According To Hoyt

I hope to post the chapter of Rogue Magic tomorrow.   Today I’m skipping out which is par for the course this week.  I truly can’t explain WHY when I take anti-estamines (sp?) it turns off the writing thing, but it does.

So…  I’m going to clean and stuff and will post the chapter tomorrow.

Meanwhile, it would be helpful if one of you has been collecting the chapters of Rogue Magic, if you send me a unified copy.  I swear I’m missing every other chapter which doesn’t make things easier.

And now, pray for me, I’m headed to litter box territory.

Meh — one of those days when I skip out and all that.  Thank you for putting up with these occasional glitches.

Yesterday after an attempt at writing that felt like I was trying to extrude my brain through my nose (sorry for the graphic image, but that’s exactly what I felt like.  For some reason sinus infections make me slow.  On the good side, it’s now on the way out, I think.  I might help it along with a light hydrogen peroxide solution snort.) I went downstairs to watch an episode of Columbo.

It wasn’t one of my favorites, since I rather liked the guy you know is going to get killed, and this one had way more lead up to the ‘being killed’ than most episodes.

It was the chess tournament episode, and here’s the thing: the challenger is clearly Russian.  He was also a good ol’ boy and you couldn’t help liking him.  Even if, like me, you were aware that the people they let out, even “athletes” (which chess players are sort of sideways) were vetted on loyalty to an evil regime.  (Not saying all of them adhered to it.  Clearly a lot defected, but saying that they had to stealth better than I managed with all my might to stealth in a less evil regime.)  And even though this character is not showing as wishing to defect.

But he is almost little-boy endearing in his escaping from his handlers to go eat snails, and he is clearly a good person in coming to the rescue of … well… thinking he’s coming to the rescue of the guy planning to murder him.

And it got me thinking.

People are weird creatures.  Very weird.  They can believe the most outrageously evil stuff – like that people can somehow be forced to become mere automatons in the service of the state; or that those who’ve worked hard for something should be despoiled; or that a particular race/culture/ethnicity is the repository of all evil in the world; or that a particular gender is not quite human – all while remaining at heart good people.

Were there good Nazis?  Almost surely.  And I mean good people who were Nazis.  And I don’t mean just the ones who had no clue what was going on in the camps.  I mean of course NO ONE WHO KNEW THE DETAILS (the details were unforgivable) but any number of people who thought other people were “cleanly” or “Humanely” being put down and who were essentially good people in everything else.  They just believed Jews (and gays and gypsies) must be exterminated for “the greater good.”  I bet you there were people who believed this who would forego their last morsel of bread to feed a stranger, or take off their coat on a freezing night to give to their neighbor.  And I bet you some of them too KNEW Jewish people and wouldn’t approve of THOSE being killed, making a compartment in their minds called “but he’s not like other Jews.”

Were there good communists?  Of course there were and are, in the same way there are good Nazis.  These are people who think only of the end they desire.  “I want everyone to have a good meal” etc.  They look at the glossy pictures of celebrities wasting in a night sums that would support a family for a year, and they think “why do they need to do that?” From there to thinking all private property should be abolished, it’s a step.  It’s a particularly easy step if your society has long ago foregone teaching real economics or real individual ethics and teaches that all bourgeois virtues come from having bourgeois wealth.  (And also teaches that if you’re poor it’s somehow more “authentic” to be thuggish and uncouth.)

Why am I bringing this up?  Do I think we shouldn’t condemn the “good” members of these evil cults?  Do I think that their good intentions justify their actions?  Do I think we should surrender, because some of them are “good”?

No.  Quite the opposite.  I do think in the “how we got where we are” that some of the older “right wing” – republicans, libertarians, anyone to the right of Lenin – got where we are by doing exactly what I just said.  They knew these people.  They were good people.  They had good intentions.  And up through the late eighties it seemed like the march of international communism couldn’t be stopped, which led to…

The entire attitude we see in RINOS today and which makes us howl and rage, and which is “Their hearts are in the right place; maybe they won’t screw up this time; we will just try to slow them down.”

That misguided tolerance has got us where we are.  It isn’t just the left’s intent and determined long march through the institutions – though it is that too, particularly mass media and mass communication institutions – it is also the soft certainty that these people are good, we like them, and we don’t want to offend them by speaking up.  Because they mean well, really.

The problem of their meaning well is that nowhere have their well-meaning intentions come to fruition.  From Asia to Europe, everywhere communism or socialism has touched it has brought misery and poverty.  And there’s no point at all talking about societies not being “quite right”

Everywhere a touch of economic freedom has gone, even hampered by the society or the culture, or the fact it was so watered down as to be ridiculous, it has brought prosperity.  For a case study compare China and Hong Kong.  North and South Korea.

Yes, this post is in a way a companion piece to the civil war in science fiction, and to “being normal.”  The civil war in science fiction is a mirror of the civil war in the larger society.  (Only we go to battle wearing Spock ears.  Deal.)  Only I think the sides are more balanced in the larger society.  I think the left outstrips the right in science fiction, at least among published authors and those who read NOW.  Because everyone else has been run off.

In the larger society, it’s anybody’s guess, though I think if the issues were brought to point, the left has gone so far left that it commands maybe a quarter of the population and a lot of those are impaired in some way.  Compare the tea parties to the OWSers, not just in size, but in slice of the population.  (And if all you know of tea parties are the media portrayals let me assure you they’re wrong.  I attended two in my region when they first started.  Not only was it not just old white males, but more than half the people were female and we had a slice of minorities probably larger than the general population in this white bread city.  In fact, probably, the larger group was Hispanic (which is to be expected, here.))  And before you bring up the results of the last election: first – unimaginable levels of fraud.  I said it, I stick by it, I saw it up close and personal.  It might or might not have involved a fifth column in the challenger’s campaign.  I think it did, but that’s my opinion.  Second – a media which reports nothing.  Now, still, most of the populations has not heard of Benghazi.  Third – the media portrayal of the opposition as the “church lady” circa 1950.  And it’s no point at all saying that the republicans shouldn’t have furnished them ammunition.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to make sure a group that large and that diverse NEVER slips?  The same media who never mentions goofs like Guam tipping over, or the events in Benghazi is quite ready to jump on malapropisms like “real rape” when it comes from the opposition.  And for now, at least, the media shapes “normal” for a good part of the population.

As all groups that are getting suppressed, stigmatized and written off the national discourse, anyone to the right of Lenin has been getting upset.  And considering the effect that the economic policies to the left of Lenin (No?  Crony capitalism is always an effect of communism.  More or less dressing of it is the only difference.) are having on most of our lives and livelihoods, people are getting VERY upset.

I’m hearing more and more “It’s going to come to shooting.”  I have a sinking feeling in my water that it might very well come to that.  I’d prefer not, though.  Look, I have sons.  Also, we do not live in a nice world.  If our world were really the black-and-white world the liberals believe in, where the USA is the big bad wolf and everyone else is a sweet little lamb who wouldn’t hurt anyone but for fear of the wolf, a civil war might not be a bad idea.

Of course if the world really were like that, we’d be dealing with a species other than human and perhaps communism would work.  Who knows?  May be worth an SF story.

But the world is not like that, and the US even if it is rapidly flushing generational wealth down the toilet is still much wealthier than most of the world, and is way wealthier than most of the Americas.  (This btw is taken by the communists as proof of malfeasance.  It’s a religious dogma.)

While we are involved in a civil war – and let’s assume it’s only half as bloody and half as long as our last one – do you think the other nations of the world will sit still?  Forget a Chinese invasion (though G-d knows you shouldn’t) or Russia getting involved on one side or another with a  view to ruling portions of our country when all is done (and if you dismiss that, you should study the roles of France and England on the past civil war) and just think about the people who hate us and who think (and our media has HELPED this perception) all their woes are our fault, and who  think they’re accumulating virgins in heaven – and prestige on Earth – by hitting us with acts of terrorism writ large.

How many cities do you think we’d lose to random acts of revenge?

What I mean is that it might very well come to that.  But do you want it?  Talk about setting us back generations.  Yes, I know you’re furious and I’ve heard the “we have all the guns” boast.  It’s not true, okay?  Yeah, we have most of them.  And sure, we probably could win in days.  Except that you forget how many third world armies would gladly fight on the other side, once it got started.  And would be promised everything they want if they do.

Oh, sure, they’d probably still lose – but I’m predicting we’d all be wading in blood to our ankles before it’s said and done, and parts of the country would be radioactive for a century.

Again, it might still come to that.  And I think the other side wants that – probably more than even the nuts on the “right” – because part of their religion (don’t fool yourself it’s not one) is the belief that history has favorites and that they’re it.  They think in the end they win.  (They might perhaps want to consult the Norse legends, to figure out which said was believed to win in the end.  Never mind.)

But before the shooting starts – in this moment in the heart of the storm – perhaps those of us to the right of Lenin should try something we haven’t tried before.  Perhaps we should try speaking out.

Look, I’m as cowardly as the rest of you.  I spent more than twenty years, between breaking in and finally losing my mind, listening to digs about “the rich” from people who could buy me and sell me outright; I spend years at parties and meetings listening to Marxist pap and not pointing out how stupid it was; listening to public figures on the right being denigrated as “stupid” when it was obvious they weren’t, etc.  And I shut up.  Because I wanted to make a living in my chosen profession.

I’m still not half as brave as I’d like to be, though I try to speak out if I’m present.  And yes, I know I’ll pay a monetary price.  But I don’t go out of my way to look for fights, because I’ll pay a monetary price.  And also because, frankly, I know many good people on their side.  I don’t want to upset them.

But consider—

My grandmother used to say “silence is consent.”

Consider that when they say ridiculous stuff in public like “the fat cats never pay” or other bits of Marxist agit prop and we stay quiet, they don’t know that we disagree.  And they take what they’re saying for normal and tilt further left, until you get stuff like “We live in an evil patriarchy” (in a society where women are LEGALLY given preference for almost everything and while these same people stay quiet on the societies that whip women for showing ankle.)

Every time we internally go “oh, that stupid slogan again” – every time we stay quiet because we like the people as much as we despise their stupid religion; every time we shut up for the sake of peace or a job, or …  We’re allowing “normal” to be moved farther left.  And most people want to be normal and fit in.  And the truly extreme ones then feel more justified in being extreme.

Every time our silence gives consent, what we’re giving consent to is the inevitability of eventual shooting.

You know those massacres that have happened in every communist paradise?  Here the would-be victims are armed.  To quote the title of some Baen anthologies There WILL be War.

Unless we stop it now.  Unless we’re as brave with our words as we eventually will have to be with our guns, if we stay silent.

I came out of the political closet and fought like h*ll to elect a man who would have been at best as statist as George Bush.  (No, he was not my horse in the race, ever.)  I did so because I thought it would keep us from the shooting war.

Now, it might be too late.  Or it might not.  Staying quiet and cleaning your guns might be expedient.  But is it the best for everyone?  What about the good people on the left?  What about the innocents who will be caught in this?  What about the rest of the world that will undoubtedly sink if the US as we know it vanishes.

Yes, we’re all ready to take our piece of flag and head to the bunker, to preserve the idea of the US until we can rebuild it.

But wouldn’t it be better not to let it pass from this Earth?

Speak now.  Maybe we can hold our peace.

 

Wayne Blackburn Happy Crow threatened/promised that on Wednesday all of you would do posts on “in my copious spare time” and link to mine.  I’m fairly sure he was joking, but I thought just for the heck of it I WOULD do a post on all the stuff I’m supposed to be doing, all the stuff I’d like to do and the stuff that’s waiting my “copious spare time.”

Is this whining?  No.  It’s a bit of a complaint, because with all these things to do, I often end up not doing anything all day.  Or rather, I do a ton of little things (like today) but nothing of what was on my to-do list.  And then I get upset, but mostly at myself.  And my main reason for getting upset at myself is how easily I get ill.  Like, right now, I’m battling a sinus infection, which is a ridiculous disease that should not make you feel this low.

However, for some reason, my sinus’ being out of kilter just makes me want to sleep the day into the night.  Which is also why you’re getting this excuse for a post today.

And in case it does sound like whining…  It’s not because if I had to choose, I’d much rather and by a great amount be over-busy than not busy enough.

When I first got married, I came from a situation in which I had been teaching, going to college full time, and taking four language courses at other institutions.  There were days I left the house at seven thirty am and didn’t come home again till nine pm at night, at which point I’d eat dinner in solitary splendor and do whatever homework or studying was needed for starting at seven thirty am again.

I was perfectly happy in this routine.  I squeezed in a social life around the edges and usually took Sunday afternoon and just slept.

Then came my first two years of marriage, when I had no job, no car, and was stuck in the house all day.  I went so nuts I started trying to write for publication.

Then I got a job in which I got paid normal amounts, but had to work unpaid overtime.  We were so busy I often bought clothes because I hadn’t had time to do wash.  In the end we realized that we were spending more money with me working than we did with me not working.  Even though I was being paid decently, it didn’t compensate for the sheer amount of work which meant I didn’t cook at home, or wash clothes, or… and besides it was really interfering with the infertility treatments.

Then came the kids, and Robert’s first three years of life I moved three times, and I was sometimes so tired I couldn’t think.

Then came the crash of my writing career in 03 and days when I had nothing to do but clean and decorate.  And then it took off again, and I’ve been writing multiple books a year and unable to take the time to breathe.

I’m not sure what this means except that there doesn’t seem to be a happy medium, (possibly because he/she keeps getting struck) and if I had to choose I’d rather be insanely busy, because it seems to give the opportunity for things to get better.  Also, as grandma used to say, “to stop is to die.”

If that’s true I’m going to live forever…

Right now, on the plate and getting more overdue by the minute:

Five short stories.  One isn’t due till June, but the rest need to get out there.  These are proving a small issue because I haven’t READ short stories in too long, and what you read absolutely affects the habit of mind you get into.  Yeah, I can probably write shorts without reading them; I have enough practice.  But actually sliding into them would make things easier.

Through Fire: technically not due until August, but I’d like to do an extra book this year because it’s pushing at me, so…  Well, it’s started and I am actually working at it.

The subscriber space: It hasn’t been updated this week, mostly because all I did was editing.

Finishing A Flaw In Her Magic for Naked Reader Press before my editor crawls out through the monitor and beats me.  I have maybe three days of work in it, but I need to get back into the head space.

Ditto the second vampire musketeer’s book – and here’s the craving belief that I should just let it slide till the rights revert to the first next year.

Getting a sketch to the artists doing the cover for Witchfinder.

Finishing editing Witchfinder.

Finishing editing Shadow Gods.

Finishing editing Musketeer’s Seamstress.

(The problem with these is that if I get interrupted, I get popped out, also for things like the musketeers, I need to immerse fully.  I THINK I need to take a few days and do them sequentially.)

Picking cover art for a few Naked Reader Properties.  (Why am I the cover director?  Ah.  Well, the person doing it had a death in the family, and things got weird, and… yep, I was the one who could squeeze it in.)

I have to read a couple of friends’ books for quotes.

I’m doing an introduction to the annual collection of someone who will eventually be a friend and is right now an online acquaintance of whom I am a – squee  type – fan.

These are all things (except for writing the WHOLE of Through Fire) which must be done by the end of the month.

Then come the things I’d REALLY like to do:

I’d like to write the first Orphan Kittens mystery, before Everitt Mickey physically crawls through my computer to get it.

I’d like to start cleaning the room in the attic we call “the beach room” because it needs to be empty before we can even start preparing the house for sale.  (It has a gross beach mural from the seventies.  And we use it as a storage room, which means you can’t even get into it.  And some of the stuff that’s in there, like my good sewing machine, I need to fix other stuff.)

I’d like to go to my hairdresser.  I’ve been overdue for an appointment since JANUARY.  My hair is becoming too long to manage easily, but I have yet to have the time.

I’d like to do some research I’m going to need for Darkship Revenge.

I’d like to read a few books that have been waiting patiently.  This is not just for fun.  When I’m this busy I just re-read, but you need new input, now and then.

I’d like to finish the re-do on my website, but unfortunately it will take a bunch of figuring out ways to make the interface behave, so I need about a week.  I ain’t gonna get it, so I have to cram a week’s worth of work in the spare hours.

These are things I’d like to at least have started in the next couple of months.

And then – in my copious spare time –

I’d like to learn to use the new art computer, and poser.

I’d like to read the three books I got for Christmas on interstellar travel.

I’d like to start studying Latin and Greek again.

I’d like to finish putting up all my trunk short stories and organize a listing of the future history stories, in order, as well as revise the thirty or so that need serious revision, so I can sell them to webscriptions and also make collections for Amazon.

I’d like to start writing a short story/novella a weekend again.

And I’d like to go somewhere for a week and just sleep…

I could get rid of this entire backlist in a couple of months if I could just take it one at a time, but life doesn’t work that way.  So…  I try to make plans, but it’s like making a budget when we were newlywed.  It always showed we couldn’t possibly be surviving, and yet we were.

So I go on.  To stop is to die.  And I’m not anywhere near stopping.

Different post over at Mad Genius Club.

Oh, yeah, and my novel in thirteen weeks thing is up at PJM.

*Sorry, I did it again.  Put post up and forgot to push the “publish” button.  I swear…*

An article came out recently saying that the brains of 25 year olds today resemble those of  15 year olds in the past. (I’d link it, but, as usual, can’t now find the article.  If one of you puts it in the comments, I’ll link it.) (Thanks to Alert Reader RES for the link!) To some extent this sounds like a good thing.  Note the “to some extent.”

I grew up in a society where it was clear that there were different rates of maturation for those who started working at ten and those who went to school to their early twenties.

When I was little, ten was the most usual age to get a job in the village.  Yes, the law was that kids had to stay in school later.  Portugal was, if not the first, among the very first countries to pass anti-child-labor laws.  But there were loopholes – there always are when a well-intentioned law is out of step with the economic reality of the country – and so people got certificates saying their kids were educable mentally retarded – despite often flying grades from elementary which ended in fourth grade – and got them jobs in the textile factories or apprenticed them with various craftsmen.  Later there must have been a crack down on these certificates, so every middle class family acquired a maid of ten or twelve years old, who was according to parents “Sent to live with relatives” – well, I suppose that was right, right?  After all go back far enough we’re all relatives.

This is btw a prime example of how both well intentioned, completely unrealistic laws help nothing, and how crackdowns make things worse.  In the factories the kids were treated well, because there were inspections and labor laws to follow.  Once the factories were forced to stop hiring kids – but a family still couldn’t support itself from just a salary or even two — those little girls were all but slaves, because they had no recourse to any legal authority, their wages such as they were were mailed to their parents, and their conditions depended entirely on the benevolence of their employer.  It made me faintly queasy.  (Made mom faintly queasy too.  Her reaction was “I can’t ‘hire’ one of those girls, because what would happen was I’d adopt her and do the work for both of us, and pay her parents to boot.  She also thought less of – and lost – a few friends who ‘hired’ these kids.)

Anyway, it was very easy to see – and I mean physically – the difference between those kids and we, pampered children of the middle class.  They looked older.  And I don’t mean older in the sense of aging.  There is some of that, but mostly I see that in paintings of the nineteenth century or so, where little kids have these aged, on the verge of lined faces, and I’ve always wondered if that was vitamin deficiency.  The kids I grew up with weren’t like that, but two years after I’d left elementary (ten, fourth grade was the end of elementary and fifth and sixth grade were middle school) and was ready to enter high school, these kids whom I’d played with and who had looked pretty much like me back then looked… grown up.  Yes, they were usually smaller than I – at 5’5” at 12 and weighing in at 120 lbs, for my generation in Portugal I was what is known as a moose – and often less developed, but they stood with more confidence, they could do things I couldn’t (like navigate opening a bank account or a savings account.)  They were adults despite the lack of full adult growth.

But even that changes.  We just bought the entire Columbo series and we’re going through the second season – listen, I DO have a sinus infection, which, btw, is annoying because it’s something no one dies of, but my mind becomes total mush – and I swear the women who are considered “young and sexy” look my age now (though thinner, I’ll grant you.)  I.e. to the modern eye they read “forty to fifty.”  How much of this is improved health care and vitamins and all that, making us look younger?  I don’t know.  But I do know that twenty something year olds now look like we did in our teens (only usually pudgier, but that’s a talk for another time).

And that makes me wonder.  People are maturing later physically and emotionally.  I remember watching Friends and thinking that might have been stuff my friends and I did in our early twenties, (not really.  Well, some of my friends, but in general we weren’t that sex-involved.  OTOH the stupid pranks and such?  Totally.) but these people were turning thirty and were still not established in life; still had no direction.  I’m afraid that’s slipped further still, due to a combination of many things, including the horrible economy.  I now sometimes see “a bunch of kids in coffeeshop” then realize some of them have white hair coming on and are probably early thirties.  But their faces still look like kids’ faces, their movements and everything still says juvenile.

I wonder how much of this is the brain regulating the body.  We do know that in the history of the species we’ve been moving to extend our childhood and that to an extent this has helped us because we had more time to learn.  This particular brand of naked apes, after all, hasn’t conquered the world through our special speed or whatever, but through our learning and brain.  We have been extending childhood so we can cram more and more learning before we hit our adult years.

There are only two problems: we haven’t really pushed off senescence much.  We mitigate it, sure – through stuff like better nutrition and MUCH better medicine, but that doesn’t really push off getting old.  We’re still hitting the beginning of old age – white hairs, decreased energy – at around thirty five, just like our ancestors were.  We’re healthier, so it’s showing less, but it’s still there.

And this applies to having children too.  By the time today’s children hit “grown up” they likely are no longer able to have children.

All of which might or might not mean much of anything, but what worries me is the idea that our kids – all our kids – are now behaving like the kids of very wealthy people in the past.  They never mature, they live at an infantile level forever, and they waste their lives in the pursuit of “juvenile” stuff.

More, I’m worried that at some level we’re creating the exact same type of personality as the royal prince whose parents lived too long and prevented him from taking adult responsibilities for far too long.  I’m afraid we’ve entered the territory of “we’re making their lives so easy, why do they hate us?” (Which could also very easily apply to home-grown terrorists.)

What precipitated it was this prank that some cute comedian came up with. You were supposed to text your parents with “I got two grams for $40” and then “Sorry, wrong person” and sit back and watch the results.

Yes, I know there’s a whole genre of “fake texts” and that some of these might or might not have been doctored.  OTOH the whole thing, both the prank and the responses rings true to what would happen in most of our social circle.  And it baffles me.

Our kids know we’re giving all aid and support we can, PROVIDED that they keep their noses clean and bring home nothing worse than Bs.  (This is only necessary because younger son messes up tests on a routine basis, and “does not test well” has always been his issue.  Even he has mostly As.)

If one or both of the kids had sent us that text, they’d find themselves on the front porch with the clothes on their backs, as we waved goodbye.  Yes, even knowing that it was a prank.  Perhaps particularly knowing that it was a prank.

The idea of kids who are, probably, mostly, legal adults, who think it is fun to play on their parents by pretending to be drug buyers/dealers (considering all the legal penalties that attain to both kid and parent if the drug is in the house, up to and including forfeiture of the property) have proven that at some very deep seated level, they resent the parents who are looking after them.

I don’t even know what to say other than that, other than “when you artificially prolong childhood in homo sapiens, till it starts blending with senescence, it seems to create a backlash.  Perhaps Heinlein’s thing about there being however many words for “Thank you” in Japanese and all of them involving some level of resentment should be invoked.  Or perhaps the thing about never ruining your children’s lives by making them too easy.

Yes, as a parent, of course I want to ease everything for them.  On the other hand… How much is adversity or at least struggle needed to form the adult brain?  And what happens when people never encounter any growing up? (Addition thanks to alert reader Bearcat.  [someone has to be alert.  This is my brain on sinus infection.])

I’ve been promising to do a promo post for me and friends and readers of this blog and failing spectacularly, mostly due to my brain having fallen out of my ears.

Seriously, at some point one or more of you are going to need to point out the fact that the thing you DON’T do when your schedule is already full up is arbitrarily add more stuff.  “Daily blog and five shorts due this month?  Piffle.Scheduled for two novels?  No fear, add two more!  Then add an episodic one on weekends!  Not enough?  Add an how-to-write column at pjm on Tuesday afternoon.  Then start editing old shorts and just recovered novels to put out.  More! More! More!”

I keep telling myself this is insane, but myself knows self lies for a living…  I don’t believe a word I say.

The distressing result is that things tend to break down, and I can’t force myself to work for sometimes hours at a time.  And then when I come back to work I’m so out of it that nothing non essential gets done.  Hence the forever-breaking-down blog tour — yes, I know I still have three or four appearances to do!  And forgetting to promote you good people who deserve it.  (Also failing to do my web site, or even rebuild the “My books” section under this blog.)

Which brings us to today.  This weekend there was a rather sharp breakdown — mostly a conjunction of physical stuff and a really bad sinus hopefully-not-quite-infection-yet, which had me sitting in front of the computer, staring at the screen going “Okay, now I–” then realizing this had taken three hours, somehow (I blame Terry Pratchett’s monks of time.  They’re overactive in my life.)  I will be putting stuff up on the subscriber space, but later today.  First, I must do my post for PJM because my editor needs time to look it over before it goes live tomorrow afternoon.

Some stuff DID get done, like my finally getting the RIGHT opening for Through Fire and editing a short story and a novella to go up.  But it was not half what needed to be done.

Anyway, so I’ll hope you excuse me this half hearted post.  To compensate, I’ll list my “Free Soup” for the week, followed by things people have asked me to link.

Ill Met By Moonlight, the first book of my Shakespeare trilogy is free until the second of May.  We will also bring out the new edition in paper soon.  If these continue to sell well, I will do a kickstarter for the next three.  If there is enough interest. The cheap option for these is The Magical Shakespeare Omnibus, three books in one.

After the second of May I’ll take short stories free while I continue to revise The Musketeer’s Seamstress.  (Edit really, but heavy edit, as it was really badly edited before.)

My friend Ellie has her romantic suspense novel Wedding Bell Blues out for free.  She just released a paranormal romance Hunted.  While paranormal romance will never be my thing, it held my interest and didn’t get thrown against the wall, which from me to a paranormal romance is high praise indeed.  Be advised.

Cedar Sanderson has a YA fantasy Vulcan’s Kittens out and she’s also promoting other stories at her blog.

Travis Corcoran has The Aristillus Series a pair of science fiction novels about anarchocapitalism, economics, open source software, corporate finance, social media, antigravity, lunar colonization, genetically modified dogs, strong AI…and really, really big guns. (Sounds like fun — SAH) Free chapter here.  (I hear the first hit is always free — SAH)

Elizabeth McCoy has Queen of Roses.  She describes it as a story about an indentured servant on a cruise (space)ship, her fellow servant (the pilot), the crew, the passengers, and the stowaways. Bit of a fluffy SF, bit of a cozy mystery (I’m told).

Cyn Bagley has Urban Werewolf. (Cyn.  That cover.  Bigger letters!) and posts her poetry at Scrambled Sage.

Alma T. C. Boykin, our very own TXRed has Justice and Juniors out, the second one of her Cat Among Dragons series.

Sabrina Chase has The Scent of Metal out.  I will confess I haven’t read Sabrina’s books yet — but I have heard raves about them from people I trust, and also I’ve read her blog, and know the woman can sling words like a pro.  They’re on my list.

Tom Bridgeland has Iron Magic out.  (NICE cover!)

David Carrico asked me to mention 1636, The Devil’s Opera, his novel with Eric Flint.

If you’re not reading Older Son’s Robert A. Hoyt’s Ninja Nun comic, shame on you.  And if you have a few spare dimes to throw in his kitty, I’m afraid they go for school books and such fribbles.  I’m trying to convince him to run a fundraiser….

J.J. (James) DiBenedetto has asked me to mention his novels and been really patient in waiting.  His Author Page on Amazon is here.  The first novel is Dream Student. (And James, if you read this: bigger name and title!)

Russ Mitchell has Malik The Pawn.  (Heed me, for I’m the voice that cries in the desert — make thee the name and title bigger — SAH.)

Wesley Morrison has Let No False Angels out.

Celia Hays: Only A Paper Star (a short story collection.) The Heart Of Texas, collection of essays about interesting events and people in Texas history. Travels With Blondie— about being a single parent in the military.

Mary Catelli has a short story in Warrior Wisewoman edited by Roby James.

Archer Garrett: Flashback — a sci-fi novelette.  And here you can see samples of Pulse Chaser his steampunkish short story series/novel.

S. T. Gaffney has China Harbor — quoth her husband Frank:  Set in an island off the coast of China in 2012, which was the future when she wrote it, but then what is the future when you’re dealing with time travel anyway? It features a female scientist, as written by an actual female scientist. And yes, she’s heroic, and no, she doesn’t kick butt and shoot people. It’s a great read from many angles, including a full-on immersion in another culture, and a unique look at the laws of time travel.

J. A. Marlow – The String Weavers  From J. A. Marlow —“The String Weavers” is the first book in my String Weavers series. Disappearing food. Music no one else hears. An alien dropped off by a giant flaming bird… Abducted from Earth, Kelsey Hale finds herself in the middle of a deadly conflict among alien worlds and parallel universes. She must not only survive, but also rescue her father from a dangerous group of unknown intent. In the process discovering a family secret that will change her life forever.

Mike Weatherford didn’t give us links, so we’ll wait till he does it in the comments.  (Hey, Mike, did you know there are at least three people with your name writing?  No?  Well… some seem to do art and stuff.)

I know there are other people who asked me for mentions, who got lost in the shuffle because it’s been SO long.  Sorry.  This year has already been a year.  If you mention stuff I forgot in comments, I shall link here on updates.

And now I’ll go write weekly column for PJM before my editor starts pulling out his hair by the roots.

So… Would you read a writer with whose political opinions you disagreed?

Right now, I see you staring at the screen, going “Woman, if I didn’t, I’d never read anyone at all.”

Right.

However, as you know my blog immediately pre and after the election earned me a spate of letters saying “I was one of your greatest fans, but I’ll never read you again, as long as I live.”  I know Larry Correia gets those now and then too – as does probably any other conservative/libertarian/to the right of Lenin writer who dares to express a political opinion.

Most of those are fake (of course.)  They are another example of the tolerance brigade’s “shut up, you’re ruining the choir” techniques.

And some them, I’m sure, are absolutely right.  I’m sure?  Yes.  One of my favorite authors – not naming her, but arguably the person who got me back into reading SF/F after I dropped out in the late seventies/early eighties; someone I used to order every book as soon as advance ordering was available; someone whose books I evangelized, to the point of buying them in French to send to my brother (who, curiously, loathed them) – has remained unpurchased for the last five years.  This is all the weirder, since her books are not normally overtly political, and the opinions she does express are in no way left much less extreme left.

I had never thought about why I didn’t buy her since then – I mean, I know the precipitating incident, but not why it made me flinch from buying her new books – until we were discussing this last Friday with friends we had over for dinner.  Even then I had to think about it for a while.

This author’s great appeal to me, was how sensible she was about the insanity we call for reasons of easy classification “the twentieth century” because, I guess “insanity with year markers” was too long and “The Crazy  Years” might not be over yet.  In fact her entire oeuvre, even when it didn’t touch on history, was marked by such a strong common sense that it was one of its appeals to me, in a field where, back in the nineties half the writers were writing about people needing nose filters to go outside within ten years.

The precipitating incident was her starting to bring her politics to conventions – in the form of buttons worn, of speeches given at panels, of conversations that made me realize not only had she completely bought into the left nonsense but she had bought into some of the crazier left nonsense, wholly unexamined.  I don’t mean that she was to the left of Lenin (though I think by now she is.  That stuff has its effect) but that she had bought into things that, on the face of it, made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and that she too – like all the other crazies – conflated libertarian with nazi.  (Vee shall take over und vee shall leev you RUTHLESSLY alone.  You have been warned!)

That she brought this stuff in where it had NO REASON TO BE was the shock.  It was like she thought it gave her gravitas, or made her sound intelligent, or something.

And that’s why I haven’t bought any of her other books.  I am very afraid to run into this lack of sense in a new book, and then go back and re-read the older books, and realize that what I’d taken for excellent good sense was merely the regurgitation of what she thought people wanted to hear.  Which would, in turn, make those books and my memory of reading those books, into embarrassing faux-pas of interpretation on my part.  Because of that, I haven’t re-read any of her older books, either, because, well… I’m afraid of discovering bad things I didn’t know were there.

In case you were curious, no, I won’t stop reading some writer because his wife happens to act like a asshat (in a way not out of keeping with her profession.) And in general I won’t stop reading some author because he said something that makes me go “ew” – not unless it is pushed in my face when I don’t expect it, and the utter lack of tact shows less than common sense.  (I DO think that the penalties for asshat-dom being so skewed in our field ARE a serious indication of trouble, though.)

But the “I have found this about you and I’ll never read you again” can be real.  Which is why if you can, as an author, you should keep off politics – and religion, and any other hot button —  as much as you can, as long as it doesn’t relate to your books.

Right now you’re scratching your head.  Yes, I am aware I came out of the political closet.  But look here, the reason I did it was that I could either do that or continue writing largely about nothing.  Or worse, continue trying to stealth, which amounted to living a lie and was starting to twist me in ways I didn’t like.

Okay, not about nothing, but the layers of stealthing in my earlier fantasies and SF almost make them hard to understand and often when people latch on the superficial meaning, it loses me readers forever (which is why the Magical British Empire is getting revised).  Here’s the thing: when you write about history, or the setup of modern society (did anyone notice my shifters are NOT on welfare?  And they work?  And pay for things?) or just about anything at all that touches on society, economics or history, you don’t have much place to hide: not when you’re one of the damned.

What do I mean by one of the damned?  Well, the filter of the publishing world – and the critical world – is very fine indeed when it comes to opinions they cast to the outer darkness.  That is in general any opinion not to the left of Lenin.

Trips for that “I don’t trust you” or “I’ll never read another of your books” include your woman being insufficiently “strong” or your having women murderers in your mysteries, or your writing about warfare as though it were, sometimes, necessary, or your having a character who smokes tobacco (!), or your having a character who raises a middle finger to ANY authority (I had a huge argument with both agent and publisher over the refinishing – Daring Finds – mysteries because my main character won’t OBEY her addled, ex-hippie parents.  No, I’m not joking.  She’s 31.  They think her lack of following their plans for her life makes her “unsympathetic.”) or, of course, having the Baen logo on the spine.  (This is known in the field as “Baen taint.” – pour that taint on me baby!)

As I said, I don’t think I ever stealthed well enough to get that boost the establishment can give you – well, for one, note the lack of exploited Latinas in my books (rolls eyes.) – and so though I sold well enough to continue being bought, I was never going to win any fervent readers.  I was never going to be on the shelves enough to sell decently, even.  On top of that, writing while trying not to offend anyone was like running a race with both legs in a sack.  If you can’t put your deepest convictions in your books, and you’re always self-censuring, then your books are going to read bland and blah.  I couldn’t keep it up, and things leaked out

By the time I’d written the three space operas, I figured my politics were out there, for anyone who wanted to know them.  If people willfully avoided them and kind of winked sideways at my other books, they could pretend not to know.

Going “political” on my blog might erase that effect – maybe.  Here’s the thing… if I’m going to write every day my blog too has to be about stuff I care about.  Which means I’m going to write about what last hit my funny nerve; the latest news that made me think; things that interest me and things that revolt me.

I have tons of non-political interests, but they’re not the sort most people want to read about: I love cryptozoology and tin-foil-hat stuff – the weirder the better – and I like cats; and I’m passionately interested in the craft of writing.  Enough there to write blogs about?  Sure.  But not everyday.  Sometimes the idea/problem in my head is political, at least by the new definition of “political” which means it pertains to living in modern society, paying your bills and sending your kids to school.

And, as I said, there’s no way to make my ideas acceptable.  I could stealth enough for the OLD Marxists, by staying off stuff like TANSTAAFL.  But there is no way to stealth for the new identity Marxists, who think that who you ARE is political and unless your identity fits the right box, you’re a traitor of some sort.

So I gave it up.  Did it hurt my sales?  I don’t know.  I won’t know for a while.  BUT it was the only way I could continue working.

I’m betting on at least half the population being as disgusted by the whole show as I am.  I could be wrong.  And a good portion of that half might have never read sf/f OR have given up on it long ago.

I simply didn’t have a choice anymore.  And to an extent, too, I think, yes, we need to start revealing ourselves so that our brothers and sisters in the left (or simply wanting to fit in) don’t become ever more extreme because they think that’s what everyone believes.  And so that people can read genre again, without fearing that it’s just a never-ending left-propaganda show.  And to break the sense of “everyone believes this” the establishment has tried so hard to foster and which affects our type of Odd most of all.  It’s a duty.  A post of duty.  You don’t quibble with duty.  At least, I don’t.

Still, I try not to ambush people with partisan politics.  I still think most of my posts are of a social and philosophical bend, not political – and I run a greater risk of putting people to sleep than of inciting their animus.

And anyone on my facebook who doesn’t wish to know my political opinions or my off beat philosophy can simply ignore my blog.  I wish most of them were that discrete in their politics.

I try not to offend people, but you can’t stop those looking for a reason to be offended.  And then you have to wonder how much difference there is between them and the “shut up” brigade.

But do I care about an author’s politics as such?  Not unless they rub them in my face.  And in fact, though I’m not stupid, and I’m aware his politics differ from mine, if someone told me that there was a great political blog by Terry Pratchett, I’d probably stay away with intent for fear of reading something that would destroy the pleasure I have in his stories.

In the end, after it all washes away, only the stories matter.  None of us could care less that Shakespeare was a despicable propagandist for the Tudor regime.  We care that his stories touched the core of humanity.

And for writers who can do that any political taint will wash off.*

*This writer makes no such claims, except to say that she’s working on it.  It’s the only thing worth working on.

News: Our very own Foxfier has delivered herself of The Baron, a bouncing 7 and a half pound baby boy, who is focused on the important things of life – right now, eating.  Keep mommy and baby and the rest of her young family in your thoughts, if you’re so inclined.

My very first published book, Ill Met By Moonlight, is free, right now on Amazon.  Also, my friend Ellie Ferguson has her romantic suspense book Wedding Bell Blues out for free as well.

If you tell me what promotions YOU are running in the comments, I’ll make a post this afternoon.  And now I shall go for enough caffeine to de-zombie-fy.

 

 

 

There is a meme going around facebook, an innocuous little question of “What was the last female writer you read, and the book?”

It’s very popular and being echoed all over.  It’s also a good example of how people think when they get rats in their head.

“But, Sarah,” you say, “why would you object to being introduced to authors you might not have heard of?”

Brother!  This is not how book recommendations and word of mouth happen.  First, with few exceptions, no one in mixed company is going to admit to having spent the entire night awake reading something called “The Sinner” (a romance) or “Three For the Chair” (a mystery) or even “Martians Go Home.”  Instead they will mention the sort of book people buy and leave sitting around on their coffee table to look smart or caring or whatever it is society values this week.

Word of mouth book recommendations are far more targeted.  They’re done by people who know you or at least know what you like to read.  Even I, who read almost anything, have stuff I will not read.  One of them is insufferably stuffy books my kids were forced to read in school.  I couldn’t read them even to give them help with studying them.  In fact, I’d rather have a root canal than read most of those.  The other one is zombie fiction.  I truly don’t care if your zombie book is a masterpiece.  I don’t read zombies because yuck.  (Actually I don’t read most horror.  Not because I’m squeamish: I can write blood, guts and wading through both of those scenes.  I just don’t enjoy being either grossed out or scared.  So reading horror would be fatuous.)  You can recommend me those till you’re blue in the face.  I still ain’t gonna read them.

However, if it were “What was the last writer” or even new writer “you read and the book?” the meme would be merely stupid and vacuous.

It is far worse than that . “The last FEMALE writer” you read.  This is because female writers are supposed to be discriminated against.  Statistically (if you look at it sideways and squint) females get reviewed less than males, and this leads to their selling less than males and this leads–  Excuse me.  I’ll dissect this nauseating fallacy later.  First tell me the last book you read where you gave a good goddamn about the author’s sex.

Unless you are reading true accounts of childbirth or of surviving testicular cancer, if you were specifically looking at the gender of the name on the cover, you’ve got rats in your head.

The first rat is a cute and fluffy baby rat that leads you to believe that the name on the cover has anything to do with the gender of the author – but we’ll let that go by.

We’ll let it go by because the big rat is stinky and dropping pellets all over the culture, and will destroy us if we don’t trap him and kill him.  It’s stained with the blood of millions and it’s called Marxism.

One of the things Marxism does is treat people as widgets.  Take me.  Female, Portuguese origin, married, mother of two, liberal arts post-graduate degree.  I’m supposed to be exactly the same as anyone else with those characteristics.  You should be able to pop me out of this blog and pop someone with those same exact characteristics in my place, and they’re supposed to be indistinguishable.  (Stop laughing.  It’s impolite to laugh at the mentally afflicted.)

No?  How no?  What is the purpose then of all these comparisons “more men get reviews,” and “More men are bestsellers” and—

Even if those are true (some of them are for certain fields) what makes you think they’re fixable?  Or that they should be fixed?  Or that there is anything to fix?

Look up there to where, no, you can’t pop me out of this blog and pop someone else in its place and have it be the same.  So, let’s suppose – don’t I wish – my blog became one of the most popular on the internet.  Does this mean that Females of Portuguese origin, married, with two children and a liberal arts degree are being discriminated FOR in blogging.  No?  Why not?

The second rat is “diverse thinking.”  First of all there is the unexamined, cute, fluffy rat that says “diversity is strength.”  This is a shibboleth that’s never been proven, anywhere at all.  In fact, I can give you plenty of examples where diversity was the downfall or at least a serious handicap to a society.  But it is an almost adorable rat compared to the true repulsive idea that you can get more diversity of ideas by getting more PHYSICAL diversity.  This idea is something Hitler would have loved.  No, I’m not breaking Godwin.  I’m simply being factual.  The whole idea behind the eugenics movement that was all the rage when Hitler came to power (and not just the rage in Germany, btw.  If you think that, you have more than rats in your head) was that culture was inherited and inhered to your racial ancestry.  The white race was this and this and this, and the Black race was this and this and this.  And the pink race with polka dots was this and this and this.

THAT was the brilliant idea that filled the ovens with human beings.  The Marxists were so scared people would be repulsed by the results that for a while, they hid their “scientific governance, by the numbers” under The Worker Class and the Capitalist Class and the Intellectual Class – instead of calling them by race names (Both are constructs, in case you wonder.  Particularly in a blended society like the US.)

But it is impossible to run a society by the numbers without always coming back to the same primal sin of treating people as things.  Because if Bob over there is an exemplary person and Joe is a terrible person, there’s no way the government can equalize that.  But if Bob is rich and Joe is poor, the government can take money from Bob to give to Joe.  And if Bob is white and Joe is black, you just won the support of all the black people who aren’t doing very well monetarily (most white people aren’t either.  It is a characteristic of doing exceptionally well that few people do that.)  Not just because you might also give them money like you gave Joe, but because – by claiming that the reason Joe didn’t succeed was a social injustice and invisible racism – you gave them an excuse for failing (and most people, anywhere, under any regime, fail.)

It is perhaps no wonder, then, that this big stinky rat of an idea has got fixated on women, the minority that isn’t.  I mean, how much more virtuous can you get than by supporting the majority of people, while claiming you’re fighting discrimination?

So people take to the statistics and examine how many women are mega bestsellers, and how many women get reviews and how many women…

This shows that women are discriminated against and then the drumbeat starts for “how many female writers have you read today?”

Rats.  Or perhaps hamster.  I think if you lean close to those brains, you can hear the hamster wheel squeaking.

First, where are those statistics coming from, and exactly what is taken in account? The last three major popular successes, pushed under everyone’s noses and talked about on every blog, magazine and show that cares about culture and books are…  Harry Potter, Twilight and Fifty Shades, all of them in fact written by women.

Almost every romance published is written by women.  So is most of the fantasy.  Quite a few of the historicals, unless they’re military history, are written by women.  A good number of the Christian books (a huge part of the market) are written by women.

Now, almost every thriller, almost every hard sf, almost every adventure story and police procedure seems to be written by men.

So – how come most bestsellers/most reviewed, etc. are men?  Isn’t that unfair?

Lies, damn lies and statistics.  Writing (except for Romance) used to be a mostly male profession.  You could tell there was actual prejudice against women writing, in say SF, because women wrote under male pen names.  (In romance there is prejudice against males and most people still write under a female pen name.)

Writing was a male profession when you could make a living from it and back when women were not expected to make a living.  By the time I came into the field, unless you were willing to do what I did and engage in EXTREME writing, you made ON AVERAGE five thousand a year.  And the funny thing about social expectations is that they cut both ways.  Given that writing doesn’t make a living wage, most men could not engage in it.  They couldn’t engage in it long enough o even break in, let alone try to get big. A woman can stay home with the kids (or even just stay home) and though in our crazy society that incurs some societal censure it is nothing like the censure incurred by a man who stays home and is supported by his wife.  (Yes, I know some brave souls do it, but they’re rare.)

When I came into the field 90% of the new authors making it in fell in one of three categories: women, gay men, academics – i.e. people who could have other means of support while they pursued their art.  Of this, by and far the largest contingent was women.  (Who often overlapped with academics.)

This has been a fact of life for the last fifteen years.  However, there are still some remnants from the ancient regime back when it was mostly a male profession.  They’re old and having stayed in the field long, revered.  They’re mostly best sellers and widely reviewed.

There is another effect.  Think back on the first women that broke the gender barrier in science fiction.  They were almost instantly notable.  Why?  Because they had to make an extraordinary effort to break in.  This is going to select for driven individuals, who immediately will do better than the run of the mill “followed the usual path, had an easy time getting in.”

The males in my generation – particularly those supporting a family at the time, like Dave Freer – who broke in, were strong enough and driven enough to come home and work at their dream after pursuing a full time career elsewhere.  Do you wonder that they have more staying power than someone who was told “Just pursue your dream, dear, someone else will pay?”

Then add another layer.  New York Publishing by definition has got the rat of Marxism in their heads.  They always treated writers as widgets anyway.  Round the mid seventies, early eighties they realized that they had more widgets with outies than innies, and they decided to correct it the usual way.  “Buy more women” the cry went out.  And in came not only a barrage of women who had an easier time breaking in than men, but of women who were told what kept them out had been discrimination.  And who, therefore, hated the field they were getting into, because those meanies had kept them out.  Out came an outpouring of “poor me female” writing.  Which in the early nineties caused me to snarl at a Barnes & Noble, “I wish someone would pass a law forbidding women from writing.” After I’d walked up and down a fantasy shelf and found NOT ONE novel that wasn’t about some abused high-magic chick whose father was a monster.

Here we digress from writing in general to genre writing.  It will shock you to realize that different genres appeal to different people, right?  In general romance – by and far the blockbuster of genres – appeals to women.  I know this shocks you, since women are not at all by evolution designed for being fascinated with relationships.  This doesn’t mean men don’t read it.  I know several men who read Romance (and no, it has nothing to do with their orientation) but the proportions are so grossly skewed that if you see someone in public with a romance novel and can’t see what gender they are, you can take a safe bet it’s a woman.  At the other end of this, military fiction is read mostly by men.

I can tell you as a female reader and writer that from my teens I was upset by the assumption that whatever I was reading was OF COURSE a romance.  Ditto for what I was writing.  To this day total strangers assume I write romances or (I DO have an accent) children’s picture books.

The ridiculous equalizers of author genders ALWAYS concentrate on those that appeal least to women.  Say, thrillers, or science fiction.  (Why don’t they try to get more men in romance?  Why do they devalue a female way of seeing the world, which always centers on relationships?  Are they anti-woman?)

The problem with trying to equalize the innies and outies is that you get people who aren’t going to appeal to the genre’s majority readers.  For instance the attempt to bring in more “sf” writers of the right physical configuration gave us science fiction that rotates around someone’s belly button.  (There is a difference between novels about colonizing a world, even with strong character development, and novels about someone angsting over colonizing a world, so that the book could take place entirely in my laundry room and there would be no difference.)  This meant readers – male and female – who liked SF as it was left in droves.  The same for those who liked adventure fantasy but were tired of the female-revenge-fantasy woven in.

Of course these things shake out, they always do.  By the time I came in, NY publishing had got the idea that somehow their experiment had been less than successful.  Of course, since the rat was still spinning in their head, the only thing they could think – and which was told to me over and over – was “Women can’t write science fiction.”  Which is why Darkship Thieves was unpublished for thirteen years, while they pushed me to write fantasy.  Other gems I was told were that “you don’t write like a woman” – this was said derogatorily by the way – to which I probably shouldn’t have responded that no, that part of my anatomy was grossly unsuited for typing.  That my women were insufficiently “strong” (by which they meant that they fell in love with men.)  That I couldn’t write gay males because that was stealing victimhood and because gay men weren’t transparent to people who didn’t share the experience (to which one of my gay friends said he was glad he wasn’t transparent, he’d hate for me to be seeing what he ate for lunch.)

That is, the people who treat people like widgets, all in the name of equality, were telling me what I could or could not write, because my thought wasn’t conforming to their ideas.  I.e. it was too “diverse.”  That is, all of the above was “bad widget, bad.  Fall into your category.”

Again, the primary sin behind this entire meme is treating people as things.  The secondary sin is expecting physical characteristics to dictate the way I think.

Do my experiences have a lot to do with who I am as a writer (and a person)?  Sure they do.  How many of those are experiences only a woman can have?  I can think only of being pregnant and giving birth.  (And a man who is sufficiently connected to his wife, or who has asked a lot of friends could write those as convincingly as most women.  I mean a lot of them are physiological.)

But doesn’t my experience of going through life as a woman, of relating to men as a woman, etc. color how I write?  Sure they do.  But I have enough male friends and enough imagination to write men convincingly too.

So should you read my books because they give you an experience of what it’s like to be female?

Rat droppings!

I write science fiction, fantasy, mystery and historical.  You should read those for the joy of reading those.  And my books should be enough to hold you and get you to buy the next one whether the name on the cover is Sarah Hoyt or Joe Smith.  (How DO you know I don’t write as Joe Smith?  I could if I wanted to.)

If you’re picking my books because they have a female name on the cover, forcing yourself to read them to prove you’re not sexist, and hating every minute, that makes you LESS likely to pick up the next female author.

Writers are not their books.  There are men who write women better than women do.  And there are women who write men better than men do.

And the books should stand on their own.

Everything else is rat droppings.  Big stinky rats with blood on their teeth.

*This is the new free novel I’m posting here a chapter at a time.  For previous chapters, page back to previous weeks.  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.*

 

Twisted Magic

 

Jonathan Blythe, The Earl Of Savage:

 

The door to my study opened, and one of the upstairs maids came pelting in.  The sight was more startling than if she had flown in, or perhaps came in doing a perfect ballet step, because the thing is, no way to hide it, maids don’t pelter.  At least maids who have been trained under papa’s aegis and mama’s watching eye don’t.

I half rose from my chair, not quite sure what I meant to do, but ready to either ward off an attack, or catch the girl should she be under the impulse of a magical compulsion.  Not that either was likely, but both have happened, if one is to believe history books and newspaper accounts.  Not that I ever do, because every time I’ve been present at either of these–  But that’s a story for another time.

At that time, what I was faced with was this young woman running straight for me, and she was wearing the uniform of an upstairs maid, all starched black frills and white lace.

Fortunately for me, the chair in which Merritt sat was square in her path.  This made her stop, and I could confirm that besides the uniform, her face was familiar too, a peaked little face with straggles of blond hair escaping from the cap.  I’d be cursed if I had the slightest idea what her name was, but I had seen her go in and out of rooms with warmed bricks for the beds, and the like.

Two things were of concern, besides her running in.  First, she was very pale, and her eyes were red rimmed as though she’d been crying.  This meant you couldn’t trust her.  You never know what a woman will do when she’s been crying.  Why, once, when I tried to give one of my peculiars her conge she started crying and…  If my skull weren’t as thick as it is, you wouldn’t be reading this.

The other thing was that she was clutching a piece of paper in her hand.  I had the odd idea that mama had sacked her, and she was coming to argue the point with me, but that was of course stupid.  After all, why would mama tell her she was fired in writing.  For one, Mama don’t like putting pen to paper above half and used to get Honoria to write everything for her.

Before I could sort through all this and speak, the girl was bobbing up and down like a jack in box, in repeated curtseys and murmuring something like “Forgive me your lordship,” which was daft enough, but not as daft as Wolfe Merritt standing up and looking for all the world like he expected to ask her for a dance.  I mean, I realize she was a woman of his condition and all, but all the same—

“Stop with the bobbing, woman,” I heard myself say, somewhat shocked at how much my voice sounded curt and disdainful, just like Papa’s used to.  “You’re making me seasick.  What do you mean by pelting in here without knocking, and don’t tell me you weren’t pelting.  I know pelting when I see it, and that was pelting.”

The gone, probably more than the inane words stopped her.  After all, she had been trained in papa’s household.  She stopped bobbing and stood, turning even paler though I’d have sworn that was impossible, and swallowing convulsively. I thought she wouldn’t be able to speak, and I was reaching for the bell to call the butler to come and remove her or something, when Merritt gave me the slightest shake of the head, that signified I shouldn’t do that, and then crossed over to the tray with the brandy, poured a bare finger into my used glass, and took it to the girl.  And damme if he didn’t hold her head and put the glass to her lips, and make her drink the whole thing.

We were going to have a drunk housemaid on our hands, not that it wouldn’t perhaps be an improvement on a housemaid who had decided to imitate a jack in box, but all the same, it seemed like it would cause mama of accusing us of trying to debauch this chit and perhaps fire the girl anyway.

But she swallowed, and either because the taste of brandy was a shock or perhaps because it worked fast, she looked towards Merritt and said, “Thank you, sir, I—”

“That’s better,” I said.  “What is your name?”

“Annabelle,” she said. And then, catching the slightest of widening in my eyes, because I was sure no maid in the house could be called Annabelle, she smiled a little.  “Your mama told me I am to be addressed as Mary while I work here.”

I nodded.  Her speech was above her class, too, and I wondered if mama had ordered her to use a lower class of speech while working for us.  Thing is, I know mama.  Devil of a woman mama.  Quite likely to do that sort of thing, she was.

“Well then Mar–  Annabelle,” I said.  Might as well establish I was neither Mama nor under Mama’s thumb.  “What do you mean by coming running in here, without even knocking?”

She started to bend at the knees, but I quelled her with a look.  I had the oddest feeling that the corners of her mouth shook just a little at my look.  “Yes, sir,” she said.  “No bobbing,” she said, managing to convey the impression that under different circumstances, she would be laughing.  “But sir, we found this… we found this… in Miss Blythe’s room.”

The “this” she handed me was a sheet of paper, close written in my sister Helen’s sprawling handwriting.

It started very primly if highly improperly with “Dear Jon,” but it went down from there very fast.  Or at least I couldn’t in rational calm consider its contents anything but the sheerest lunacy.  I read it through three times before the first words stopped all my ability to relate the rest of the letter.

The very first words were, “I’ve decided to run away and become a Pirate Queen.”  I blinked at it, in utter horror, and read through the rest of the letter, seeing nothing but disjointed words, three times solid, then looked up at the maid, Annabel, “Is my sister–  That is—”

“Both your sister,” she said.  “And her maid, Betsy, are gone from the premises, and there were the remains of a transport spell upon her table.

I closed my eyes to make the room stop swaying, surely a side effect of all the bobbing the maid had done.  I took two deep breaths and read the letter again, this time making myself pay attention.  “I’ve bought a spell which should take us to Portsmouth, where I expect to seek employment aboard a ship and to advance to the post of captain by either my just deserts or, if absolutely needed, mutiny.”  Mutiny was underlined.  “You need not worry, since both Betsy and I have taken the precaution of cutting our hair and dressing as boys, so our honor shall never be threatened.”  I closed my eyes and breathed deep three times.  I should have shared with the impudent chit a thing or two I’d heard from my friends who were at sea.  “I know you will be very shocked by my taking this step, but once you think about it, I’m sure you’ll know it’s for the best.  I’ve been watching you, my dear, dear Jon.  Of all the family, you must know you’ve always been my favorite, well, at least since that time when I was very little and you helped me dress the cat as though she were a baby and then laughed with me when she tore through all the clothes and ran off into the bushes cursing.  And then you told me a story about some girl called Kitty, and I knew for sure you were not half as starched up as the rest of them, and you had a sense of humor and a heart, Jonathan.”  The fact that I had no memory whatsoever of the moment also meant I had had far more alcohol then I should have, but of course, she wouldn’t know it.  “And I’ve been watching you since Papa died, and how all of them – every one, from Mama to the prince consort expect you to do your duty, and how you stopped laughing and funning anymore.” Partly because I had cut drastically back on the consumption of alcohol, but what could a delicately reared young lady know of that? “And I know you’ve been in low spirits.”  Well, she could say that.  Low to none.  “And I know, too, that part of it is having to provide dowries for all of us, and having to find us a proper man to marry and all that.  I would like you to be sure that I do not intend to marry any man, proper or otherwise, because I saw what happened with poor Honoria, and it’s all very well for mama to say that the proper way for a woman to live is to have children, but if children make you die, I’d rather not.  So I hit upon this capital scheme.  I always wanted adventure, as you know, because I told you many times how much I wished to sail the ocean.”  I must – MUST – make sure when my sisters poured their unwise confidences upon my ears I was not more than three sheets to the wind.  “And so, this will do it.  Do not fear for me.  You know I’m resourceful and intelligent.”  And wholly uninformed about the world.  Even with all the snooping she did of my papers and all the listening behind doors.  I was aware of both of her abominable habits, and I’d kept her in the dark as much as possible, by making sure my important or shocking papers were kept at my club, and that I never spoke in terms she could plainly understand.  Now I wondered if perhaps I’d been unwise.  “I promise never to sack any ships that belong to you or the family.  And if I sack any very great treasure, I’ll be glad to let you have it for the other girls’ dowries, as I suppose they’ll want to marry and even risk having children.”  It finished with, “Your affectionate sister, Helen.”

I looked up at Annabel, “You read this?” I asked

Her face had become grave again.  “Yes, milord.  You see, she didn’t address it, and as it was upon her mantel…”

“I see.  Who else read it?  You said you and someone else had found it, at least you said “we” – who is we?”

“Oh, only Jane, the other maid, sir.  She was making the bed and she found a quantity of hair, both your sister’s and Betsy’s, by the look of it, shoved under the mattress, and sir, she called me in, because I have some knowledge of magic.  I saw this letter on the mantel and I read it.”

I might as well face it I couldn’t scotch the scandal.  “Jane read it too?”

Annabel gave me the oddest of looks.  “She doesn’t know how to read.  Just like she doesn’t know how to do magic.”

“I see,” I said.  “And you did magic?”

“Not really, sir, as that would have called too much attention, but I did set my hand on the pile of hair, and try to locate where they might be.”

“Apparently Portsmouth,” I said.  “I must go there right away and—”

“No, sir.”  Annabel looked at me.  “I looked at the remains of the transport spell and I could tell something had gone very wrong with it.  The magic had twisted, though how it’s beyond me to explain.  Putting my hand on the hair confirmed it.  Your sister is not as close as Portsmouth.  In fact—”  She paused, then sighed, as though resigning herself to the inevitable.  “In fact, I’d say she’s not in this world.”

Put down the shot gun.  Take a deep breath.  Consider the importance of those words and of their being used ritualistically to pass legislation.

Then consider something William Patterson used in Heinlein’s bio (first book.)  I will not quote him exactly.  I have the book on my shelves, but my shelves are a salad because of the boy-who-doesn’t-know-his-alphabet and who most assuredly does not read my non fiction books (rolls eyes.) so to find it might take me the rest of the morning and I have an appointment.  However, the phrase said something about “the broken children of mid-century” finding an ethical guiding hand in Heinlein.

I’ll confess I did find a guiding hand in Heinlein, even if I couldn’t be considered in any way to come from a broken family, not in the sense he meant.  My parents were married.  My brother lived with us until he got married at 26, and my entire extended family lived around us, all over the village.  (In fact, the amiable habit of the village was to call any adult over the age of having children “ti” short for tio or tia i.e. uncle or aunt.  We did this I suspect as a throw back to a time when everyone in an area was related, whether or nor you could trace it back.  We did it even to people we knew were new arrivals, I’m going to guess on the principle that eventually their genes would enter the pool and we therefore adopted them, retroactively.  Keep this in mind.  The assumption was wrong, and it’s been fifty years and this is important.)

On the other hand, in many ways, I was a broken child.  Well, I suspect mostly through being an Odd, but there were other things.  Mostly I rejected the simple morality of the tales told to me in childhood and I couldn’t find guidance that fit me, until I fell into that first Heinlein – Have Spacesuit will Travel.  What spoke of me out of it?  We’ll go into that.

I was “broken” in the sense that the instruction given me wouldn’t take.  It wouldn’t take partly because I was surrounded by skeptical voices all over: my brother, his friends, my cousins; and partly because the circumstances around me no longer fit the instructions I was being given; and partly because I was thrust into a world that didn’t figure into any of those tales, not even grandma’s inventive stories.  Which was part of the reason I liked science fiction.  It also wasn’t the world I lived in, but it was a world in constant change and it made more sense, internally.  (BTW this is why the idea that  kids today don’t read science fiction because the world has changed too much and “they’re living in science fiction” should be met with derision and contempt.  They don’t read science fiction because it has nothing to say.  It’s either vapid, human hating, or a continuation of the preaching they get in school, which they know is wrong.  [There are exceptions of course.  More fantasy than SF but I highly recommend Pratchett’s Johnny Maxwell trilogy for instance.])

I don’t mean to imply that the stories I was told were Bowdlerized.  A lot of them were, of course, but certainly not grandma’s.  (If grandma had spoken English and had access to a typewriter and a publisher, she’d be a more imaginative Stephen King.)  It was just that I couldn’t make those stories fit the world that had gone upside down and sideways forty years or so before I was born.

Most of the stories that were told to me assumed I would grow up, get married, have kids all within the relatively narrow confines of the village (or other villages.  Even the upper class “ton” of Regency England was about the same number of families as a largish village.)  It had to do with keeping relations with people you’d see every day for the rest of your life.  It had to do with raising the children to fit in in the same narrow environment.

By the time I was five, I knew they were wrong.  There was that gut feeling – even in an environment that was superficially static – of “this is wrong” kids get when they’re told fables (and why I think insisting that girls of ninety pounds can beat men of 200 will only create idiots and cynics.  Idiots are the girls who think they HAVE to believe it or be gender traitors.  Cynics are everyone else.  Even the all-pervasive propaganda of communist countries can’t do better than that.)

Anyway, if I – who was raised in a relative stable environment, in a religious family, in a traditional village – felt adrift in the world, how about all those other “broken children of the mid century”?  Those whose parents uprooted and left the ancestral village, or even the vicinity of family; those whose parents engaged in Marital Blanket Bingo; those whose parents lived for career or other considerations?  I.e., most of them?  And what about those even more broken kids who came after?  Those who are farmed out to total strangers because mom and dad MUST work?  (And I truly don’t want to argue this with people who think that mom and dad can choose not to work to stay home with the kids.  Some can.  Some purely can’t, not in their circumstances, which include taxes to pay and DEFINITELY include the social disapproval few people – even Odds – fully want to incur.) And whose parents, themselves, wouldn’t do a much better job of raising them because they have no clue WHY they should sacrifice that way – not unless they’ve arrived at some sort of morally coherent internal sense before having kids.

Because, the truth is, the reason our society screams so much about “It’s for the children” is that nothing is.  No, seriously.  We live in the least child-oriented society ever to exist.

And before you jump me and point out all the things that are forbidden to adults so as to keep them from the children; all the things that exist for children or people with children (like certain restaurants, or movies for kids, or…) and tell me that our predecessors had none of that, I’ll tell you “precisely.”

We are like the very wealthy of times past, shoving toys and gifts at the kiddies which we ignore the rest of the time, because we’re busy pursuing what we want to pursue.

A few years ago, I was talking to a friend who is single, childless and gay.  I would consider him a very moral person (in his dealings with others) though he’s by no means “moral” by what the left thinks the right’s morals are – if that makes sense.  He was outraged as I’ve seldom seen him.  You see, he rarely projects his morals onto other people and rarely condemns other people as doing wrong.  (Unless they’re celebrities, and that’s just fun.)  BUT he was rather incensed at an acquaintance of his who had “realized his true orientation” after he was married and had a three year old child.  Upon which he’d left wife and child to pursue love in all the wrong places (though my friend put it rather more graphically.)

My friend thought this was horrible, because what would the child think when he grew up.  My first reaction to his outrage shocked me, too.  I thought “yes, but would you want the poor man to live a lie all his life?”  I don’t think I said it, but I might have.  I sometimes have the self preservation instincts of a mouse teetering on the edge of a whiskey barrel.  I must have said something because what I got was the double barrel of “if you have assumed an obligation for a young and helpless life, particularly one you’ve brought to the world, one who depends on you for guidance, instruction and security, you LEARN to derive your happiness from fulfilling your obligation and doing your duty.”

I’d never heard it put that way, and most people would say it was an arid life.  But that’s what most of our ancestors would have done, and done unflinchingly.

It’s useless to project into the past the sort of uniform morality of a fairytale.  It wasn’t like that.  Every era had right and wrong.  Every era had reprobates who put themselves ahead of their obligations and those who depended on them.

However the idea that you owed others something was there stronger — as in the time of Romeo and Juliet, where you owed your family EVERYTHING — or weaker but it was there.  Those who didn’t were at the margins of society and justly reviled.

But now… now even I who was properly brought up, thought (at least until I was glared at, which is weird since we were talking over the net, but the man has a glare that can cross the miles) first “but you can’t expect the man to sacrifice his every hope of happiness because he made a mistake.”

Part of it is the definition of happiness.  I know people are going to come and pile on and say we lost that sense of obligation because we lost religion (my friend is an atheist, btw) but I don’t think that’s it.  I grew up in a place where it was noticed if and when and where you went to church and where most of the conversations ended in pious shibboleths of consolation or condemnation.  And yet even there, it had crept in, this feeling that “you can’t expect people to throw their lives away just because they made a mistake.”  (The concept of gayness was very odd indeed there – at least openly – but people still made mistakes aplenty, from babies conceived out of wedlock to “I thought he was nicer when I married him” to “She ain’t no fun anymore.)

There was this idea that it was right and just – the only right and just thing to do – to “pursue your happiness” regardless of whom it affected, whom it hurt, and whom it shocked.  Phrases like “you only pass this way once” and “you have to be yourself” had penetrated into the culture, particularly among the younger people.

I don’t think it was the breakdown of religious faith except insofar as it resulted from the same thing.  I think it was the end result of two wars, back to back, and so many men who died young, without in fact getting to be themselves and, more importantly, the women who stayed behind and regretted the fun they hadn’t had.  Though Portugal hadn’t really been part of the wars (technically of the first world war, but in miniscule numbers) the zeitgeist had percolated there and the idea was “don’t give your life to something not of your own choosing at that moment” and the idea that “life is short, eat dessert FIRST.”

The other part of it was, of course, mobility.  Starting after WWI but really after WWII people moved away from parents.  They moved to other places, they fragmented.  I know that this sounds like I’m hankering for the ancestral village.  I’m not.  Villages are terrible places.  If you’re an Odd, it takes a village to drive you totally insane.

But they do exert surveillance and enforce laws.  (Though by the time I came along, as is obvious from above they were a little uncertain about what laws and rules to enforce.  Was it “never be alone with a man you’re not married to?” or was it “To thine own self be true, even if thine own self has a tendency to fall on her back?”)

Humans are social animals.  We try to fit in – even outliers like us – and therefore not having a well defined community and clear rules that enforce the raising of the next generation will lead to… broken children.  Who don’t know what the rules are, and what to do.

Our mass media jumped on this too.  You may attribute bad intent to it, but I think they were mostly reflecting “life is short, eat dessert first” back at people.  The rules they proclaimed were the sort of anodyne rules of “love yourself” (There is only one you! Seemed to be a refrain on TV when I came here in 1980) and “be nice to people” (which is not the same as living up to your obligations to them.  Heck sometimes it’s the opposite.  And nice isn’t the same as good.  Not by a mile.) and “be polite and outwardly accepting of everyone” not to mention “if someone does wrong he’s a victim and society made him do it!” or the reverse “If someone is a victim, they’re automatically good.”

The broken children of mid century had my generation, who in turn had severely broken children, because by then things were completely upside down.

Understand, I’m not complaining of people being immoral or of people having odd sexual preferences (in the science fiction community these are often very odd) or even of people living a life of what they consider “fun and excitement” – I’m not the mother or father of other people, and they are what they are (or to quote grandma, we don’t “each make ourselves”.)  What I’m complaining about is where the focus is for society and where it remains, even after people have made choices that mean what they’ve done will affect people who depend on them.  What I’m complaining about is people shirking obligations – particularly an obligation to the next generation – for the sake of some undefined “don’t worry, be happy.”

I’m complaining of the fact that not  only do we not shun people who offload their responsibilities brought on by their own actions, but we enshrine them as a sort of heroes because they’re living the imperative of “pursuing their happiness” or in the words of the sixties “finding themselves.”  This ensures they’re free of “hangups” or “complexes” or “frustrations” or whatever the heck we’re calling it today, and makes them a sort of secular saint.

Yes, everyone makes mistakes – but it’s how you deal with the mistakes that makes the difference.

They don’t stay in that oh-hum marriage for the sake of the children (Yes, I do recognize reasons for divorce.  Among them are “he hit me” and “she was hurting the children” – morally or physically.  There are others.  We all know marriages where a partner and the kids would be far better off without the other but “it wasn’t fun anymore” is not one of them.)  They don’t pretend to be something they’re not for the sake of the children.  They don’t volunteer to fight for the sake of the children.  They never even consider doing something “for the children.”

They do instead insist that society be as a whole brought down to child level: that everyone be insulated from their choices and given everything they need as though we were all toddlers; and that everyone obey the rulers as though they were mommy and daddy.  And every time they want to force this on us they scream “do it for the children.”

This is because – and this is what Heinlein taught me and what my friend’s glare (it is a very nice glare, truly!) brought to mind – what makes us adults is not stomping our little feet and “expressing” ourselves.  Any kid can do that with finger paint and a free hour.  It is assuming our place in civilization and in the march of generations through time: it’s shouldering the burden and moving on and doing our best for the next ones in line; it’s assuming responsibility for those weaker or in peril and doing our best for them too.  Your obligation might be to a child of your blood, or to a sick friend.  It might be to the person you love with all your heart, or to some old relative wished on you because no one else would take him/her.

It is still your obligation.  Being human means having obligations to those around you.  We are social apes.

Government or impersonal bureaucrats ARE NOT the means to help our brothers and sisters.  We are.  In recognition of our common humanity; in recognition that there might be a life after in another world, but there will surely be one here, after we’re gone, we pay our dues to those who came before and build for those who come after.

Sometimes the best choice for others is not what you want to do.  Sometimes it’s not even close to nice.  Sometimes there is no good choice — but the way forward leads through a life of duty, not happiness.  And sometimes you find a sort of happiness in that.  (To quote the epitaph of a Heinlein character “He ate what was put before him.”)

We can shirk it.  We can pretend that there is nothing in the world bigger than ourselves – “There is only one YOU!” – and that we are all that matters – “I’m gonna live forever; I’m gonna learn how to fly!” – but in the end, the only one you’re lying to is YOU!  In the end there will be centuries and millennia after you, and the broken children of the broken children of the broken children will either die with their civilization or relearn.

Would you rather shoulder your responsibilities and make sure they relearn from our ancestors and those who made our civilization the most successful and comfortable and, yes, just, on Earth?  Or from the barbarians at the gate?

One or the other will teach those children and give them guidance.

Who’s it gonna be?