I mean, like entirely made up western states.

So, inevitably there came the Summer afternoon where I was bored out of my gourd, and I’d read all the non fiction and all the old stuff, and all the science fiction in the house, and also in the attic, and also in grandma’s storage spaces.  I was desperate.  And I looked up at the bookcase in the living room with its row upon row of vampire books.

And I found Fer-de-Lance.  I had no idea it was a snake.  I thought “Iron in the lance?  How odd.”

So with much trepidation, I brought it down, curled up on the armchair (back then I tended to curl up like a cat) and started reading.  I kept waiting for the supernatural horror to come in.  It never did.  What did happen is that by three quarters in I was hooked.  I spent a glorious summer catching up on all the mysteries, including Agatha Christie and found some permanent friends.

So – to what purpose this?  First, get out of your comfort zone in reading.  You never know.  Yes, I know you have a TBR pile that dwarfs the Taj Mahal – who doesn’t? – but a change of pace will make you appreciate all of it more.

Case in point, I’d never read Romance until about four years ago, when I took a chance. And even though my taste in Romance is limited (I don’t need to know what went where.  No, really.) I’ve found some pretty enjoyable reads and learned some techniques I ported into my other work.

That vampire bat on the cover might never appear inside.  Give it a chance.

Second – if you’re directing kids’ reading: other than outright porno (and why in heck would you have that — where they could reach, anyway?) don’t limit them.  You can say “I think you’re a little too young to fully appreciate that” (be aware, though that this will ENSURE they read it then, so use it advisedly.)  And you can say “I didn’t think that would be your thing.”  But mostly, make books available and let them find their own path.

Weirdly, though they might share some tastes with you, it will not coincide.  Not precisely.  But the greatest reward of all, and how you know you’ve done your job, is when they come to you, at fourteen or fifteen or twenty and say, “Hey, I found this book, and it’s great, and I thought you’d like it.”

And it’s true.

I went to high school (grades 7 through 11) in a high school that consisted of two buildings.  Like many of that time, it had originally been one building, then the new one was built, but the second was still in use.  It was an all girl’s high school until my year when two boys were admitted.  One of them was gay, the other must have had immense force of character.  (Well, if I’d ever had the slightest inclination towards women – I didn’t – seeing that many women that up close and personal and what they did when they thought no guys could see them would have cured me.)

Anyway, the older building (for a while the carriage house) housed the gifted forms.  The gifted forms which didn’t exist (by decree passed after the revolution, it was illegal to sort students by ability levels because all animals were alike or something.  However, teachers isolated kids they thought were trouble or so far ahead they were trouble, and threw us together into two forms.  Between which a deadly rivalry immediately developed.)  In the last year we were together, (10^th grade most of them went to science, so I lost them) we were in unofficial classrooms (so small if you sat near the window – I did.  Mildly claustrophobic – and wanted to go to the bathroom, you had to walk on top of other people’s desks.) past an attic filled with broken furniture and discarded stuff.

In eighth grade, though, we were in a classroom past two other classrooms – before the building was a school, it was an earl’s palace.  It was confiscated in the great glorious revolution.  No, not that one.  The one that deposed the king – facing the window, with French windows to two small balconies.  It was a lovely room and I’m sure it was someone’s bedroom or private parlor or something.

At the back, behind the teacher’s desk there were a series of doors which were locked.

You might as well unleash a monkey with a wrench on your average suitcase as thirty two gifted teen girls, (well, thirty one.  There was also me) with a rebellious disposition (except me, of course, I was good) in a classroom with locked doors.  We made it our business to open them and look in there.  (To this day I can’t understand what ninny livered people were there before that the doors remained locked.)  It took us a little while, but since Portugal doesn’t have substitute teachers and when a teacher didn’t show up we were told to stay put, alone, in the classroom (Yes, of course, half the people went down the street for a coffee and a croissant.  Not me.  I was chronically broke.) eventually we managed to open the doors.  They were rather unexciting.  There was a closet (we later used it to suggest to our overwhelmed biology teacher she could go in there to escape us.  She thought we were possessed.  Don’t ask. After her we got a fatherly middle aged man with army experience and he didn’t have any trouble at all.)

I think the other one was a sort of dressing room and I don’t remember what the third was.

However, in our exploits, while we were being little (or in my case big) monkeys, we shoved at this big cupboard that looked built in, and which was used for school supplies.  Okay, there was a fist fight (me?  I was more likely to kick.  Honestly I don’t even remember if I was engaged, because what happened next wiped it all out of my head) and one or more people fell heavily against the cupboard, which swung away, creakily, on hinges and long-disused wheels, revealing… a passageway.

Did we go down it?  Are you kidding?  Wild horses couldn’t have stopped us. For one, they wouldn’t have fit into the passage.

We went into it, and found ourselves in this sort of box high up on the side of one of the most magnificent churches I’ve ever seen.  I’m not sure what was the point of the secret passage, unless someone didn’t wish it known she prayed a lot.

The church was all in ruins, of course, and smelled strongly of mouse whee.  No, actually not “of course.”  Considering the school had mandatory classes of religion and moral taught by a priest and getting out of them was trouble enough that most parents never tried, I’m surprised that they didn’t use the built-in-church for mass. (I had to be excused due to getting in arguments.  This involved my father getting a notarized document saying he objected  and getting a lawyer involved (mostly he objected to my possibly killing the teacher.  I was fairly sure Catholic or not, the little red book should not be confused with the Bible) so I spent my time studying with the four protestant girls and three Jewish girls whose parents cared enough to get them out.  Since two of the Jewish girls and one protestant girl was in my form, I’ve since wondered if the reason the parents cared enough was that they had similar experiences to my family’s.  My form were generally trouble makers.  I’m surprised in all the years since I’ve only seen ONE of them in the news linked to a crime.)

In retrospect, I think that the people from the great glorious revolution – no, no, the anti-monarchist one – which was strongly anti-religion sealed all other accesses to the church so well that, barring a drawing of the building by an architect, no one suspected it was there.

Anyway, the church had been decorated in the baroque style (yes, RES, they were going for Baroque) which means that it had enough gold everything that even in a corroded and tarnished condition it looked like Donald Trump’s wet dream.  It also means that the various saint statues were in positions of martyrdom and had expressions that could be either of extreme pain or orgasm, and it was best not to look too closely.  Saint Sebastian, pierced by however many arrows might have seen heaven close, but the smile was still disquieting.

Anyway, to the right of the altar, directly facing the box we were in was the best statue of Senhora das dores that I’ve ever seen  “Lady of the Pains” is the straight translation, but I think in the States she might be known as Madre Dolores, thereby giving rise to a number of women named Dolores.  Her chest is pierced by seven swords, and she looks up to heaven with an ecstatic/painful expression.

This long (good golly, two pages?) preamble is because when I thought of writing of motherhood today that was the image that came to mind.

In one of Patricia Wentworth’s books, I found the definition of motherhood as “A pain over their teething, a pain over their schooling and a pain over their lurvering.”  When I read it, I had only experienced the teething pains, and right now I’m into the schooling, though the younger has made incursions into the lurvering, even if nothing serious yet – but I see no reason to doubt that definition.

By some strange alchemy, their pain, even when they’re as stoic as my older son or as close mouthed as the second, reverberates through me much more strongly than pains I experience myself.  And the emotional pains are the worst.  For the physical ones, I can take them to the doctor, or I can apply bandages.  But for the emotional, even when I can give good advice it usually isn’t the type they can take right then.

And that is a pain, because you bring them into the world, but then… but then they’re their own.  And while I never wanted to control them, I wish I could give them, wholesale the knowledge that I have, that would make their way easy.  But that’s not how humans work.  (I always thought that was a good touch on the part of Anne Rice – yes, I read the vampire series until Queen of the Damned when I judged she’d gone off the deep end.  Even before a feeling had been growing that after reading one of her books I should take a shower on the inside.  That book was the final straw – to make the “child vampire” and the “parent vampire” deaf to each other’s thoughts, because that’s a great part of parenting.  Of course, I’ve known them all their lives.  Of course I should be able to read them.  Weirdly, it doesn’t work that way)

Not that motherhood is all reflected pain and frustration.  There’s also terror.  The first instance of terror was when I found myself massively pregnant with Robert thinking how in heck this thing could come out.  I decided there and then that he wouldn’t.  He could very well go to college in my stomach.  I still find it was uncharitable of Dan to laugh himself sick over that one.

The second moment of terror – and the third – came as I held my newborn son, and realized I was completely and utterly responsible for this creature and his existence in the world.  (Yes, with Dan’s help, of course, but you know what I mean.)

The third comes and goes and is best expressed in the phrase, “I should have stuck to cats.  They rarely grow up to be ax murderers.”

However, through all this, there is the ecstasy.  There are the moments of grace – and most of them are moments of grace – reading their first story, tasting the first dinner they cooked, listening to Robert play piano after he taught himself, watching Marshal as Petruchio in Taming of the Shrew.  Or even (just) our conversations around the dinner table, or when they’re helping me clean the house, or pretty much every moment of their existence.  It is a partaking of the divine joy of creation “Look, look what I made and sent into the world, independent and autonomous, full of the same heartbreaking imperfection as all humans, and the same glorious potential.”

They’re pretty great young men.  They couldn’t have done worse for a mother, but I couldn’t have done better for kids, so as we know, it’s all in perfect balance.

Happy Mother’s day everyone.  You either were one, served as one to someone, or (I’m fairly sure most of you, though some of you – waggles hand –) had one.  Enjoy the fact that humans’ prolonged helplessness as children gives us a chance at a relationship as baffling as it’s fulfilling.  Freud was right.  Most problems start with the mother.  He missed that so do most blessings.  And often they are one and the same.

And all we can do is do the best we can, then hold our breath, give thanks where they’re due and ignore the bad — and keep faith in the future.

May all your troubles be little ones.

“All right then,” he said.  He remained in the shadow, his face hidden by the way the light from the hallway was obstructed by the half open door of the office.  “Time to come with me.”

I looked up from the computer, where I’d been making minor alterations to a trunk story.  “Uh… Why?”  the time was six thirty am, give or take a few minutes.  And my visitor was a bulky man with broad shoulders and wearing something… strange.  It could be armor or a space suit.  Or something.  I thought of the boys down the hall, and that they’re both studying for finals and therefore by definition a little loopy.  “Robert?”

“No.”  He sounded impatient and the voice had a faint hint of undefinable accent.

“Marshall?”

“NO!  I said come with me, woman.”

My mom taught me, before I was out of my pram never to go anywhere with strange men, much less strange men like this one.  The more I narrowed my eyes and looked, the more it seemed that he was rather unsubstantial and I could sort of see the panels of the door behind him.

“I don’t think so,” I said.  “I have these stories that were published in the suburban fantasy anthologies to edit, and then I have to write one where they go out to Vegas and get married by zombie Elvis.  And the cat box needs doing.  And I have two novels that need editing, and one I’m copy editing.  And I have friends novels to read for quotes.  And besides,” I said, with finality.  “I have a witlow.”

I got the impression he’d scrunched up his face in a frown. This was quite a trick, considering I couldn’t see his face and wasn’t even sure he had one.  Something appeared in his hand.  It might be a trident or a lance.  He hit the floor with it.  “And yet, surely you must come.  The forgotten demand it.”

“The… what?”

“The forgotten.”

“They’re not forgotten.  They’re lying to you.  I gave them food this morning while I was making tea.  If the bowl is empty, it’s because Havey eats as much as all four other cats combined, and that includes Greebo, look you.”

There was a hiss from the figure, which strangely didn’t make him seem more catlike, but rather, strangely like a tried-beyond-endurance human.  “Come.”

He struck his lance again, and like in a dream, I found myself standing beside him at the window at the end of the hall.  But instead of looking out onto the roof of our garage, our horribly neglected (as in nothing alive) garden, or even the neighbor’s houses, I was looking at a nebulous landscape wreathed in thick fog.  Here and there, pieces of landscape emerged, like wrecked ships on a shallow sea.

“There,” a huge hand pointed at a patch from which something like Greek architecture emerged.  “Is your pre-Mycenaean epic.  The character has agreed to let you give him … er… her a sex change operation.  What are you waiting for?”

“Well, you see, the resear—”

“And over there.” He pointed at a gloomy bit with French renaissance look about it.  “Is the vampire musketeers.  I mean, the second book is three days away from completion.  THREE days.  Why haven’t you done it?”

“There have been—”

“Over there.”  He pointed at the same architecture but more cheerful.  “Is the musketeer mysteries.  You still get letters every week asking for more, don’t you.”

“Well, I’m editing the second, so we can—”

“And there.”  He pointed out a patch of green wreathed in Kudzu that could only exist in the American South.  “When are you going to finish that charming Southern piece?”

“As soon as I—”

“There—”  The mountainous landscape of Goldport Colorado.  “What’s up with not finishing the thing with the chick and the ghost of her dead lover.”

“A week, at most, I swear.  I just have to find a week.”

He next pointed at a futuristic landscape with monolithic public buildings, “I thought you meant to bring out The Brave And The Free on the fourth of July?”

“Well, I did, but then I got sick, and…”

“And what about Winter Prince, a space opera in a completely different universe where you—”

“Oh, that.  I really want to do it but I…”

“Then there’s A Flaw In Her Magic.  Remember how much fan Austen fanfic used to be?”

“Yes, but I had more time then.”

“And orphan kittens.  It’s waiting for you. They all need to be done.  You can do a novel in a month, and you know it, but you’ve wasted almost six months now doing nothing.”

“Not nothing.  There’s editing and publishing and family stuff.  And I was sick.  And before I do any of the others, I must finish the two books under contract for Baen.”

“Yes, those must be done too, but that’s not an excuse.”

He gave me a disgusted look.  For that moment, I could see his face, shifting between the faces of all my characters, male and female.  Let me tell you, it gives you a cold feeling to see Athena Sinistra looking disgusted at you.

“Get sick less, write more.  Hire someone to deal with the other stuff.  Otherwise all the people from those universes will come and make sure you never get a wink of sleep again.”

Like that, he vanished into thin air like a bubble.

And I went back to my desk.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  For previous chapters, page back to previous weeks, but be aware I skipped last week.  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.  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.   Until I give this a tab, you can find older chapters by paging back to Friday (or the first, I think Sat/Sun) or simply searching Rogue Magic.*

A Hearty Dislike Of Fish

Miss Helen Blythe, Sister of the Earl of Savage:

I came up the steps with what dignity I could.  It wasn’t much.  To any of you considering disguising yourselves as boys, and then being thoroughly soaked, be aware that the bindings slip and things spring free, pushing against the too-tight boy’s coat and revealing very clearly – an in a quite indecent manner – your gender.

On top of that, the breeches clung to my legs, and I’d lost my hat somewhere, so that what hair I had remaining clung to the sides of my face.  I had no mirror and couldn’t tell how I looked, but if I looked like Betsy, I must be making a very good imitation of a drowned corpse, reanimated and brought to life in jerky moves.

Betsy was pale, and wan, she kept crying.  Her blond hair clung to the sides of her face obscuring most of it, and her nose had gone a quite unnatural pink.  To make it worse, she kept tripping on her soaked breeches and boots, and falling.

Some part of me wanted me to be mad at the wretched girl, but all I could think was “what have I done?” and also that this was all my fault for getting both of us in this horrible situation.  So I gave her my hand.  Hers felt very cold and floppy, sort of like you’d expect the hand of a drowning victim to feel.

“Come, Betsy,” I said, and supported her with an arm around her waist.

What she answered back weren’t words, but an ululation of despair that sounded somewhat like “Woooooooowoooow.”

I thought if Mamma heard it she’d tell Betsy to stop that wretched noise.  But if Mamma heard it, that meant she would see me, and I suspected this was an escapade that would cost me far more than not going to a few balls, or getting preached to a lot.  This was an escapade even I, myself, was starting to consider must be very ill considered.  I went back over my reasoning, in my mind, as I dragged Betsy out of the pool.  There were a sort of rough stone steps there, and it became easier to walk once we had water lower than our knees.

I slopped out of the pool, and slopped along the flagstones, and stood in front of the fish-men with the tridents, who were looking at Betsy and I as though we were something the cat had dragged in, and something snapped in me.  “I always disliked fish excessively,” I said, in my haughtiest tone, which sounded exactly like what Mamma sounds like when she finds someone has violated the order of precedence and sat her lower than her great rival, Mrs. Piper.

The two men looked at each other, and suddenly laughed.  This was far worse than if they’d hit me or something, because when they threw back their heads and laughed, I saw row upon row of very sharp teeth.  They had at least three rows of them, all sharp like needles.  I jumped back, but they didn’t see because they were still laughing, and I told myself I was being a stupid little coward and found my courage.  The one compliment that Jonathan ever made me which I treasured was that I was pluck to the backbone and never flinched, better than most boys.  Of course, usually he said that after he’d hit me on the face with a ball and was trying to get me to stop crying.

Betsy had shrieked, and she was crying, but Betsy was Betsy and she’d never stopped blubbering since we’d got here.  And besides, I started suspecting she was much younger than I.  She might be no more than fourteen or fifteen.  It had never occurred to me before.  I mean, maids didn’t have ages, did they?  They were just there.  Even the ones one used as allies.

I whispered, “It is well, Betsy.  I’ll get us out of here.”  And wished I could believe it.  The two men, meanwhile, looked at each other and one of them said, “She will do.  Better than we could have hoped.”

And then they told us to walk ahead, and the two of them got behind us.  Since I was sure my view behind was as revealing as in front, this did no relieve my embarrassment, but I kept telling myself after all fish didn’t mate with women, and men didn’t have fins.  And if I had a fishbowl in my room, surely I wouldn’t be embarrassed by it.  So why should I be embarrassed by these men?

We went ahead into what were almost surely natural caverns that had got shaped to look like hallways.  The doors were made of wood that looked like it had been at the bottom of the sea a long time.  And it would, of course, for where else were people who lived in and under water get wood?

And the feeling had grown on me that these people lived under water.  We were in an area with air, but I felt it was a pocket, perhaps caused by underground caverns.  I can’t say whence the feeling came, exactly, except perhaps from the very faint murmur of water that seemed to come from all directions, including overwater.

There were murmurs of water of another kind inside the hallways of the cavern complex.  It sounded like a million little twinkling fountains, and the sounds merged ill with my squelching boots, and the feel of water trickling down my back.

Also, the whole place smelled mildewy and salty, like long-submerged buildings.  Once, when I was little, Jonathan had taken me to the seaside.  I don’t precisely remember why.  But he’d gone fishing at one of the manors we own near the coast and he’d taken me along, possibly because I’d just got a governess while the other girls were still with nursie, and my governess had travelled with us.  In retrospect, remembering some things I didn’t then notice, it is entirely possible she wasn’t exactly respectable.  I know Mamma fired her a year later and I wondered if Jonathan had given her her conge.  I hadn’t thought of her in years,  but I now remembered looks she and my brother had exchanged that made me blush even more than my unbound breasts poking against the boy’s jacket.

But back then I was perfectly innocent, and Jonathan had taken me exploring some caverns at low tide.  Tame stuff, of course, little more than small rooms, just above the low tide.  I’d thought it was high adventure then.  But even then I’d thought it smelled like some very large incontinent creature had relieved itself all over the caves.  Now, it seemed like everything around here had been made use of by the same creature.  Only it would have to be a much larger creature.

And as though on command there was a sound, like a moo and roar put together, from under my feet, and I jumped, and Betsy dropped to her knees.

She was crying again, and I grabbed at her arms and tried to pull her up, and she looked white as a sheet and was crying, and now the two guards moved forward, and started helping to pull her, but in such a way that it gave me the impression they would drag her on her knees if she shouldn’t stand.

What was scarier was the way they looked.  They both looked scared.  And one of them said, “It senses her.” And the other “We have to get her out of this place.”

And then they were both dragging us, and I barely managed to pull Betsy to her feet.  The incident so unsettled me that I wasn’t more than half aware of passing a lot more doors, and walking down yet another hallway.

The walls around us changed and looked like they’d been carved of pure jade, which I don’t think they could possibly be.  The floor under us looked like white marble, which again I don’t think it could possibly be.

And then we entered… a throne room.  It is the only way to describe it.  There were men and women…  well, fish men and fish women, attired in what looked very like court dress.  Mind you, it all smelled fishy, and if you looked really close you could tell that the women’s gowns were woven of seaweed and the ornaments might be pearls or they might be seashells, and they didn’t seem to make a distinction.  But even so I felt underdressed, and when Betsy started her whoowowowow again, I reached over and clapped my hand on her mouth.

Then I looked up towards the throne.

First let’s establish that he was handsome.  I mean, he was a fish man like the others, but he was handsome.  He wore a sort of white shirt, and I realized it was the first pure white thing I’d seen down here.  I’d bet it was linen too, and not seaweed.  And his knee breeches looked to be velvet.  I wondered if he went to my world to have them tailored.  They were deep emerald green, as were his eyes.  His hair was sort of greenish gold, like gold that is starting to tarnish.  His features would not have passed unremarked in the ton, wherever handsome men were mentioned.  He had a square jaw, and well defined cheekbones, and he wore a white and gold crown as though he’d been born with it.

But when he opened his mouth to speak, it was easy to see that he had the same teeth as the other two. And as for the shirt, the fins along his arms pushed it up in a most unsettling way on the sleeves, and they seemed to pulse with his every movement.

“Ah,” he said, in a tone of great satisfaction.  “So that was the disturbance.  We caught better than we fished for.”

The fish men who’d brought us here, shoved us in the back, “Kneel to the king.”

But the king made a sound that might be laughter, and grinned at me, displaying his rows of needle-sharp teeth, “No.  Do not make them kneel.  If my betrothed and her assistant can’t stand in my presence, who can?”

Have I said how heartily I dislike fish?

What people choose to do is often influenced by factors both external and internal. As is whether they succeed.  Temperament matters, sure, but so do life circumstances, ability and that indefinable thing called “drive.”  I have friends far more talented and brighter than I who aspire to be writers but who’ve managed at most half a dozen books.  And some who’ve managed none.  Some have good reasons.  Some have none – just the inertia of day to day living.

People have trouble enough accessing themselves and choosing what to do, but it’s worse to trust someone higher up to choose for them.  And I don’t envy the job of anyone in authority who has to pick whom to promote, whom to hold back.

Nine times out of ten, from my own experience, it’s not done as much through “this person can do this this and this and this one can’t” but through “this person causes me less hearburn.”  And while removing the process one step and getting a boss “higher up” who has had no contact with the person to evaluate can make it more based on characteristics and check lists (this is what the communist system is based on) you have to wonder who makes the original report saying what characteristics people have.  And if it’s a test?  Well, though in the US this has been abused to forbid even basic literacy tests, the fact is that you can’t MAKE a totally fair test.  For one, if you come across someone like younger son who freaks out at the very idea of a test, they’re going to test badly – and they’re not that rare.

This is why from our earliest stories and legends, humanity has been fascinated with ways of choosing and of sorting people.  Usually the means are utterly nonsensical, like, you know, people who happen to be wearing a certain thing that day – but it works because … magic.  Even Harry Potter has the sorting hat.

We don’t have a sort hat.

A persistent myth, on both the right and the left, though, is that they know the formula by which both “conservatives” and “liberals” choose their professions (and neither of these words are right, unless conservatives now suddenly means “those who want to upend the status quo” and “liberals” “Those who want to continue on to a neo-feudal society.” [And I don’t want to hear quibbles on that.  There is a reason everyone starts spouting “liberalism” after they make it.  It’s the chic philosophy, the approved one.  Ie the people in power.  No, it is NOT that they suddenly become enlightened and realize it was right all along.  Life doesn’t work that way.] So let’s call it right and left, though that’s not right either – but one has to use SOME words.)

The annoying thing – and by annoying thing you should understand it has often driven me to screaming between clenched teeth – about the myth is that it’s almost exactly the same on the right and left even though on the face of this it makes ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE.

The myth goes something like this “The leftists dominate academia, the arts and teaching because they are more creative and less interested in money and worldly success than the righties.”

Last person caught subscribing to the last part of this myth (though not the first, at least not this article) was Stacey McCain, who at some point is going to owe me a desk, because of all the times I’ve pounded my head with it, or clawed at it in fury after reading something like this.

His quote is this:

Conservatives don’t become journalists because most conservatives are smart enough to pay attention to their high-school guidance counselors who advise any student who will listen to stay the hell away from this miserable low-paying racket. (My excuse? I was stoned most of the time in high school, and stayed drunk  half the time in college, besides which, I was a Democrat back then anyway.) So young conservatives generally don’t become reporters, and instead go to law school or get MBAs or do something else where they might actually hope to make a living. And liberals become journalists because they want to Make a Difference and Change the World.

[Unclenches hands from desk.  Notes furrows nails made, while screaming in incoherent fury.]

First, let’s start at the beginning, at “right” and “left.”

I know there have been “studies” purporting to determine innate characteristics that make one a liberal or a conservative.  (Rolls eyes.) Most of them are so easy to debunk as to be insane.  For one most of them are done by leftists (which psychologists tend to be) and assume that “conservative” means the dictionary definition, i.e. someone who wants to preserve the status quo.  So they look for characteristics like a fear of change.  Then they design the tests to find it.  The link between the test activity and what they’re looking for is usually at best incidental. (You know, it’s funny how all sorts of tests, even IQ tests and ability tests are just wrong and impossible to calibrate so they don’t discriminate against someone or other, but are okay and holy writ when they can be used to make some talking point.)

For another…  Leftist and Right wing WHEN?  And I don’t mean just in relation to society (though that too bears examination) but in relation to the person.  Take me at 22.  I hated communism, which made me unacceptable to the democrats as they already were, but other than that, having been raised in Europe my positions were much those of a well-to-do young person from the North East.  I believed gun control was good (till I read Red Planet, which didn’t happen till I was 26.)  I believed abortion was probably for the best (what changed that was getting pregnant. Mind you I had no intention of having one, not since my Advanced Biology teacher had described GRAPHICALLY how they were done.  But I bought into the “if they’re unwanted, they’ll be unhappy.”)  I believed in invisible institutional racism that must be corrected by affirmative action.  I believed men tried to hold women down (to be fair all I had was the public Portuguese culture – different from the private one – to go on, and Portuguese culture picked up quite a bit from Islam, particularly in treatment of women.)

If you’d got me earlier – circa 11 – I was a no-holds-barred anarchist.

I was precocious.  If you go down the list of my colleagues at PJM or any other “conservative leaning” publication, most of the people you find were left (and sometimes very left) till their thirties.

Even Stacey McCain admits that in his own case, he was stoned through high school.  (Actually I hesitate to say this outright because perhaps it’s my selection bias of my own friends, but most people I know who are now on the “right” – and in this I include libertarians because the left does – were once “wild children.”  And in a way still are.  This is logical, since the social power is on the left.)

So, since that’s when most of us choose at least the path we want to take, how could it be influenced by any innate characteristics of the right since we were then left?

Second, let’s deal with this “Right wingers all care about money and not about changing the world.”

I’m not stupid.  I’m more than three.  I’ve cut my wisdom teeth thirty two years ago.  I will grant you that I’ve come across people who fit all three of these and still didn’t understand “how to make it in science fiction and fantasy.”  These people are usually right wing idealists who believe what the left says: “write your passion and you will be successful.”

Insofar as I’m a right winger – libertarians are totally right wingers.  That’s why we want to dress in suits, then hang bureaucrats from light poles.  Trust me on this.  Of course the suits we want to dress in hark back to 1776.  VERY conservative – I’m a cynical one.

Vox Day is not the first person to figure this out – though he might be the first one to talk about it loudly – nor do you need a degree to realize from the tenor of the stories that win awards, from the tone of the books that get pushed, from the politics of the authors who get lionized that the way to get ahead in this field is to be as far left as you can, as loudly as you can, and then if you can – this is optional – be funny and stylish and debonair.

You know the thing in Jesus Christ Superstar when Judas sings “and add in a touch of hate at Rome” – well, a touch of hate at America will propel you to superstardom…

So, if I know that, and if I’m as good as I think I am at writing (which is competent) WHY in heaven’s name didn’t I take that path?

The right is all about the money, right?

No, of course not.  If we were I could have done that – but I couldn’t endorse an evil model of the world which malgre me, sounds uncommonly like idealism.

Third – as for the myth of the left being more creative… Oh, my stars and garters.  All you have to do is watch the fiftieth Hollywood remake or look at the bestseller’s list.  Please.  They have the one pony and they ride it to the ground.  (Granted, being creative while staying in the limits of the ideology is pretty hard, but it’s not impossible.)

 

So, how come some fields are completely left?

 

First, the left DOES NOT play by Marquess de Fantail rules.  Second, with them politics is very close to religion.  Politics is at least “morals”.  If you believe in a different means of solving the problem of poverty or illness, you’re “evil.”

Would you want to work with an evil person?  No?  Neither does the left.  So if they catch what they’d consider the slightest hint of sulphur about you they won’t hire you/buy your book/promote your book/give you that raise/advance your career.

The right, meanwhile, hires on ability and is known to say “I don’t care what his politics are, his books/movies/music are good.”  (Of course, it’s quite possible the reason we do that is that until recently we had no other choice.)

This is the process by which almost every publishing house, newspaper, movie making company, school turns hard left.  All it takes is ONE leftist in a position of power to hire or decide who gets push.  Since politics is religion, they don’t hire the “evil” or boycott them at every chance.

This is the process by which every foundation started by the right is left after a few years.  People talk about Alinsky, but it doesn’t take a conscious process or a conspiracy.  Only the firm understanding that “right wing is evil” – founded in part on having no idea at all what other people believe, and in part on the refusal to consider perhaps one’s solutions aren’t the best – and the decision to hire on the left and cut on the right, regardless of ability or anything else.

 

What if you sneak in, because you were leftist at the time?  Well, then you usually get tired of running on ice and being held in place and either drop out or content yourself with a little job somewhere.  (I have friends who should be staffing much bigger newspaper but who are working in back water towns, because – well – they can’t keep themselves stealthed that well.  Or they won’t.  Because they have a soul above money.

 

Now, can we stop buying and endorsing the other side’s myths?  They might not know anything about us, but surely we do.  And that myth, like most such, doesn’t even make any sense.

 

Be not afraid.  We’re more creative, we’re more used to adversity, and now that the tech discourages a monolithic culture and social games of exclusion, we can sort ourselves.

We will survive this.  And prosper.

My grandmother was fond of saying “G-d writes straight through crooked lines.”  It was in fact a way of saying that it was all for the best, in the best of all possible worlds.

They say that the impression of this, like the impression of seeing a face when you look at an irregular stain on a wall, is just a trick your mind plays.

To an extent that has to be true.  I mean, if you cast your mind back and you see all the things that could have gone wrong in getting you where you are, you can come up with a ton and conclude indeed that you were brought dry shod through the ocean bottom.

On the other hand, if you’re not particularly happy with your situation, you can look back and think “If only I’d done this and that.”  In the times when I was probably clinically depressed (there were reasons, but once you get into the spiral, it’s hard to pull back up.  I did, but– ) that sort of replay, and how “stupid” I’d been (to sign up with Berkley, to write a “literary” trilogy, to…) could occupy most of the day, and it formed part of the spiral that drove everything down.

It’s important, when you’re caught in that, to remember that too is an artifact of your mind trying to make sense of the situation.  Pratchett captured that very well in Lords and Ladies when the Chancellor and Granny Weatherwax are replaying their lost romance and he says “We should have got married.  We’d have grandchildren” etc. and she says “But what about when our house burned down and killed us and all the babies?”  It’s sobering to realize that even your soppy fantasies are not written in stone.  You could have done everything right and still get whammed.

And that’s the other side of this.

As humans, we need to have sense what we’re doing is a path, that it leads to something.  Yes, this post was prompted by all the musings of “I was going to be.”  It’s fairly reasonable of me to give up on being an angel (the first to make a comment on the color of the wings gets carped) or a cat when I realized these were impossible.  It’s much harder to give up on more reasonable ambitions, when you know it’s what you’d really like to do.

I’m a special case.  I don’t count.  I’ve tried to give up writing… tens of times, starting when I could barely put a story together and all I got were rejections to two years ago, when I wrote to Kris Rusch explaining that the stress was killing me and I didn’t like my publishing houses (not Baen but Baen isn’t enough for me to make a living) anymore, and I was just walking.  That’s when she told me about indie.  (Yes, it was that recent.)

There in the middle, there were times I could have walked away (you don’t want to know) but Dan said he thought I should continue writing.  (Was he right?  It depends on whether you believe there’s some sort of plan for the universe or not.  And whether I’m going with it or against it.  As someone once said, it’s above my pay grade.)  But that took serious aversion therapy.  Before that, the need to write drove me.

It drove me so much that it’s almost stopped me asking “am I doing the right thing?”

I was talking to my son the other day about careers and prospects, and my husband said “If you encounter too much difficulty, it’s probably a sign you’re doing the wrong thing.”  It’s a nice belief, but what’s “too much” and why didn’t he adhere to that when I tried to walk away from writing after years of running in place?

Because it’s not logical.  Because none of us is rational.  Because unless it becomes a matter of life or death, we all like our own way to much to just give up on it, even if we start suspecting our talent – for math, for music, for writing – is largely imaginary.

Growing up hurts.  Changing directions hurts.  Admitting you were wrong and moving on hurts.

None of which adds up to my telling I’m ready to walk now.  That would be… stupid, when though I’m not there yet, for the first time I can sort of glimpse a place where I can support us from this, and if it weren’t for the insecurity about Dan’s job (on again, off again) or the fact groceries and heating have gone through the roof we’d be starting to feel better about things.

But it adds up to one of the things I repeatedly hear, from the young unemployed, from people trying to make society “better” – people should be allowed to pursue their “dreams” and “We shouldn’t have people give up their art just to be able to eat.  Look at J. K. Rowling, she wrote while on the dole.”

J. K. Rowling is the exception.  I actually know/have known friends who found themselves able to subsist for a while either from coming into some money or from being on unemployment and said “I’m going to write a book.”

While in the old days this was stupid ANYWAY because well… publishing a book took longer than that, so unless you were on permanent disability, it wasn’t going to be there as money when you desperately needed it – the fact is that people very rarely actually DO use the time to follow through.

I don’t know why, except that it’s hard.  It’s hard for me, and it’s where my income comes from.  I don’t mean the writing is hard.  Oh, sometimes it’s a stone b*tch.  Sometimes it flows though.  I mean, it’s hard working from home, in the middle of the daily ebb and flow and not get distracted and nibbled by ducks so that no writing happens.  And, as I said, I live from this. In ultimate instance, the reminder that we DO need the money sends me back to the keyboard.  But if you’re being otherwise supported, it makes it three times as hard.  (I know.  When I was making no money from this, and we were living from Dan’s money it was very hard not to just go off and play with the kids.

The other part is – what if you’re just REALLY bad?

Those of you who know me know I don’t believe in talent.  I believe in learning.  Given enough work, given enough drive, given enough wanting, you can be a very good writer, or at least a well-selling one.

But if you start with a tin ear for language, no sense of plot, and a Disney-channel understanding of humanity, that slope could take fifty years.

At which point do you give up?  At which point do you think there are better things you could do with your life?

The communist republics solved this by telling you what you were going to do with your life.  I don’t remember its resulting in any mad success.  Even in science and sports, both heavily subsidized, they often ended up trailing the chaotic capitalist(ish) economies.  In science, almost always.  In sports sometimes.  I guess it was easier to pick someone for physical ability.

Most people pretended to work, and they pretended to pay them.

So someone outside you deciding what you’re good for is probably a forlorn hope.  And someone subsidizing you will probably not take you where you want to go, unless you happen to be J. K. Rowling.

Which brings us to “how do you choose?” and “When do you decide it’s enough and you’ll try something else?”

Most people decide by what they want to do “Follow their dreams” and quit and try something else when they can’t take the failure anymore – either monetarily, physically or emotionally.  Sometimes the failure was really the result of a concatenation of incidences of bad luck, not of the person’s making.  This is when we think “if someone had supported them…” or “But that’s unfair.”

We all know stories of people who persisted against failure for decades and then became massively successful.  And we know stories of people who failed at career after career until finally they find one at which they do very well.

But we all also know stories of people who followed either of those paths and were miserable failures.

Unfair?  For it to be fair, you’d need a kindergarten teacher closely making sure it’s “fair.”  And even those of us who believe in G-d don’t see him that way.  (I once read a Jewish interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel which stained with me.  In this interpretation, Cain was the smart one, the innovative one.  He came up with the idea of sacrificing to the Lord, but then Abel did it and his reward was bigger, etc, until Cain, upset at the unfairness of it, killed him.  I think everyone who is by nature creative has gone through this, seeing the “follow-mes” doing well when they didn’t.  There are reasons for this, of course.  Innovation in a group is hard, and the second person (or the tenth) is more likely to be rewarded.  It helps to remember that.  Might prevent the stone-to-brother’s-head end of the story.)

Even if you believe in “fairness” as an outside principle, you have to back up and ask if it’s really fair.  Perhaps your art is too far ahead of its time.  Or perhaps it tried to take the field where it didn’t wish to go.  Or perhaps…

So – do you persist and risk always failing?  Do you go in search of something you might be better at?

I’d say it depends on the person, the situation and the pain.

Robert A. Heinlein failed at his naval career.  His health simply made it impossible to go on.  But then he technically failed at his writing career.  For more than a year things got really bad and nothing would sell.  But he persisted.  And then he succeeded. (Though someone who knew him told me once that financially he “ran scared his whole life.” – which is typical of a writing life.  No security.)

As part of the “G-d writes straight through crooked lines” – We can well imagine a brilliant naval career for RAH – though if it would have come to pass or not, who knows? – but I know I for one have trouble imagining a world without his writing, and so the temptation is to say “it’s all for the best.”

Is it?  Or is it the illusion of a face?

I don’t know.  And I can’t make the decision for you. And neither can anyone else.  The state should neither subsidize your pursuit of “your dream” nor tell you what dream you should pursue.  They don’t know.  Your parents/brothers/spouse might, but the state doesn’t.  And I’d wager from having observed such things, that even your parents/brothers/spouse are probably wrong.

In the end the thing you can be most useful at and probably happiest at, is that which you want to do so badly that you’ll endure all difficulties to do it.  Against all odds or with them, fair or unfair.

How it relates to the rest of the world, leave as an exercise for historians.  If you have a need to do something for a living, and aren’t going to starve doing it, give it a try.  If the pain gets too great, quit.  If the pain is just constant, unrelenting but not large enough, keep trying.

Who knows?  Maybe there is a face in the stain.

And maybe it is what you were “meant” to do.

Different post up at MGC

When I was eight years old, my life-plan was to grow up, live in Denver and be a writer.  Somewhere along the way between that age and fourteen, marriage to a man named Dan Holtz became part of the plan.  Okay, so I got a letter wrong, and one superfluous.  Also, he was supposed to be a redhead and an astronaut.  (Sigh.  Reality just fails to conform.)

How much of my current life was influenced by that?  Well… living near Denver to an extent.  (Marrying Dan had nothing to do with my deciding he was the one for me despite his name.)  I say to an extent, because of course first I had to live in the States.

Not only didn’t my 8 year old self know nothing about immigration laws, she had no clue where Denver was located or what precisely it was.  (I’m convinced in retrospect that I had it confused with Dover, since for the longest time I thought it was in England and near the sea.)  And by the time I’d acquired that knowledge – somewhere between fourteen and fifteen – I also had an idea of what moving between countries would do.  I mean, I was aware of the price to pay.

No, I never felt like I fit in in Portugal.  There are reasons for this.  My friend Kate found a website that charted nations according to characteristics.  Portugal is apparently very consensus oriented.  I’m an Odd.  Consensus gives me hives.  There are other characteristics.  They call this the national software.  It don’t sit well with my hardware.  We’ll put it that way.

However, Portugal is where my family lives and has lived for generations.  I like the land, I like the climate, I like being near the sea – and the price I paid to escape the wrong software — was to give all that up, to give up my parents – when you move across the ocean even if I could go back every year, it’s like dying a little.  I’m giving up the years I’d have with my parents and trading them for a week a year ON THE GOOD SIDE.  (More like a week every three or four years) for the rest of their lives.  More, when I got married I also gave up my (paternal) grandmother.  And all my cousins.

Everytime I go back, I’m reminded of the price I paid.  The land, as such, is largely gone.  It’s impossible to feel much attachment to the village when I can no longer find my way around it.  However, as I get older, I see my extended family get together, supporting each other.  If I were to lose Dan – G-d forbid – after the kids move out I’d be very alone.  This is impossible in Portugal, where the family go out of their way to drag the widowed and the sick out to parties and excursions. And it’s not charity.  They’re really wanted, because they’re part of the whole.

It was the price and I paid it.  I paid it because I wanted my children to grow up here, not there.  Over all I think I was right.

However, for those who think I aimed to live in Denver – I didn’t.  First I came to the states.  Then we found ourselves in a mighty tight space, in South Carolina, and Dan said “there’s nothing in this area, where do you want me to look for a job?”  I said “Denver.”

We ended up about 100 miles away.  That’s fine.  However, from the moment we drove into the state, I knew it was home.

This sort of bridges the gap between the political and the weird.  Was I meant to be here?  Who knows.  But I made “here” mine.

It was also – Colorado Springs in fact – the center of a Libertarian project to “get as many of us to move in as possible” and “take over.”  It worked for about five years and then…

So, now to everyone who keeps sending me notes asking me what I intend to do about the Colorado legislature and its laws to ensure we never get to have a say in governing again.

I’m not stupid.  I see the Detroit writing on the wall.  I’d feel the same way if this were the Republicans ensuring we never had a say in government again.  Whenever you get single party rule, you get corruption and decay.

So, am I going to move?

Where?

Sure some places are now becoming less crazy – TN, maybe portions of Ohio – but Colorado was going that way when we moved here, and look at us twenty years later.

Twenty years from now I’ll be seventy and it will be too late to fight the encroachment wherever I am.  And besides, I think the sh*t hits the fan well before then.  We are running out of our grandkids’ money (and perhaps ensuring most of us never HAVE grandchildren.)

Barring us having to move because there’s no money or jobs, we stay here.

Now, I’m not saying that won’t affect our plans.  We always wanted to live in Denver, but this might not be possible, if the area is going to Detroitize (totally a word.)  Heck, where we are is not nearly as safe as we used to be.

So we’ll cast about perhaps for a more defensible place, balancing this with the need to have access to hospitals which yeah, we’ll need as we age.

But other than that…

When I was eight, I was going to live in Denver and be a writer.  I’ve almost made it, and I’m not in the mood to let the larcenous and petty Colorado legislature dislodge me.  It’s impossible for them to believe same day registration and voting by mail makes elections more secure.  Unless of course they mean it makes their positions more secure.

But I refuse to go running from my chosen home just because they’re playing games with bureaucracy.  If we keep just moving on and leaving the places they take over, they learn nothing but that they can take over.  I’d say moving on was a good strategy if we had other worlds to colonize.  We don’t.

I mean to prove to them that what they captured is a booby prize.  What makes this country is not government.  What makes this country are the people who create and work and raise their kids.  Colorado still has plenty of those.

I plan to be prosperous without them, avoid their schemes as much as possible while staying on the side of the law, and oppose them and ridicule them every chance I get.

The Colorado legislature shall learn: Molon Labe.  Also mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.

As I’ve said recently, I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff about ESP and the paranormal.  This of course is a great relief as last week it was “gruesome unsolved crimes” and “ghosts” – a decidedly more unwholesome mix.  And incidentally possibly in itself a symptom of being ill, since weird hormonal fluctuations and sinus infections both send me to the “unclean” side of the mind.  (By which I mean MOSTLY the gruesome unsolved crimes.)  I spent months reading truly strange things like stories of Roman atrocities when I was pregnant with #2 son, which involved both hormonal fluctuations (natch) and my having a massive upper respiratory infection which we couldn’t treat without antibiotics, not advisable in my condition.

But the fact that the reading “craving” (there is no rhyme or reason to it) has now moved from crimes completely and is only touching ghosts peripherally as I research other “psi” stuff, leads me to believe that what set it off is Rye Crisp.

Rye Crisp is something Amanda Green and I wrote as a proposal and outline YEARS ago.  It was supposed to be ALMOST a straight mystery, with just a hint of supernatural.  My agent refused to send it out flat.  (Actually through my eight years with her, she turned down everything I ever tried to write with anyone else and, I’m now convinced, either got horribly confused lied about one that had been submitted before I hired her saying my partner had withdrawn it.  This cost me a friendship, and in retrospect – and having talked to my now ex-writing partner again and believing her – was probably not true.)  Why?  I don’t know.  Perhaps the books really weren’t that commercial.  (Amanda and I might have been taking the fine edge of supernatural/not supernatural too tightly.) Or perhaps – given the 5 for 5 turn down rate of collaborations, my agent simply hated dealing with multiple authors, one of them not her client.

Anyway, recently we started kicking it around between us again, because what it could become – once we were afraid it would be too supernatural for mystery – was sort of a cross between CSI and Monster Hunter.  (More CSI, I’m not plagiarizing Larry.  Nor could I.  In fact the collaboration with him is going to need major assists on guns from some of you.)  What I mean is that there is an organized police force dealing with the paranormal.  Yeah, I know, not a new concept, (just like a force that kills monsters is not new – I mean Buffy) but our schtick is to make it as realistic as possible.  Which means having enough techno-babble to make it sound “real.”

This means I’ve fallen sideways into a world of weird to very weird reads.  It’s appropriate to where my life is just now, because I can read a chapter or two while having breakfast or doing dishes, and there’s no story continuity I must mind. In fact, I have a book in the bathroom, one in the kitchen, a different one by my bed.  Which is okay, as hardly any of them are riveting reads.

Look, I have reason to know there are SOME psi phenomena – we’ll leave it at that.  Though if pushed I’ll point out I abandoned the office in our last house (and sort of because of other stuff eventually moved out) when I came up the attic stairs, and my computer was on (it turned off after ten minutes.  This was early morning.) which could be a glitch.  What couldn’t be a glitch was the mouse moving on the pad.  I don’t mean the cursor.  I mean the mouse.  On the pad.  (Before you ask, the kids were too young to rig anything.)  I could ignore the creepy feeling I’d been getting while I was in the attic/office alone (like someone reading over my shoulder) and I could think the creepy “messages” I’d found typed on the screen were the guys freaking me out, even if they denied it.  But that mouse moving around sent me running down the stairs and to working remotely on the laptop for a year before we moved.  And no, this wasn’t an isolated incident.  More on that later – but if I ever need to convince myself that they are all fakery and become a confirmed skeptic, I’ll read more books on psi research.

One I bought for its truly wonderful title (which I might steal for a fantasy novel) for instance the gentleman writing starts telling us how he got interested in the paranormal because he had a near fatal illness.  As you read the FIRST chapter of the book you realize he had all these interesting experiences and feelings because he was doped to his gills.  And the “messages” he feels are important to transmit to the world are just what you expect in the circumstances.  When I read them aloud to older son, he said “That sounds like that take off parody on what Moses would have been like if he really had been smoking pot ‘We should all be kind to lizards, because they’re awesome and stuff.’”

Then there’s the UFO conspiracy books (they’re sort of sideways related to psi) in which the aliens all give the sort of messages parodied in Good Omens, “Take care of your planet and be nice to people” doesn’t seem like the sort of thing anyone would cross the galaxy to tell you, does it?  I mean you can get the same from your priests, shamans or teachers and for that matter from the manned drones in government (who seem to think of themselves as priests, shamans and teachers.)

Then there’s the psi researchers on a tour of the USSR’s famous psi research facilities who meekly believed it was an accident when their visas were cancelled before the greatest demonstrations.

You sort of look at these books and go to the back and see where these people have degrees, real degrees from real institutions, and then you look at the page again and you think “you can’t be THAT dumb.”

Part of the reason to persist – in fact, part of the reason to own these books at all – is that Heinlein at least was convinced that psi not only existed but that it could be researched and harnessed.  He not only used it in his books, but talked about it extensively in at least one essay.

Partly of course, it was because it was the seventies, and people were taking psi at least somewhat seriously, and both sides of the iron curtain were at least making gestures towards researching it.

And I wonder how much the fact that it got swept away – far far away – from all respectability has to do with its big push being in the seventies, when everyone was on drugs.  Cause or effect, take your pick, but yeah, the phenomena might have “manifested” because everyone was swatting away purple lizards (and being kind to them.) But I also wonder if the loss of respectability – which in turn means it attracts more mentally-unstable and “I wanna believe” types… and writers, natch – was related to the same sort of reaction that consigned shag carpeting and bell bottoms to the ash heap of history.  (And the attempts at reviving them have only sort of worked.  I keep wondering who in heck was nostalgic for the seventies.)

However, I think part of the problem, and the reason the “scientific harnessing” of the subject matter might never be possible, or at least not until a scientific breakthrough in another area makes it possible to figure out better instruments to view it, is that the subject matter might fall (with quantum) in that broad area of “the observer influences the observed.”  I.e. we get silly and unreliable data because the researchers are silly and unreliable.  If the universe truly is full of quantum thingies and powered by narrativium this is quite possible.

Something to consider is that the experience I described above, of coming up the stairs and seeing my mouse move by itself on the pad, while I KNEW everyone else in the house was asleep, is not even unusual for writers.  Nor is the creepy, disturbing feeling of someone reading over your shoulder.  Or finding stuff written you know you didn’t write.  (And I don’t mean like the Medieval Romance, because that one, by the date was right after I hit my head, which in case you wonder was AFTER I moved from the house with the auto-moving mouse.)

Almost every writer, including friends who are atheists will tell of this sort of experience.  (Of course, they have to trust you to tell you that, so I’m not naming names.)

Apparently there’s something with working with story and invoking people who never exists that invites WEIRD “supernatural” events.  The pattern seems to be that these happen after you live and write in a house for about five years, and it will center on your writing area.  (Which holds true of all except the house we rented in SC and there our experiences were neither unique nor isolated.  I mean, I thought I was going nuts till I heard that the chick across the lake who let loose with the firearm occasionally in the evening was shooting at the fairies that lived under the lake and who had stolen her boyfriend.  Yeah, I wish I was joking.)

Anyway – what part of this is the mind influencing the world and the world influencing the mind?  The narrative telling the story or the story imposing itself upon the world?

I don’t know.  I wouldn’t presume to guess.  I don’t even know where precisely my stories come from.  And every time I get sick and can’t write, I start worrying it will never come back.  I totally understand Stephen King keeping his teaching certificate up to date “in case the writing goes away.”

Like all those psi researchers, I’m making my living on the margins of the “not quite reputable”

Only, unlike them, I’m not absolutely sure all of this stuff – including my writing – is real.  In fact, I’m sure the story he tells of someone controlling the Chinese population through psi isn’t real.  I wish I weren’t sure, because that would mean I’d never have heard to forced abortions and dying rooms.

On the other hand, the books occasionally make me laugh aloud (unintentionally.  Particularly the ones written in the seventies.)  And you know, lizards ARE awesome and stuff.  And besides, we should take care of our planet and be nice to one another, because the guys from Alpha Centauri say “Don’t make me come out there.”

 

I try not to get in political arguments on Facebook, unless I’m going in to support a Baen buddy (and because of my erratic hours, I rarely see those in time) or someone starts it with me first.

I assume what people post on their walls is their own d*mn business and they’re allowed to be stupid as they wanna be on their home page.  After all, people can have posters of Che in their living room, and when I find a neighbor or acquaintance has one of those, I simply make plans to ignore them in the future, I don’t say “So, you like mass murderers who delighted in killing kids, personally, uh?”  Also, to be bluntly honest, I’m away too busy to teach history to people who seem unable to reason from fact to fact.

Yesterday something got in under my defenses.  Call it Sarah being too sleepy and still very angry at the Colorado legislature.  Or perhaps it was the irreducible stupidity of the post or its sheer lack of contact with reality, or its hatred of life in a free society.  Indeed, there was so much to choose from, that it’s useless to wonder what first set me off.

To begin with, the note the poster put with the post (which was one of those “images” that people repost, this one just black background with letters on it.)  She said “This is their secret agenda, believe it.”  Since the post was about the GOP I presume she meant the GOP’s secret agenda.

Given the general disorganization of the Republicans, I wish someone would tell them that they have a secret agenda and that the only people who seem to know about it are the opposition.  Also, for the love of heaven, someone tell them that the agenda is so stupid that even I am shocked, though I’ve come to expect mentally-damaged decisions from them.  In fact, their agenda will achieve exactly the opposite of what it purports to want.  And FYI a two year old with experience in pre-school would realize this.

So, what was the charming post?  It said “The GOP wants to abolish government, so the corporation (sic) can rule us.”  At the bottom of it was an elephant in a “not” sign.

Let’s start from the bottom, shall we?  What in heck do they think they’re saying?  In a two-party system they want to abolish one because….  Massive responsiveness to the people will ensue?

Look, I have a lot of right wing friends, socons, libertarians, insane, sane, erudite and not.  They sometimes post pretty hateful stuff about “liberals” (they’re not using this in the “classical liberal sense”) “progressives” or “Marxists.”  The most common is “Liberalism is a mental illness” – and taking in account what they mean is “Marxism” they’re right.  Or rather, it’s a dogmatic religion, which induces mental illness to the extent it doesn’t agree with reality.  However, I have yet to see anything that says “Abolish the democratic party” or the symbol of the Democrats in a forbidden symbol.  Now, one or two of them might have done it and I might have missed it, but this doesn’t match the countless pervasiveness of it on the left.

I am baffled by their bizarre idea that removing one of a two-party axis would lead to anything good.  I recommend they study the history of single party systems, as well as the history of absolute monarchy.  When the state doesn’t have opposition – loyal, disloyal or completely lost in its own pants as the GOP is most of the time – it becomes by definition tyranny.  I mean, why should they care what you say when they know they’re going to be elected/reelected anyway?  Why should they care if the people get upset?

That stupid little “no GOP” symbol at the bottom is a sign of mental illness.  It’s a sign of people who have become so upset that someone disagrees with their position on how to do things that they want to silence the opposition.  It is a sign of people who think that anyone who disagrees with them has to be EVIL – there’s no other option, since, they are so blindingly brilliant and obviously right.

Do I need to point out that first they are so far from obviously brilliant that that short post has a huge logic error (forget the factual errors, etc.)  Or that at some level they know they’re not brilliant or their answer would not be “because, shut up.”  Or that this by itself justifies anyone who wishes to post “Marxism is a mental illness”?

But this “the other side is wrong and must be silenced” is what leads to panicky conspiracy theory inventing, because they can’t figure out why everyone doesn’t see the dazzling brilliance of their position, and they, themselves, don’t want to look at it too closely.

To begin with – I was tempted into an answer that was in itself not quite factual.  It went something like this “First, you’re wrong.  The GOP merely wants to reduce the government.  It is us libertarians who want to abolish it.  Second, it is a centralized government with all its rich opportunities for graft that causes corporations to have undue power.  See China or Hitler’s Germany.  This is a fantasy of washed-out drug-addled rejects who buy into the fantasy that the democrats are protecting us from corporations, and are allowing the so called progressives to drive us back to the thirties.”

I was tempted into a post not quite factual?  Well, yes.  While we libertarians could – you know, if we weren’t all about as social as feral cats – hold our hands and sing, kumbaya style, our own version of Imagine “Imagine there’s no government; it’s hard and we can’t try” – we’d like, in the end, you know, come the millennium and a higher state of man or something, to be able to have a society without government.

Most of us however are aware that it will never be possible, not for communities larger than about to dozen people all committed to doing what’s best for each other and, at that level, whether you have perfect libertarianism or perfect communism is a debate we’ll save for another time.

I simply didn’t feel up to explaining clear political lines, to people who were so blinkered as to think that the GOP had a “secret plan” (really, all of the GOP?  Including your local level?  And the press who are so fond of bugging political meetings where – shocking – Republicans debate who to defeat the opposition has never got a memo or a letter or an email?  Remarkable.  I guess Republicans aren’t humans at all, but pod people from alpha centauri.  Because the best way to keep a conspiracy with three people secret is to kill two of them.  And the best way to keep a conspiracy involving millions of people (or if you believe it’s only the top levels, hundreds of thousands of people) secret is not to have one.)

In the political continuum, you have anarchists – I used to be one when I was 14/15, mostly because anarchists had all the hot guys in black leather jackets and work boots and one of them had long, curly black hair.  Deal.  I have never understood why in the states anarchists want “A strong central government.”  Don’t try to explain it to me.  The last I heard was something like “We need a strong central government so people can live government free.”  Wait, what?  I think the anarchists, who at least at their start had a strong anti-royalist and anti-society strain (as in, destroy society — ???? – Paradise) have long since gotten taken over by the Marxists, who can, after all, organize.  Anyway, other than getting out their cool bandanas and flags in the service of daddy government you can safely ignore them.  They’re so far lost in their own underwear they can’t see the light of day.

Then you have the Libertarians.  I think by now what most libertarians – there are exceptions – want is a government small and hampered enough to adhere to the founders plan.  I subscribe to that.  I don’t subscribe to their own magic belief that if we don’t seek “foreign adventurism” other nations will leave us alone.  It’s a peculiar American illusion.  It has led to blood in the past and will again.  Between that and the obsession with legalization of drugs (yes, I am against the war on drugs.  Yes, I am pro-legalization.  It is simply NOT my only criteria for choosing candidates, and I’m willing to grit my teeth and wait 8 or 12 years while we fix other more urgent stuff – as annoying and civil-liberty-violating as the war on drugs is, yes, there’s more important stuff.  Besides, in Portugal I saw the result of legalization in a stagnant economy.  Let’s say there’s a reason the ganja coast is prone to mysticism and tyrannical governments.  Drugs are a great way to keep the restless and unemployed young quiet while you do whatever the heck you want.)  Because of that, post 9/11 I dropped out of the Libertarian party, where I’d been active and vocal, and started defining myself as a small-l libertarian.  (Or a Rational Anarchist.)

So, you have Anarchists, Libertarians, libertarians, some undefined but not short length of division, in which I would put my “social libertarian/economic mercantilist” friends, and then, at arms length, the outer fringes of the GOP which have people who are at least partially small L libertarian.  These people are considered insurgents and dangerous by the main GOP establishment which are, let’s be honest, statists.

Part of this is the same effect that ended up turning all the “conservative” parties in Europe into Social Democrats (or Christian Democrats, forever trying to get Caesar to fulfill THEIR obligation of charity.  They are so many levels of wrong…)

It is hard for those of you born in the seventies or later to fully get this, but even people like me, who hated the idea expected the communists to win the cold war, eventually.  It made perfect sense.  They were more organized, everyone knew central government was more efficient, the press was full of the glories of the Sov Union, and those of us who thought it was morally atrocious and a horrible thing for the individual had to shut up or be thought crazy.

For my generation – born in the sixties – enough had come out, and we passed Gulag Archipelago around like Samizdat (No, we wouldn’t be arrested, but the school would be very upset we were reading it, and we could kiss college admission goodbye), so that our reaction mostly was “I don’t care if it’s inevitable they’ll win.  They’re evil, and I will go down fighting.”  At least that was my reaction and those of my friends, and I submit those of the martyrs of Tiananmen square.

It wasn’t the stand of the people older than us. They really thought that communism (or its soft sister, socialism) would bring better social outcomes for the most people.  As conservatives they might hate it for peripheral reasons, but they still felt communists “cared about the people” and “held the moral high ground.”  This sort of mental concession is visible in the older ranks of the GOP who are, of course, the ones in positions of power.  I don’t know if they were too old when the wall came down, or if they simply know too many people on the other side whom they judge to be good people.  I know that it’s implicit in their attitude the idea that the Marxists are nice guys with the wrong idea.  The other side, meanwhile, is playing by the rule book that says anyone who doesn’t believe in Marx MUST be eliminated so paradise can happen.

This is sort of like a street fighter going up against the Marquess de Queensbury.

What it means is that with one side apologizing and bowing and the other calling them evil or worse, while the press is definitely to the left of most politicians the “consensus” of each party has moved left ever since I first set foot in the US in 1980 (before I moved here.  Four years before I moved here.) (The other mechanism for this, of course, is that a government will grow unless it meets opposition.  It’s the iron law of bureaucracies.)  Back then I judged the Democrats to be socialists (Carter’s speeches were almost word per word those of socialist leaders in Portugal.  So much so I still wonder if they were faxed/translated from a central location.  I know it’s unlikely, but…) and the Republicans to be Social Democrats.  (Yes, even Reagan – though at least he hated communism as much as I did.)

Now… Now I’d guess the center of gravity of the GOP hovers somewhere between Social Democrats and socialists.  They’re no more willing to REALLY cut down government than the Democrats are.  (And no, the sequester was neither a Republican idea, nor is it a CUT.  Reducing the rate at which spending EXPANDS is not a cut in any sane vocabulary.)

As for the democrats…  Heinlein said they were taken over by hard core Marxists starting in the thirties.  I see no reason whatsoever to doubt him.  There is a startling disconnect between the crowd in the streets (I want to shout at all these people supporting Democrats because the Democrats TALK about being for the little man AND talk about sexual freedom, that the end result of any Marxian regime is like something out of 1984.  There is no space for the little people except as chattel.  And as for sexual freedom, both the USSR and China (still) strenuously denied the existence of homosexuals or adultery or… and made contraception either mandatory or impossible to find – in the USSR largely impossible to find since about the seventies when the state had realized it needed more kids.) and the people in power.

And part of this is that though the Democrats haven’t been “in power” very long, they’ve been in power in a lot of places: most entrenched bureaucracies, teaching, entertainment, the media, and some of the larger blue cities.  Which means they’re already running to “end stage Marxism” in which the society is, in all but name, Fascist.  Or if you prefer, the softer word, crony capitalist (which of course is not capitalism at all.)

One has only to look at everything this administration has done, from taking over the auto industry to the billions squandered on Solyndra and its sisters, to the massive unwieldy regulations that make it impossible for small businesses to hire, survive, expand, to know that whatever the rhetoric, what they really are building is a society with MASSIVE government which in turn picks and chooses the winners from MASSIVE Corporations (bureaucracies like other bureaucracies) who are in turn inured from competition by the government’s aiding and abetting (Almost every monopoly – and the almost is only there because though I know a lot of economic history there MIGHT be a freak occurrence somewhere in history that I don’t know about – REAL monopoly was brought about by government either openly or through regulation.)

The end result of a strong central government with near unlimited power is to attract the greedy and power hungry, both to work for it, and to lobby it on behalf of other organizations.

The end result of growing government is a country in which there is no room for the little guy – and which, incidentally, slowly starves to death because – I know you’ll be shocked, shocked – turns out centralized government or economy or ANYTHING really isn’t the most efficient.  Because when you don’t have to be responsive to the consumer, it’s the same as not being responsive to the voter – you can meet your shoe production goals by making only baby shoes and only for the left foot.

Making government small and getting its regulatory claws as much as possible out of business, OTOH, leaves precious little room for a corporation to take over (Much less “the corporation” whatever that is) because there will always be competitors who can do it smaller and faster and more targeted.  (Corporations that get large enough become STUPID.  See IBM.)

But Sarah, you say, you wrote about corporate take over in a world with no government!  Yes, the same way I wrote about an anarcho-capitalist society in a world without government.  It’s possible if it’s small and if people have no written law (or ignore it, as we’re doing!) Even then, for a corporation to take over without governmental aid, I had to make it a situation where they had a natural monopoly over the energy source.  Break that (as my characters do) and their strength is gone.

Which leads us to “if we abolish government the Corporation will take over” – unless the left now has their version of the illuminati conspiracy, really… what in heck are they talking about?  What is “The Corporation”.  I have to sort of assume that these people posting this once took a look at a job where ties were required and ever since have been afraid of “the Corporation” coming after them and forcing them to tie on neckwear.  Nothing else makes sense.

I don’t want to abolish government, I want to restrict FEDERAL government to its enumerated powers.  Which would leave me free to say hire an assistant and pay him/her a negotiated package that includes stuff like eating with us a couple of times a week, and perhaps going to cons with us.  This would allow me to grow my business, and perhaps hire more assistants at above the now federally mandated minimum wage (supposing I could hire the first below it)  And eventually the Hoyt-writing empire might rival what the ever charming Sabrina Chase calls the Media-industrial complex.  (Well, you never know till you try, and there are, after all, four of us.)

A strong central government OTOH is considering an internet tax which would make it impossible for people like me to sell anywhere but Amazon or other equally large corporations.  (Which is why they’re all quiet as little mice.)  Because the keeping track of paperwork would make it impossible for a small vendor to maintain its own store.

This in turn removes what I always tell people who tell me Amazon if evil and will turn on indie publishers “If that’s true, someone else will come along, offer us a better deal, and Amazon will be history.”  With the government regulations giving it overwhelming advantage, Amazon WILL (guaranteed) turn evil and turn on the indie publishers.

Because large entities prefer negotiating with large entities, a large government favors large corporations who in turn favor other large corporations.

I’m fairly sure this is not the Democrats “secret” plan.  Most of them seem to think government power makes people angels.  And those who are trying to get more power like this story and lie to themselves.

However, I guarantee to you that the Democrats want to grow a central, Federal government and remove all restraints on it.  And that at the end of it is a very poor country populated by massive and massively inefficient corporations.

The other is a fantasy for people who haven’t yet recovered from the sixties.

UPDATE: To whom it may concern.  Stuff now up in subscriber space!

Today I should do the chapter, but I’m still not QUITE up to it (though no antihistamines today.) I should also – in the sense that it’s my obligation – write about why the voting changes in Colorado are wrong, and can’t even be covered by the fig leaf of “greater voting opportunity.”  There is in fact no fig leaf except the destruction of the individual right to vote.  It has to be the intended result.  (And btw, would there be a remedy via the courts?  That at least ties it up long enough that we get a couple more elections and throw these clowns out?)

But writing about this will just make me depressed.  It probably helps understand my feelings if you “get” that at eight, when I had no clue where Denver was, I told everyone I was going to grow up, be a writer and live in Denver, and that the more I found out about both ideas, the more I wanted to do it.

I don’t want to move out and I don’t think it does any good, either.  When we moved to the Springs it was trending Libertarian.  If all it takes is for these vile progs to get power, and they change the rules so it can’t ever be taken away, ANY PLACE is vulnerable.

Anyway – I’m not going to talk about that.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the many heads of the writer – mostly because I think the current problem I’m having is due to being stuck in the wrong head.

I’m not talking about pen names.  That’s a problem all its own.  Humans are, as you know, weird people.  You know this particularly if you’re one.  What I’ve found with pen names – caveat emptor – is that once you give something a name, it acquires its own personality and ideas, PARTICULARLY if it’s secret.  This was part of the reason I had to drop my nom de political blog.  This woman was living in my head rent free.  I could tell you what she was doing at any time of the day.  It got creepy.

The open pen names aren’t as much of a problem.  Sarah D’Almeida is just another name for me.  (Interesting side note – my maiden name was de Almeida but I figured D’Almeida got me better shelving, in the Ds which used to be important.  It wasn’t until talking to my dad that he told me that de Almeida was ONLY adopted by his father and before that our family name was D’Almeida.  Now I wish I had known that before I got citizenship, when I could have changed, and before I named the boys.)

But the secret names – and in these days of indie writer, every I writer I know is at least trying those with short stories – quickly try to become multiple personalities.  My kid was groaning about his romance pen name, which hasn’t even been published yet…  And I once overheard one of my colleagues say “My pen name and I go into a room, only I come out.”

The levels of insanity in that could potentially make normal people think we should all be locked up, except they can’t because we’re writers and we’re supposed to be nuts.  It’s right there, on the box.

But keep that in mind, because it will come up later in this ramble.

Right now the heads I’m dealing with are all mine – no pen names, no secret names.  They’re more what you’d think of as toolboxes.

If you’re a writer there’s several things you do – you have to do – research, edit and creative writing as such.  These all employ different thought processes.

I don’t know how other people do this, understand, so what you’re getting is me, and how I do this.

I do three types of research: unfocused “craving” reading, often on subjects that I have no idea relate to anything I’m writing; focused general reading on a time or a subject; spot-research where I look up words, locations or names to fill in a hole in a story that’s being revised.

You’d think the middle one would take up most of my time, but no.  The middle one is controllable.  The first one comes from wherever the impulse to write comes, and it can become overmastering and interrupt things that need to be done, and generally drive me nuts.

Did I say I have NO idea where these needs to read obsessively on a subject come from?  Worse, that sometimes the idea that I’m groping for doesn’t show up for years?  For instance, I spent three years reading everything I could about Queen Victoria’s empire, with a sort of compulsive intensity.  It wasn’t until ten years later that it became the proposal for the Magical British empire.  Worse, by that time I’d forgotten the reading.  I’m only sure it was sort of there, all the time, buried deep, because I bought a bunch of books to research the proposal and then, when cleaning to move, found the exact same books, bought ten years later, at the bottom of a closet.

Right now the craving readings are on true-crime cases – bizarre ones, like the Black Dahlia case – and paranormal activity.  That these are hitting together is making me feel skivvy.  I’m not sure I want to write anything that presents that way.  (OTOH isn’t part of what I do to bring stuff into the light?  It’s what I try to do at any rate.)

Anyway, that’s taking up a whole lot of time when I should be writing, and it’s hitting “that” part of the brain, that is neither writing nor revising and making it very active.  (We should light the rat signal and get Dr. Tedd Roberts to come xplain how this works.)

At the same time, I’m editing a bunch of manuscripts, and that’s a different type of mind again.

There are three different types of revision.  There’s story revision, but I call that rewrite.  There’s coherence revision and there’s copyediting.

I know a lot of people who write in revising mode.  If you can, it’s best to revise in writing mode.  What I mean is that your revising mode tends to be more word focused and … petty, frankly.  It can’t see the story and it goes nuts on commas and concordance.  Or it picks at “you said he was standing, but now he’s getting up from the chair.”

I’m doing that type of revision on Musketeer’s Seamstress, because it needs it, but it brings out a type of thought that doesn’t LET me write.  I call him Bob.  He has a clipboard and wears glasses.

The problem with both of those parts of my writing brain being very active is that it seems to cause a “different” type of block.  As in, I can see what I should be writing, I just can’t do it.  I can’t get in the story mind.

The research mind is a dreaming and putting things together mind, but it’s not coherent enough to write in, and the revision mind just won’t let me write more than three words at one go.

Usually I can flip between either of these minds and the story mind, but both at once are driving me nuts.

Which brings me to a book I read for research this week – It’s called “the Trickster and the Paranormal” and it analyzes the trickster both as a parapsychology phenomenon, enshrined in the religions of the world and tricksterism as part of being involved in these marginal fields – what they call “at the edge.” This is used both in the senses of low-status and the fact that what people do in these fields isn’t rightly understood.  So it’s easy to cheat.  And almost impossible to do scientific research.

It occurred to me when reading it that a lot of our scientific fields have gone “at the edge” in pursuit of cash, and that there too the waters have gotten too muddy to know what is going on, precisely.

However, by definition, being a writer is one of those fields.  Heck, we’re not even sure what we do, ourselves.  There is a lot of “and then something happens and I have a story in my mind.”  It seems like shamanism even to me at times.  And the impossibility of relating these subconscious processes to others leads us to making them, instead, rational and ordered, which involves lying to ourselves, which in turn messes us up.

Anyway, they defined the type of personality involved in this and it seemed like a description of most artists, including writers.  People who have trouble describing what is true and what isn’t, and who often have issues with relationships,etc.

I’d say it confirmed my rather smug idea that I’m too sane for this field, except that a person who complains two of her heads are blocking the third, probably shouldn’t say that.

And that, my dears, is the state of the writer for today.  I am going for a walk and then seeing if I can revise a chapter so I can put up a coherent chunk of Shadow Gods in the subscriber space.