According To Hoyt

I had a great idea for a blog post last night, but of course I spaced it, and so I’m going to write about impossible things, like organizing writers, squaring the circle, training cats.

BTW if this post is criminally late, it’s because I’m waiting for washer repairman to replace washer motor, which means I’m trying to get the kids out of bed on a day when they don’t have classes till the afternoon (speaking of impossible things.)

The first paragraph is only half a joke, as of course I’m not going to talk of squaring the circle or training cats (Mostly because my cats would kill me in my sleep, if they had to do it by cutting across my throat with a sharpened whisker.)

However, I’d like to talk about organizing writers.  Part of this because the main writer organizations right now are running around like chickens with their heads cutoff, even RWA of whom I used have a higher opinion, partly because it touches on what organized labor is good for, what it is not good for, what it is detrimental for, and what it can do in the circumstances we’re going towards.  Because in the future we’re all ducks… er… I mean, we’re all contractors (must not talk to younger son.  It’s a thing for poultry that boy has) or at least a significant portion of us are, the bind that writers are in today is something that’s likely to come to your living room in the next five years, for either your job, your spouse’s job or your children’s job.  So taking a look at the situation writers are in and why it resembles where (more or less) the entire labor market is headed (unless civilization collapses to an unimaginably low level) is important.  As is taking a look at what organizing can do, what it can do, and “the best we can hope for.”

To begin with, I started on this wild hare because of Rex Stout.  (It occurs to me, btw, Rex Stout would have loved the present anno domini.  Well, not really, since even mega bestsellers sell fewer copies than he did, but what I mean is he’d have loved ebooks.  Indie is made for the type of thing he wrote: novellas, mostly, often sold as packets.)  I’ve been reading him a lot because I’m very busy, which means I read only short pieces that I have read before (meaning I can set them down and not worry.)  At one point, Archie is extolling unions, and Rex Stout, of course, like Heinlein, was a great supporter of unions.  (I doubt of public employee unions, but that’s something else.)  Only Heinlein saw the end game quite clearly, in Starman Jones, where the world is so tied up by unions that true genius can’t get in to where it would be best.

That sort of started me thinking.  Unionism is based on the belief that your co-workers want to screw you for their benefit less than your boss wants to screw you for his benefit.

There are circumstances in which this is absolutely true.  I’m thinking of an homogeneous and relatively powerless workforce, say the immigrant-clogged NYC of the early twentieth century.  I understand that entire blocks in NYC were, in all, entire villages from Sicily or, depending on the decade, Ireland.  I grew up in a village.  You track cousinship to the sixth generation, and when it gets too far for that, you’re “connected.”  That chain of blood relations is a chain of loyalty and there’s nothing worse than being shunned by your group, your family, your peers.

In that type of naturally collectivist environment, you can trust your peers (to an extent.  If you read biographies from back then, you still read of slick union operators screwing people up – but that’s human.  Unless you deal with angels, you’re going to see that.)  And when you’re working in a low skill level position, for a boss who thinks you’re a widget (man, do I feel their pain.  On the second, at least, though I gather a lot of publishers think “anyone can write” and considering what they’ve pushed down the throats of the reading public the last twenty years, they might still think it.) it’s pretty hard for your co-workers to screw you over worse than your boss will do given the chance.

So, unions became a logical way to deal with this.  You had group loyalty against the tendency of grasping management to take more.

The problem is for unions to work you need to be able to do SOMETHING to the owner/manager to stop the abuses.  Again, the situation in which the unions worked best, you could surround the factory (or farm, though there’s problems with that one, and Gionvanni Guareschi illustrated it beautifully in one of the Don Camilo short stories.  I think in The Little World Of Don Camilo.  I.e. farm labor can’t be stopped and then picked up again, and you’re doing active and permanent damage each day the strike goes on.) and stop scabs from going in to do your work.  That meant that the boss had something to lose (also) by not coming to the table.  And in those days also the union people were actual works (not operatives who don’t care if the company dies – see, twinkie.) so people could agree on a mutually agreeable compromise.  Or at least mutually workable.

When the wheels come off… well, we see that all over the country these days, from public sector unions, where the “negotiating” is in fact a branch of government telling the other that really they need mo’e government cheese – which amounts to self-dealing – to the auto unions where they’ve lost track of the fact that a) there must be a product people want to buy and b) they are competing with non unionized workers, and some of those are doing better than the unionized ones because… it’s not a low skill industry anymore.

Next comes the fact that the basic premise, that your co-workers want what’s best for you too more than your boss does is pretty dang faulty.  The reason that unions devolved into bullying, tug tactics (against CO WORKERS) and worse is that since WWII our country has become less and less that “small village” where there’s bonds of blood and culture and shunning works.  (Though that had the bad effect of living anyone not in the clan out.  But you could at least trust the clan.)

And of course, as we go more and more remote, the “shop’s” ability to be shut off or controlled physically has gone away too.  Yes, a lot of the battle of unions and other labor advocates right now is to try to prevent outsourcing and telecommuting, precisely because those tactics make it easier for workers to come in from elsewhere and undercut organized labor.

I tell you, it won’t work.  When you’re trying to create by law artificial conditions that replicate those of a hundred years ago (Which btw, compared to now weren’t good for ANYONE) you’ve already lost. The best you can do is make the area covered by your laws unappealing to those who would provide work.  At which point, you either clamp down like North Korea and nobody has jobs or your people start telecommuting for companies in other countries.  And then all your laws are moot, unless you’re willing to go to war.  And they’re still moot because, after the war, your people will still need jobs.

Our politicians haven’t realized this yet, because they are exceedingly well educated people, taught in the best labor theory which doesn’t take in account that we’re not all factory workers in the Bronx circa 1920.

I first realized this when we tried to go on strike as students (for good and sufficient reason) and the teachers laughed and would have failed us if we’d continued.  Then I realized the reason that US student “strikes” worked was because they were willing to use and threaten violence.  (Something a small group of mostly female students of German weren’t willing to do.)

There needs to be some sort of power balance and counter-strike ability for organized labor to work.

And that’s always been the problem with writing.  Perhaps when SFWA was started, and most of the magazines were in one place and a lot of the writers too, we could have acted as a union.  I don’t know.  Perhaps enough wild-eyed sf writers in front of Amazing would have caught the attention of newspapers.  Who knows?

But even then there were writers elsewhere, and even then, publishers could always bring in new talent to replace the striking ones.  There was no way to stop scabs, unless you were willing to stop the US mail.

By the time I came in writers needed a union more than ever.  In one respect we were like that transplanted community in the Bronx in the early 20^th century: there was only one employer, or such a small number of them as to make no difference, they all talked to each other and had a level of collusion that would be illegal anywhere else.  (Heck, I’m fairly sure it’s illegal in publishing too.  It’s just no one dared say anything, because if you were blacklisted by one, you were blacklisted by all.)  And we couldn’t have one.  Why?  Because even our organization leaders, working writers, had to stay on the good side of the employers who could replace them or blacklist them at the snap of a finger (more so since they had control of what went on shelves.  Complete control.)  Worse, if the leaders dared upset the publishing houses, the members would complain, because, well, it was their career on the line, too.  And houses were known to black list all members of an organization who challenged them.

At the same time – see where publishers had total shelf control – there was nothing that writers organizations could threaten publishers with.  Nothing material, at least.  Yeah, we could trash-talk them.  This did not hurt them, because most of the country never even heard about them.

So, what did our organizations do?  They ran with the other function of professional organizations: certification.

When I came in very few magazines required SFWA membership to buy you and those kept it a secret.  (It was a slush pile culling strategy.)  And none of the book publishers did.  Because there was no point.  And the strategy they moved to, for culling slush, was agents, which is different from organization membership (and possibly stupider.)  I’m not talking about MWA and RWA here, simply because I don’t know as much.  I came to those organizations late.  I will mention later how RWA is/was different (but not enough.)

So, most people joined SFWA for two reasons: a directory of other working professionals and validation of status.  (More and more needed as “professional” rates hadn’t changed since the fifties, and making 5k a book wouldn’t allow anyone to live from this.)  Which meant that most people in SFWA were in it to be exclusionary.  “We’re real writers, and they aren’t.”  MWA was the same when I joined.  RWA was different in that they let you join a cadet branch and learn from the pros.  This was a valuable service, when everyone had to go through the narrow gate to get in.

The problem RWA is having now, is the problem all the other writers’ organizations have: “Who is a pro?”  Having lowered the rates (or rather not raised them) to the level that allowed most of their members to stay in (the average working writer makes somewhat less than 5k a year from writing) they just keep insisting that people who make that much from indie can’t get in.  Because they’re not “really” published.  (Though it’s possible RWA has slightly saner rules on that.  I’m not sure.  I quit when they went after Amazon – which relates to: )

And because they’ve become status organizations ONLY, it is very important for them to roll the clock back and have things be as they were “you have to go through this narrow gate to publish.”  Which means that they’re going after Amazon on behalf of tiny distributors for tiny presses, because that’s where the status is.

The rest of us out here, trying to make a living, roll our eyes and decide the directory of our peers is not worth it – particularly when we’re trying to learn about self publishing and network with indie and people bringing out their backlist, and let’s face it, half of the people doing really well at that have never heard of writers’ organizations, or are actively giving them the bird, even if the organizations should want them.

Which is a pity because… if writers’ organizations had realized they’re not and cannot be unions, and that being a club of the “in kids” is just stupid and, in an increasingly more distributed world might give you a warm glow but won’t give you anything else, they could have done some good.

You see, there is a great need for a fraternal order of writers.  One of the mailing lists I belong to – one of those things that circulates in place of the organizations that don’t work – was discussing long term disability, and how difficult it is to replace your writing income if you can’t write for a year or two or… the last ten or twenty years of your life.  (Which we’ve all heard about, from authors of the golden age.)

The backlist publishing in indie might keep you in a trickle of income, for a while, but…

This is something we’re looking at very closely as we look at – hopefully, hopefully ten or so years from now, and in a better position – we look at having to live from my writing and maybe free lance work (programming and writing) by Dan.  What do you do if you’re living from that, have a pretty good lifestyle, and one of you is in an accident, has a stroke, or gets cancer?  In my case, having been a freelancer most of my life, and trying to avoid paying both sides of social security (sometimes it’s inevitable, in case you wondered where that 8k bill from the IRS comes from.  That’s taxes, plus all the stuff that an employer normally contributes half to.  It runs to about half a writers’ income, more or less depending on the state.  It’s the reason so many of us get in tax trouble the first time we get decent income.) I wouldn’t even get that.  Not this year.  Inevitably I will, but because of the years of ramp-up probably at very low level.  How do you maintain your lifestyle when you can no longer work?  Colleagues in that position are telling me that most states take “disability” in the physical sense.  So, if you’re out of your mind on chemo… well, you can still type, right?

The insurance issue is the same, though every organization that tried to offer that ran up against the “not between states” and how distributed we are.  That might need some legal lobbying.  But right now, we’re looking at – should Dan become unemployed – paying the penalty and going without.

This is made worse by the fact that as a group we are aging (at least those considered “professional” under the old rules.  This will change, probably) and therefore are more prone to the maladies of age.

We desperately need a fraternal order.  With people coming in from every walk of life and through every possible gateway, trying to control the employers is a forlorn hope.  Yeah, a fraternal order would still need some form of entry thing, possibly “For x years has derived 30% of income from writing.”  But it wouldn’t need to concern itself with status or with publishers or with vendors of writing.  Just with making writers’ lives saner and safer.  Contributions, sure, and possibly charity anthologies.

Will it happen?  I hope so.  I don’t have the ability to start it (time.  Money.  Time IS money) and I bet that’s the issue for most working writers.

But I hope someone somewhere does this for writers or free lance programmers or most of the other professions going free lance – almost all of them – because in the future we’re heading towards trying to control who hires whom is a forlorn hope.  Trying to control employers is too.

The best we can do is look after our own, pick up our fallen comrades and move on.  It’s not fair, but it is what it is and moreso what it will be.

Trying to set the clock back will only make the future even more painful (and possibly lethal for everyone.)  One of the things we might need to get rid of is this notion of “fair” — it works great in kindergarten, but in the real world it tends to crumble.  And the shards can cut things that work — fair or not.

And so, you see, organizing writers remains impossible.  All the same, it might be imperative.

(And now I’m going to have breakfast.  Repairman has been.  I tried to have tea and poured it down my front, which means I need more caffeine before lower lip works.  I’m going to drink tea over the sink.)

 

Yesterday I whined, and today I’m going to do something worse, and break one of the taboos I was raised with.
You see, I was raised not to talk of politics (we had a lot), religion (ours tended to have weird shadings) or money (we didn’t have any.)
Unfortunately I need to talk about money. Kind of.
First – I think it was Sabrina Chase, but it might have been someone else – said something about the problem about indie is that none of us knows how to make money from it.
This is not necessarily true. My dipping of toe into the pool of indie has been skittish and a bit odd, but it has also, to an extent, been rewarding. I mean, until this last weekend, I had nothing up but short stories and – between all outlets – they were bringing me between $100 and $200 a month. This is of course peanuts, but when you consider the work I’ve done so far has been light editing and a few weekends putting short stories up; when you consider further that my covers suck raw eggs (I need to redo them, but there hasn’t been time) it is not bad income for stuff that has already been published and/or was in the drawer doing nothing.
This weekend I added three very old novels that, furthermore, do not fit with the direction my career took. (And thank heavens. I meant what I said in the afterword for those books. If they sell really well, I’ll finish the series to the point the aged Shakespeare walks into fairyland to live. However, they’d have to sell VERY well. To get in the frame of mind to write those books, I need to mainline Shakespearean plays and read a lot of Elizabethan speech. It will help you understand how weird those books are FOR ME if you know that I wrote the first draft of DST before I wrote that. No, it wasn’t as good as the published version, but it was closer to that than to this. By miles. And after those books came out, EVERYONE in the field wanted me to do more “literary fantasy.” I can do it, yes, but it’s not natural and it strains my mood. Thank heavens Baen saved my life.) They are selling more than the short stories, just by themselves. This is good. It gives me hope as I finish editing the indie novels (and the old published ones) I can make a decent living off indie.
Unfortunately the novel that is my life is very badly plotted. Or maybe not. Maybe Himself is making it exciting. After all, what fun is there in letting me set up this form of income, then take over, and then having Dan quit and do his own stuff? No drama, no angst.
So it’s looking like, with both boys in college and our savings down to nothing, Dan’s job has gone precarious. Mind you, it might recover and keep on trucking. But if not, we’re in a world of pain.
Right now my income is about 1/3 of his, and with his income and mine we’re barely making it.
The funny thing is that we didn’t even buy close to the “best” house we could afford. They qualified us for double the loan we took. (And man, did we like that house. But we’re not stupid.) And that was when I had virtually NO income. But the raises stopped too, and our expenses kept going up – part the inflation that doesn’t exist, part the boys growing up (you never expect them to cost more.) Part is that we spent a lot of money fixing stuff in the house – because we didn’t know it had been flipped twice before – yes, yes, now we have fixed almost everything and will probably finish before it can go up for sale, but now with cutting down paper books and the prospect of the kids moving off in the next five years, it’s rather a lot of house for us (and I don’t have the time to clean like I used to, as the career is also showing signs of life.)
The truly sad thing is the main reasons we bought a house this size and where it is was a) the paper books. No, seriously. You have no idea how many we still have, not counting the ones boxed for sale. b) the schools – which ended up not being a good fit at all.
But anyway, we have this huge mortgage, and we have grocery bills that swallowed the universe, and we have cars that are fixing to die. And we have almost dead cars (the ones Dan and I drive, if sold together, might net us 8k.) And last year, between car and house repairs ate into our bank account to such an extent that the check to the IRS might wipe it out.
Now, none of these is the end of the world. If Dan keeps his job, there is money coming in from Baen. And while we should still fix this house and sell it and move (for one get our money out of it, which at this point should allow us to buy a house outright elsewhere) we might even be able to manage that as indie picks up.
If nothing else goes wrong. If Dan keeps his job. If my stuff keeps selling. If…
I was reading an article somewhere, a while back, that the new kids couldn’t expect job security and might have to change careers two or three times and adapt, in their working lives. The article was written by someone my age, which led me to wonder what kind of special snow-flake he was. Because for Dan and I that has already been the reality. This is why we NORMALLY like to keep six months salary in the bank (but that hasn’t been true since 08.) Because suddenly he’d find himself unemployed and whatever I was doing would tank and – inevitably – we’d both get ill for months, and next thing you knew we were considering the soup kitchen. (Okay, only happened twice, but trust me, once is enough. I was hungry for two years growing up and THAT was enough too. It’s not the sort of thing you want to revisit.)
Anyway – the issue is that when I start panicking (and I panic easily) I can’t write, which blocks the one way I can make money to keep us afloat, right? It’s stupid. It’s also fairly normal, from what I hear from my colleagues.
All this to say, our situation is nowhere near dire yet. I’ve heard of people taking out their retirement accounts to pay for groceries. We’re not there yet. We’re not even at the point of postponing buying underwear. Clearly since I bought some this weekend. (And yes, we’ve been at that point before.)
But we are at the point of postponing buying new glasses and extending the time to take cats for their shots.
In a way we’re blessed, with Dan still working, and my income picking up, considering the times we live in.
This is to say – I’m NOT begging. Yes, I’m worried about money, but show me ONE person who isn’t just now.
On the other hand, at Liberty Con, Jerry Pournelle told me that a blog the size of mine should have a subscribe button – that you should be able to support it, because I put in an hour to two hours work on this EVERY day, including Sunday and holidays, and he says writing for nothing is immoral.
He is right. Of course he’s right. There’s a man I don’t argue with. BUT I know a lot of my regulars and a lot of my fans are hurting, and I hate to ask for money for stuff they’re getting for free, anyway.
On the other hand, the joking this week led me to see a way to provide value added to those who do subscribe: i.e. access to my unedited work.
Now, to clarify, I’m not giving you access to ALL my unedited work. Some of those will be under contract, and some publishers get shirty about such. Also, Baen sells earcs and I’m not getting in competition with them.
This means there will be weeks that the subscribers will get clear, cold nothing – though I’ll make a little newsletter, if you wish, and tell you what is going on and why there is/isn’t material – And sometimes I’ll jump around between things. Like, right now I’m editing two books, one of which is posted unedited, so you wouldn’t get that, and you might or might not get new snippets I put in. But I’m also writing Jane Austen fantasy, and you could get that. And I’m completely rewriting shadow gods, and you’ll likely get that in chunks over the next few weeks.
There’s also short stories being fixed to go up, and you might get the unedited version, and musings on future history.
As I said, you won’t get stuff every week, but you’ll probably get two or three novels, and ten or twenty shorts in aggregate through the year.
What subscription isn’t: it’s not a substitute for donations for the novels. That is separate. Unless you’re donating at the Medici level, I’m not sending you edited copies of every novel, in ebook format. (If you’re donating at the insane level, I’ll also send you copies of my Baen books. I’ll buy them, sign them and send them to you. And book t-shirts, too. But I don’t expect anyone to do that, hence, Insane. And I only expect you to do Medici if you win the lottery.)
Anyway, the subscription button is there. Maybe Jerry is right and it will generate considerable income. Maybe it won’t, in which case it comes down. My price for the additional work of compiling the work of the week and putting it in a way you guys can access it, is $100 a week – because that’s what I get for my PJM work(which, btw, is up today) which takes what I estimate about the same time. Yes, we know what I am. We’re just haggling over the price. If the subscriptions build to at least that, I’ll continue. If not, I’ll refund people and stop the program.
Meanwhile don’t feel obligated. Yes, things might get dire at Casa Hoyt but I know they’re already dire for a lot of you.
(The whole idea of people giving money for my unedited stuff baffles me, btw. I’d give money for Heinlein’s grocery list… but he was HEINLEIN. I’m just little Sarah Hoyt, telling her little stories.)
Everyone I know – and their cousins – told me to have a subscription program, and it is up, but I don’t want anyone alarmed and thinking I’m starving in the dark. I’m not. And even if things get really dire, the worst that will happen is that we lose the money in the house and be left with the cats, the books and the kids. It would be a pain in the butt, but not the end of the world. The living things would still be okay. A lot of people are worse off.
On the other hand, if you choose to support this blog and this writer, I am, needless to say, very thankful, and it will help.

I have a different article up at Mad Genius Club and my How to Write a Novel in 13 weeks up at PJM.

UPDATE: For some reason it’s not letting me do this.  We might move where the blog is hosted soon, because of this nonsense,  (i.e. I’m not the only one having trouble and the net is full of people complaining)  So, if you want to bookmark this — Tazwriters Zazzle Shop Other stuff will go up over the next week, including (up soon) the infamous t-shirt with the drawing of me by Chris Muir.

I hate doing blog posts about publishing, except at MGC, because most of my readers are not writers (I think.  At least most of you mugs posting comments aren’t) and therefore it starts feeling a bit like inside baseball.

But sometimes it bites me in weird ways.  And this post is weird (and confused, and undigested.  Bear with me.)

And I’ve been nooddling a post on where publishing is right now – it’s not as straight forward as it seems – under the dual impact of the con and its panels and the rather interesting post Dave Freer put up at MGC for April’s Fools.

So… the con this weekend.  I did enjoy it, though the scheduling was… odd, to put it mildly.  For instance, I was put on a panel on writing your first novel.  Yes, there was a best selling author on that panel too, but she wrote her first novel in 2009.  For me “How to write your first novel” is sort of like “how to suvive your first year as a newly wed.”  Given that I’ve been married 30 years and it was a different world… uh… I don’t know.

I mean, however you look at it, I either wrote my first novel on a typewriter with a broken rewind ribbon mechanism (so when it was all on one side, I needed to pause and wind it by hand.  Which was hard, since it was made of chipped flint.) circa 1985 (if we go with the first novel I wrote for publication.) or I wrote it in 1998 after selling it to a traditional publisher on proposal (which might still happen, but I very much doubt) if you go with my first published novel.  (I reject a priori the notion that the first novel I wrote at six, before I had any clue what publishing was or how it worked was that first “novel.”  For one, I suspect it was all of 20k words.)

In either case, one, granted, more than the other, they are like things from a lost world in terms of what needed to be in that novel to actually make it to the shelves someday.  Because the first one, though it was never published for other reasons, if we still lived as we did in 85, we’d be talking about how to make your corrections clean, how to work with a carbon so you had a copy, etc. etc.

For the one in 1998, by the time I sold selling your first novel on proposal was already a rarity so in terms of “what to do to sell” I got nothing and in terms of “how to write your first novel for publication” I could only say “write what the publisher wants.”  Which I did with the Shakespeare series – which brings up the question “should you do it for love or money” which I’m not prepared to go into.  (I do like those books, mind you, but for a while there it looked like I was going to be shoved into writing JUST that kind of overwrought literary fantasy, and I don’t think I could do JUST that, forever.) It also brings up the question of “What’s your first novel that sold?” because Darkship Thieves was written and revised to close to the form that sold before I wrote Ill Met By Moonlight.  It’s just that none of my agents would send it out.

Which brings us to how odd it felt to be on a panel on writing your first novel and the gentleman next to me saying he’s not sold his novel, but he’s got it with an agent, so of course…

I had this wild desire to say “So, of course, if you sell you’ll pay 15% and give away your copyright, unless you’re very, very lucky.”

I didn’t.  You don’t want to lie to the young (And though he was probably my age, he was young in the profession) but if they want to lie to themselves, it’s their problem.

I wasn’t on any how-to-write workshops (which might have been just as well, since these seemed to be mostly empty) and I didn’t have a reading or a signing (though a lot of beginning, self-published authors did.)  This is not a complaint, as such, but an observation.

The observation is this: every local con I participate in, I need to fight for reading/signing and if I get one scheduled it is, inevitably, either against the bestselling author OR during dinner hour.  Even during Worldcon, in 08, when it was local, I had no reading, though readings were given to people who hadn’t published a book in years/weren’t writing a book/had no intention of writing a book.

A certain confusion is normal, in this sort of thing, of course, but the way I get shunted to the “Oh, who could possibly want to listen to a reading from her” position started grating a good five years ago.  Particularly since when I can afford to go to cons in the South like ConStellation or Liberty con, or even in other parts of the country (Lunacon) and get given a reading at a normal time, not against major events, I usually have a packed room.

Again, I’m not complaining about this con specifically.  My only complaint of this con, specifically, is that they don’t realize authors aren’t college students and therefore schedule us really heavily.  (Though part of this might be the problem of the constantly breaking down body which is not their fault, and which I’ve lived with all my life, courtesy of being really premature.)

I suspect locally – because a lot of it depends on how involved you get with fandom, how much you publicize, and – frankly – how much you give yourself airs, and also on the local fandom’s PERCEPTION of your career, (including any rumors going around) the fault is at least as much mine as theirs.

I started realizing there was something wrong with how fandom perceived me, when, circa 2006, with the Shakespeare series VERY firmly dead, an urban fantasy (Draw One In The Dark) and the musketeer mysteries coming out, I still got put ALMOST EXCLUSIVELY on “Shakespeare in modern literature” panels or “How to write literary fantasy” panels or – and by that time it was already mind boggling – “how to sell your first novel” panels.

In fact, in 2008 worldcon, the ONLY panels I was on (I crashed a bunch of others because, so there) were on Shakespeare and Fantasy.  2008.  Any Man So Daring, the second of that series, had been out of print since 2004.  Since then I had written urban fantasy, historical fantasy (the Magical British Empire) historical mystery, fictionalized biography, had a contract for Darkship Thieves and…

I think it was in 2008 that, at my signing, a local big time fan stopped by the table, looked down at a spread that included bookmarks for the Magical British Empire and Gentleman Takes A Chance and said “So, you’re just writing mystery now?  You’ve given up on sf/f?”

It was in 2007 that, as I was describing how I’d started art classes to rest from books, a local fan/book vendor told me “So, you failed at writing and you’re trying another career?”  Given that I was under contract for six books, which was the impetus for doing art so I could rest my mind, I was mind-boggled at the idea this meant “failing.”  (Also, if I intended to be an artist, I’d need to LEAVE writing behind.  I can do it at “good amateur” level, and next year I can probably enter some shows — but pro I’m not.  To make a living as a cover artist, I’d need to spend two years practicing.  At least.  Look at the cover of The Muse’s Darling, on Amazon.  That’s my art work.)

No, I wasn’t a bestseller.  We could go into how at the time the push model of book marketing had become such that you couldn’t be a bestseller unless the house had put you in that slot.  (It wasn’t QUITE true for all series and all houses, but the house had to at least allow it to happen.  For instance, when the first musketeer book sold out of the print run, it wasn’t shipped for six months – even while the second was.  Which, of course, meant that tons of people didn’t buy the second, because they hadn’t read the first.  When the first shipped again, the second had been returned.) I could also discuss how “bestseller” is not the be all, end all of a career.  It measures velocity (and lay down) so that you can have a huge fandom and still not be able to hit the bestseller list, because your books are “slow, steady sellers.”  This usually – eventually – makes you a bestseller, but it takes time, and also a certain amount of fanfare and distribution to get the fast sales up front which right now doesn’t work unless you’re one of the two people a (big) publisher will spend a ton of money on.  Or you’re a naturally good promoter (which as we’re seeing I’m not.)

However, given that by 2008, already, most people’s “career” consisted of two books (if you were lucky) the fact that I’ve been constantly under contract since 2001, except for three months in 2003 and that I’ve been making not a spectacular amount of money, but enough to support myself if I were single – PARTICULARLY when you take in account that one of the houses kept making me change name and genre – can’t be considered “since you failed.”  BUT that’s clearly the general fandom perception locally.

So… what is at the back of what seems to be a pretty well rooted mis-perception of what I’m doing and how it’s going, among local fandom?  Well, it could be political.  At least to an extent, it almost certainly is.  The fact that I work for Baen is not a plus.  I remember how shocked they were that a lot of fans wanted them to have David Drake as a guest.  And at least in Denver most of the guests of honor tend to be among the “reds in sf.”  (Except Eric Flint, since he works for Baen, of course.)

But since this has been going on from before I worked for Baen, I think it’s more than that.

Part of it is, undeniably the accent.  Yeah, yeah, I know, and I’m not claiming “discrimination” but we all judge each other that way, and I sometimes feel no matter what I say after I open my mouth, people hear “foreign born, self published.” (In fact, even though the Shakespeare series got a ton of good reviews, even back then, I read a lot of people disparaging me — it was embarrassing then, remember — as “self published.”)

Part of it is my presentation of myself.

I come from a class-intensive society, more reminiscent of Japan than of even Great Britain, at least when I was growing up.  The way you dressed and behaved in public was dictated by rules of where you fit (and going too high was as bad as going too low.  The later was “not giving yourself respect” and the first was deception.)  Your level of language informed people where you fit in the social ladder and…

And I was always very bad at it.  It’s not that I didn’t understand it.  I’m not stupid.  It’s that I live too much in my own skull to think about “how am I appearing” and also that frankly I like people, and I don’t care what “class” they are.  So I would follow handymen around and be very respectful (they can do things I can’t) while asking questions about what they were doing.  I would pause on the street to chat with the fishwoman, if she went to elementary school with me.  I generally divide the world into “interesting and not interesting” and couldn’t care less what impression that gives tot hose that divide it by money or status.  Also, the way I dress is usually “what I like” not what people perceive as cool.

This is stupid, of course, and I don’t need you to tell me that.

What I didn’t realize, at least for a long time, is that publishing is (or was) more like Portugal than like the US.  It was top down, there were classes, and fandom is very good at tuning to those classes and reacting to PERCEIVED class of an author.  Part of it, of course, is that fandom are odds, and they want it to look like they’re excluded because they’re above the rabble.  This is why push marketing worked much better for, say, sf/f than for say, romance, where it never took completely and where they always had both surprise bestsellers and pushed authors that flopped.  If publishers push a writer and give signs this writer is “valued” or “special” the “vocal” fandom tends to follow.  (This is also why, with the exception of Bujold, Baen gets no awards despite their books selling quite well.  You see, Baen has been branded as a pariah and to associate with it is to share its status.  [In fact two agents in a row tried to prevent me from working for Baen for just this reason.])

So, it wasn’t just that I work for Baen or the politics…  It’s that I don’t act as a big shot author.  (In fact, I’m not absolutely sure how a big shot author is supposed to act.)  When asked about some effect on a panel, I don’t start the answer with “in my book.”  And I don’t list ALL my books at the beginning of a panel.  (Partly because it’s tiresome.  Partly because, given most people on the panel have one or two books published, when I list them they either shut up or become passive aggressive.)  Also, because I’m working really hard most of the time, I tend to do things like leave for a con without bookmarks or promo materials.  (Hey, guys, this weekend I left without UNDERWEAR and we had to drop by the store on the way to the hotel. I also left without makeup and decided to do without.  This might have been a mistake, as I think I looked very ill.)

I tend to assume that people read the bio in the program – at least when they’re scheduling programming.  This, I suppose, means I’m insane.

Anyway – the irritation at the panels that made me go “uh?” including the one on the “age barrier in publishing” that had my entire family and, because we had no clue what they meant (Uh?  Age barrier?  Which way?  Up until fifteen years ago, they were saying you needed to be 45 to be mature enough to write.  Ten years ago they started publishing twenty year olds.  Yes, that means they skipped my age group.  What else is new?  I still got in.) and which ended up turning into “Why would you go traditional right now?” has morphed, on reading Dave Freer’s post, into a “Yes, that’s sensible and would never, ever, ever happen” frustration and then on reading Amanda’s post today, into “So they want to publish people who are already good at doing everything they supposedly do?” and also “What the heck do they mean ebook sales are flattening?  I think what they mean is that the rate of growth is flattening.  And who in h*ll is reporting this?  The big six?  They’ve reported the same 100 some ebook sales for each of my books for years.  And heck, I sell more than that, in SHORT STORIES indie.”  I mean, seriously, most people I know are now at least reading paper-and-e.  And the younger ones tend to e-only.  And judging by the number of emails I got when Baen wasn’t on kindle, any number of them read ebook only.

Will ebooks ever replace the paper books?  Yes, I think so.  It’s generational.  My kids live with kindle and kindle fire growing off the ends of their fingers.  I think eventually – in twenty or so years – paper books will be like leather-bound, collector’s editions today.  They’ll be what you buy for the two or three authors you love and want to keep clean and untouched, and signed.  Heck, mine became that way a while ago.  At least for hardcover.

The sign of this – like the sign that TVs are going either massively big or watched on computer, which is craigslist being full of “free entertainment center” offers from people upgrading/changing over – is starting to show in “free bookshelves” all over craigslist.  It’s also visible in planes, where people more and more are reading on electronic devices.  (I wonder how airport bookstores are doing?)

Are indie bookstores doing better?  Well, it would be pretty hard for them to do worse than they’ve done the last twenty years.  And with the implosion of the chains, with their top-down and “tri state” shelf stocking, it was inevitable that bookstores that actually bring in authors for signings, have knowledgeable staff, etc, will do better.

Is it a long term growth thing?  Who knows?  I think eventually there will be a place for bookstore-like hangouts – perhaps bookstore cafes – where you can meet other local booklovers in the flesh and where, if you hit an ebookstore from there they get a cut – kind of like the referral links for people to put on their website but space based.

But I do think most bulk reading will be in ebook.  From what I hear from my colleagues – not in Baen.  Baen is different.  Read Dave Freer’s post yesterday to find out why. – the printrun numbers and sell throughs are in free fall.  The ebooks through traditional publishers (at least reported) aren’t picking up, and most authors I know (except Baen) are at least contemplating an escape.  Even in Baen those who write other stuff — me — have an indie side.

Now this is where it worries me.  Because if I need to somehow give the impression I’m a big shot author before I become one, I’m OBVIOUSLY in deep trouble.  I can write.  I can write okay.  Though my opinion of how well I write now is guaranteed to be very low five years from now, I think I write well enough to be enjoyed.

But I clearly can’t give the impression I’m a pro, much less an old pro, at least not locally.  Perhaps mom was right and the “giving yourself respect” gene was left out.  Perhaps it’s the fact I forget to go to the hairdressers because I’m writing a novel.  Perhaps it’s that I treat starting out newbies, if they’re good, with the same respect I give bestsellers.

Or perhaps local fandom is right, and I’m a failure, for a certain definition of failure.  Who knows?

Local cons always leave me a little maudlin, a little depressed, wondering if something is wrong with me that can’t be fixed.

And the way the field is falling apart so that, as with the state of the country, nobody knows not’ing isn’t helping.

So you will forgive me for this very scattered and vaguely self-pitying (though more self-reproaching) post.  At least I hope you will.  Part of it, I know, is tiredness from the con (I finally feel like I’ve slept enough today.)

If you wish to support my so called “failing” career, hit up the side links and buy Darkship Thieves, or Darkship Renegades, or A Few Good Men, which is a book I didn’t mean to write, and is a complex book but is also, in my opinion, the best thing I’ve ever written.  I’ll be bringing out the rest of the backlist and a few things (Fantasy, mostly, though some mystery and a couple of horror.  Yes, there’s SF too, but I probably should (?) run that by Baen first) from the trunk (not as bad as it sounds.  Most were “agent rejected” because they’re “too weird” and “no one is doing anything like this!”  Like, you know, Witchfinder.)  I just need time to actually, you know, edit stuff.  Because a lot of it more than five years old, and needs editing.

And – as bad at promoting as I am, and as bad as giving a good image of my career – the one thing I can promise you is: Read all you want.  I’ll write more.

UPDATE:Subscribe button installed (you have NO idea what it involved.) For those not using paypal, I’ll eventually get a po box (it tells you how I’m functioning that I spelled that pox and couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong) and post the addy. Meanwhile two things: first, I don’t expect anyone to donate at the insane (or even the next down level, which now escapes me) but my mentors in these things assure me some people might be crazy enough to. So, it’s there. Next thing — if you subscribe and don’t get an aknowledgement over the next week or so, ping me in comments. It should notify me, but it’s new (of course) and it might not.

April Fool’s Day – post two

 

Here I admit to the “joke” I mean to make – not a practical joke as such, but a fun chance at cross promotion.

I got the idea from the Austen fandom.  On April fool’s people would take the most delayed long-running stories, and ask the author permission to “finish” them.  Sofie and I granted such permission one year, and the person had Darcy-the-dragon accidentally burn Lizzy.  The end.

I wasn’t very happy with THAT format, because it came out under our names, which means it was confusing, and people were going “What?” when we continued, even though it had been explained it was a prank.

So, what I’d planned to do was exchange with four friends and do an episode in their world.  I was going to take Tom and Kyrie to a convention… and of course indicate I had Kate’s permission, etc.

What went wrong was mostly me, but also my friends.  We all seem to be doing ten thousand things at once.  If we get a chance, we might still do it in future as a fun thing.

This is my favorite sort of April Fool’s joke – kind of like that documentary below – because while played perfectly straight, it doesn’t expect to FOOL anyone.  (The documentary didn’t, according to its history.  It wouldn’t, back then.  I wonder if it would now, because so few people are around farms?)  So it was funny to everyone (pretty much) how well it was done, without being mean.

My problem with most April Fool’s joke is what I call “humiliation humor.”  More and more comedies, even romantic comedies seem to rely on it.  My husband and kids get confused when I leave halfway through a movie because I can’t stand it, and it’s a romantic comedy.  But you  know, the sort of thing where say the nerd is convinced the prom queen is in love with him, and it’s all set up to have his face rubbed in it that she’s laughing at him, makes me sick to my stomach.

Perhaps it is an overdeveloped sense of empathy, but I see nothing whatsoever funny about that sort of thing.  Perhaps it is because I was not only the much younger cousin, but the much younger playfellow in all the groups I belonged to, which meant that I was often the butt of such jokes, often unintentionally.  (How?  Well – “go lick soap” is a Portuguese expression, like “go soak your head.”  At around two I didn’t know this, so when my cousin Natalia told me to go lick soap, I went and reported back it tasted awful and did I have to do it again, which made all her friends crack up.)

But in a way, the basis of ALL my ethics, defective as they are, is a horror of unwarranted cruelty.  Or unexpected cruelty.

What I mean is, say your ten year old did something awful.  He knows it, you know it.  When he comes back, he expects to be punished.  But say your two year old did something awful and has no clue it’s awful.  You call and he comes to you, all smiles, because normally you’re nice to him, and you yell at him and punish him.  The last one makes me physically ill.  (Which means my kids got at least one and often two “free bites” where I just told them why it was awful.  After they were cognizant this worked pretty well.  Third time they got justice of hand on rump quickly, and that stopped it.  Mind you, I made it VERY clear before I was displeased, enough to discourage the behavior.  I just didn’t snap out with yelling and punishment.

Now say your kid did something for which he expects to be REWARDED (it’s amazing the stuff kids misunderstand) and you spring anger on him.  THAT just makes me want to hide and cry, even just watching it.  (For instance, once Robert decided to clean the kids’ bathroom for me, when he was four.  There were things he didn’t process, such as “you don’t mop carpet.”  He expected praise.  I did praise the WISH to help, then explained what he’d done wrong, and pointed out this was why it was better – even though I knew he’d wanted to surprise me – if he asked me how to do it, until he was a little older and knew how things worked.  Carpet in a kids bathroom was a stupid idea anyway, and got replaced shortly after.)

The reason I dislike MOST April fool’s jokes is that they set up that sort of situation. The situation where the prankster feels ‘better’ than the pranked, by fooling the victim.

(Most comedies these days are the same thing.  They’re trying to make the viewer feel superior to the character.  I wonder if this is because most of the Hollywood writers lack all empathy?  Of because they have such insecure egos they must be bolstered this way. Not that I don’t love the “Big Lie” type of joke, I do – but there are ways to do it.  Look at “While you were sleeping” – thank you to Rebecca and Alan Lickiss for introducing me to it – it is one of those, and you’re sort of leaning back and going “whoa, that’s gonna be a mess.”  BUT no one is made the “stupid” part for falling for it.)

I do enjoy and used to look forward April Fool’s jokes you sort of know are coming, sort of are looking for, and can admire for ingenuity.  Say, the Scientific American April article.  (My favorite was the wooden Roman computer.  I can’t now remember whether it was fed on punched wax tablets.)  There are others.  A fellow writer announces he’s quitting EVERY year, and tries to come up with different reasons.  (Some hilarious, some very plausible.)  Those, like the spaghetti below, are more of a shared joke.

My big issue with those in this day and age is that it gets reported on the net at a remove, and the indication that it’s a joke, AND the date get lost.  For instance, my son, last year announced he was selling Ninja Nun to a Japanese company whose name translated to “April’s Fool”.  It was clear from the drawing style, etc, that it was a joke, let alone the improbability of any company wanting to buy a tiny webcomic.  BUT months later, he was still getting notes from people asking what he was paid and how he made contact.

My husband announced he was selling his first novel, under conditions NO ONE WOULD TAKE, including selling his copyright clear and forever, and having to store unsold books, and having to sell all books himself.  And putting up $4000 of his own money to get traditionally “published.”

We thought he made it as outrageous as possible.  And yet… yeah.  Some people still find that post and send him congratulations.

So… I decided not to announce that, after seeing the light, I’d joined the communist party and/or was giving up writing forever.  Because it probably WOULD lose me readers and be brought up years from now as “Sarah Hoyt is a secret communist” or “she said she wasn’t writing another word and she went on writing, and I lost all respect for her.”

Hence what I was planning, more of a joke on the characters, because let’s face it, having Kate’s Jim faced with a shape shifting DRAGON at a con, and having people trying to pretend it was a costume would be hilarious.

Ah well.  Maybe one of these days the individualists will organize.  For now, though, I’m going to do some work – and that’s no joke.

I had planned something elaborate for April’s Fool, but for various reasons it’s not going to come off.  No, it wasn’t EXACTLY a prank, and I’ll explain why later in a more serious (ah!) post.  But I just woke up — that’s how much the conference took stuffing out of me, though it’s probably fact I was editing in evenings that didn’t help — and for now, I’ll just share my favorite April’s Fool day video.  Later I’ll explain why it’s my favorite…

Ahem.  I’m not going to say anything.  I’m not even going to ask whose bra that is on the chandelier, I’m just going to go outside and take some deep breaths, and when I come back I want the blog exactly as I left it.  IS THAT CLEAR?

Well, except for Cthulhu roasting on the fire pit, because tentacles are num in a garlic sauce.  Num num num num.  And the bust of Heinlein.  That can stay.  I was going to complain about the pair of panties hanging from his ear, but seriously, he’d probably not complain.

Seriously — con was fun but exhausting.  I keep forgetting it’s organized by college students, until I suddenly find myself not able to eat dinner and with four hours of panels back to back, and then I go “Oh!”

My access failed, I couldn’t post at insty, etc. etc…  a litany of woes, but I had a good dinner with the boys today (even if Marsh made me laugh so suddenly I inhaled broccoli and almost died.)  And now I’m going to take a nap and then do some publishing.

Oh, yeah, for any of you who are curious and who are NOT on facebook.  This came out this weekend:

This is an omnibus of my first published series, back in 2001-2003.  (Fixed, thanks to the Colonel for pointing out I had 1003…)  And  Oh, yeah, it’s indie publishing since it reverted, and it’s same as on webscriptions with minor alterations, but if you’re not a webscriptions user, this will help.  Goldport is my own imprint and some other old stuff will come out from it, once I have time to edit.  The Musketeers’ Mysteries will come from NRP. Warning — it’s not at all like my space opera.  So if you’re going to consider it, download a sample first!

I am on my way to Anomaly Con in Denver, though I don’t think we’ll make any of today’s panels.  We meant to, but the younger boy was delayed at work group and… you know “things happen.”  I also (sigh) was fighting KDP and didn’t have time to make an outfit (SIGH.)

However, we’ll be there tomorrow, most of the day, if anyone wishes to drop by and say hi.  (I’m just sorry I didn’t have time to have Witchfinder out.  Ah Well.)

I might or might not post tomorrow or Sunday.  My Kindle Fire is supposed to allow me to, but it’s being sphynx-like about the HOW.

*This is the new free novel, being posted a chapter a Friday.  It will eventually acquire a cover.  Probably next week.  It will also eventually acquire its own tab (possibly when I remove Witchfinder, the prequel, which is being edited and will go on sale in normal channels in two weeks or so.)  One bit of retconning will happen.  Blythe is not the family title but the name.  I got confused.  I had made them the Earls of Timfarr.  I’ve changed that to Savage, because, frankly, fits better.  As always, if you donate $6 or more to this endeavor you’ll get an ebook in the format of your choice when it is done being edited.  (Possibly via a free coupon on Smashwords, but we’ll see.)  This is a savings, as the book will go up for 9.99.  Of course you’ll be donating in less inflated dollars, so you figure it.  Incidentally and unrelated — sort of — I’m putting up my backlist under Goldport Press.  The titles five or more years old are going up for 4.99 and I’ll try to put up Omnibus(eseses) of three for 9.99.  I might/might not, depending on what THEY think of the idea, contract to do bundles with Baen, for the various series(eseses.)  BUT failing that, they’ll be on Amazon, B & N and Smashwords at reasonable prices.  Paper editions as soon as my husband has time to set them because my mind gets all bent out of shape when I try to paginate so it appears sequentially.  For those who have been waiting patiently, yes, this means you’ll soon see sequels too, including for the Musketeers, vampire Musketeers and my Jane Austen stuff.  On Rogue Magic — doing this in interlaced first persons still feels WRONG as in “forbidden.”  But part of this is to experiment, right?*

Lady’s Gambit

Miss Helen Blythe, Sister of the Earl of Savage:

The moment Jonathan left the table, Mother turned to me.  I have no idea what set her off.  Perhaps it was my look after my brother’s departing form, which was probably both worried because I know very well what Jon is capable of, and wishful because I’ve long wished I’d been a man. If I were a man, I could have moved beyond the circle of good behavior; beyond the circle of what Mama expected from me.  If I’d been a man—

“How we’re going to get you married off, when you insist on these distempered freaks, I don’t know, my dear, but you must strive to control them.”

I didn’t know what Mama considered a distempered freak, or even what she’d said beyond those words.  I’d heard those words, only.  I knew they were addressed to me, because my sisters are good girls and never have distempered freaks.  Heaven knows how they manage it.  The first answer that ran through my mind was “Oh, do not worry, mama.  I don’t want a man.  I want to run away and become a pirate Queen.”

I realized I’d said the words aloud, as Mama’s mouth dropped open and her eyes threatened to pop out of her head.  Hanna, always the good sister, yelled out, “Mama, mama, she didn’t mean it, she was only funning.”

Only I wasn’t funning.  Or not exactly.

The problem with these daydreams I’d had since childhood, and the answers I thought to Mama but never actually said aloud, was that I suspected eventually I would start saying them aloud.  Apparently, for my sins, that day had come, and no wonder, what with my perfect older sister having an affair all along, and being pregnant by someone not her fiancé and then dying a month after the birth.

Yes, I know what you heard: about how Honoria had been secretly engaged to the illegimate son – and now heir – of the Earl of Sidell, who had been unjustly accused of necromancy and therefore was in hiding.  How there was a secret marriage and how then – fortuitously – his father’s death allowed them to announce it.

The truth is far more interesting, involving forbidden love and madness and an illegitimate baby who will forever be known as his brother’s son.  I also have more than a hint of a suspicion that the brother, my now brother in law, is in fact the lover of the king of fairyland.

All this I gathered from unconsidered bits that Mama let fall when she didn’t know I was listening, and also from my assiduous perusal of Jonathan’s private papers, which might be an action unworthy of a gentlewoman, but is absolutely necessary for me to survive in a world where no one tells me anything.

This is what I hate about society, and why I’ve decided to leave it.  They expect me to be a babe unborn and never to experience life as it really is.  Real life is far more interesting.

“Helen, say you were funning, tell mama!” Hanna said.  She was chaffing Mama’s wrists with vinegar and looked at me with that pleading look she gives, which always makes me feel like to deny her would be to kick a puppy or stomp on a kitten.

“Yes, yes, I was funning,” I said.  In my code of honor, which I’d come to more or less on my own, it was a great sin to lie, but killing Mama with a heart attack was probably a worse sin.  I wasn’t sure, because I hadn’t had the time to think about it, but it probably was.  I also judged she would recover far more quickly without me in the room and besides I had work to do.  Betsy must be frantic by now.  “If you’ll excuse me, Mama,” I said, and before she could answer, I dropped a courtesy and left the room.

I didn’t start running till I was on the stairs and then I took them two by two in a step Mama would consider most indelicate, not the least because it exposed my ankles.  Well and good.  Soon there would be no problem with that.

Betsy was waiting in my room, and wringing her hands as she’s wont to do.  I like her prodigiously much, but I think there is something about being raised to be a servant that makes you… well, anxious about doing anything not quite approved of.  It was a miracle, at all, that she had agreed to my plan of leaving this house, and making a life for ourselves.  Truth be told, I think the only reason she’d agreed was that she had been my maid for three years, and I’d read her all the same stories of adventure I read myself.  I think she was devoted to me, in a way some younger sisters are to older sisters, and that it were not for me, she’d never consider anything unconventional.

I wondered if it was a breach of moral code to allow her to get involved in this.  But it was so much easier for us to enlist in the navy and to pass if there were two of us and one could watch the other’s back.

Still, she looked awfully anxious and was wringing her hands together.  She stood there, with two carpetbags, and a whole lot of other stuff, and her eyes were tear smudged and she said, “Oh, Miss, I thought you’d never come and that the mistress had figured what was forward and that I was going to be turned out without a character, and you—”

Her mind failed at the thought of what they might do to me, and she started crying.  “Don’t be a ninny,” I told her.  “Of course no one found anything.  We must go, and as soon as possible.”  I sat down at my dressing table, pulled a towel around my shoulders.  “Quick.  Cut my hair, then I’ll do yours.  And you must put something on the floor to catch the hair.”

She obeyed, of course, but halfway through cutting my hair she started crying “Oh, Miss, all your lovely curls.” And it was all I could do not to dismiss her from my plan and this venture all together.  Only I didn’t dare.  If Betsy stayed behind, they would question her, and the girl had no more gumption than a half-weaned sparrow.  So, instead, I said, “Stop calling me miss.  What is my name?”

“Hank, Mi–  Hank.”

“Hank what?”

“Hank Cutter, Miss.”

I decided to let it go.  Like a puppy that you have to train little by little, Betsy would need to be broken of her bad habits.

She wasn’t a very good barber either, but that was good.  The rough cut made me look less like one of society’s ornaments.  It ended up with my hair mostly at my shoulders, except for the bit where Betsy had tried to cut off my ear, because she was crying so hard she couldn’t see.

Her hair was not much longer than that to begin with, which made sense, because of course, she didn’t have as much time to deal with.  It was a whispy blonde and even with it short, it didn’t do much to make her features less round and rosy and feminine.

It was a liability, but I figured some men lived with it too.  Fortunately I looked more like brother Jonathan than like my very feminine looking sisters.  The shorter hair, roughly tied back, made me look like a boy maybe of seventeen or so, a couple of years younger than I was.

Betsy helped me bind my breasts, and I put on an old suit I’d bought used, because all of Jonathan’s were too fancy for Hank Cutter.  Then we got Betsy dressed and I had to wait till she stopped crying, though I suppose very young boys – she’s my age, but looked no more than thirteen in male attire – might cry at leaving home too.

I bundled our cut hair, and stuck it under my mattress, to delay discovery.

Then I took out from my desk drawer the transport spell I’d bought from a vendor so that it wouldn’t have disappeared from our stock and Jonathan wouldn’t know right away.  I didn’t think he would care if I disappeared.  Certainly not care enough to follow me.  Our entire family is selfish, and Jonathan, mostly, cares about Jonathan.  But it was no use giving the alarm right away.  So I didn’t want to use just my raw power, nor did I want to steal a spell from our stock.  It had cost me a shocking price from a street vendor, even though it was stamped with the seal of Blythe’s Blessings.

The thought of the price reminded me to take my remaining money – my quarter allowance, withdrawn and turned into gold coins – and slip the pouch into my sleeve.

Then I turned to Betsy, “Are you ready?” I asked.

“Yes, M–  Yes,” she said, and sniffed.

I opened the transport spell and commanded “Take me to Portsmouth.”

 

UPDATE: FREE SOUP

Yesterday one of my online acquaintances/fledgelings who is fast becoming a friend had an unpleasant experience which brought to mind sideways and backward something that’s been percolating at the back of my mind for a long time.

First let me start with a story – years ago (21 years ago, to be exact) my family was living in Columbia, South Carolina and we were dead broke.  Part of this was because my husband had been unemployed for six months, and hadn’t been able to get a job, since he had to look after me through a difficult pregnancy.  Six months of paying your visa with your mastercard when you’re young and were barely making it before REALLY puts a dent in your finances.  Then the birth of our long waited and worked for son was a three-day-nightmare ending in a two-surgeon emergency Caesarean under COBRA.  The bills, when all was said and done, came out to 20k.  Twenty one years ago when that was still money — heck, it was a third our debt on our then house.

To make things worse, it took me about a year to recover from the pregnancy, I had post partum depression and was neither physically able, nor emotionally capable of thinking clearly, much less finding a part time job or even doing little stuff (I started towards the end of our year there, stuff like making baby booties from tapestry scraps, and selling those at our garage sales for $5 a pair.)

Dan got a job almost immediately after I gave birth, but it required moving to Columbia.  We still had our house in Charlotte and it took us more than a year to sell it.  We had to pay for a place in Columbia.  All we could afford was a house with no air conditioning.  Yeah, it sounds like “uphill both ways” but on a normal day, not the three months that passed as winter, we woke and it was 104 degrees in the house.  And Dan worked sixteen to eighteen hour days (It was that type of software shop) and we only had one functioning car.

I honestly think if it hadn’t been for its being South Carolina and there being cheap places to buy fish and vegetable stands by the side of the road selling excess zucchini, and if I hadn’t got help from my parents, we’d have starved to death.  We did, more than once, consider going into a soup kitchen.  Never quite had the nerve to.

As the year wore on and we worked out a payment plan for the medical bills, and I started being more able to think and do stuff, now and then, rarely, we could afford to go to Burger King.  We’d get a burger for Dan and a grilled chicken sandwich for me, and we’d drive down the street to this really nice neighborhood and park in a place with a nice view and eat.

I’m no saint.  I didn’t like the situation we were in.  I got bitter very often.  But it never occurred to me to envy those people (many of them our age) in the nice neighborhood.  I liked the thought that even though I couldn’t and might never be able to, these people got to live in these nice houses, with these lovely gardens and not everyone had to slog along with me.

I didn’t think these feelings were that rare or that strange, but around that time I was reading about Eva Peron and there was a quote about how she grew up poor and the thought that there were rich people in the world infuriated her.  I was shocked, not just at the naked envy but the fact the magazine doing the profile seemed to think of it as normal or maybe even a virtue.

In writing, G-d knows, I’ve come across tons of people who had a much easier ride up than I, and yeah, I do get bitter.  Do I envy them, though?  Do I want to see them brought low?  Well, no.  I do get very annoyed when they assume (sight unseen) that I must write much worse than them/be stupid not to have broken big yet (instead of suffering from a bizarre combination of luck and odd circumstances.)  I get annoyed because even from my modest success, I can tell you writing, like all other careers, is not a meritocracy.  Wait, like all other careers not dealing with vital stuff, like things that will explode if mishandled.

Now, I believe in traditional publishing (Baen excepted, of course) there is a strong element of political bias.  Yes, I know, the OTHER side says that conservatives just don’t make it because they’re establishment and therefore not creative.  First, it would be the first time in history that creativity is consigned to a political side.  Second – REALLY?  We’re the ESTABLISHMENT?  Really?  Only if establishment is defined as “people who hold no positions of power in the industry whatsoever, except a relatively small house we love to beat up on.”

Anyway, so I do think there’s political bias.  Whether it hit me or not, I don’t know. There were ways around it, but some I couldn’t do and sleep with myself.  (Or wake with myself.  Waking was the hard part.)  But I do know that BOOKS that got the fawning treatment had to hit the points they were looking for.  (Yes, there is a way to tread the needle, I just never did it.  By the time I knew enough craft to, I was in a permanent state of anger at having to do that, so it didn’t happen.)

But beyond that, there is luck.  While I don’t think that my first publisher had me slotted for a long and fruitful career, I also don’t think they planned 9/11 to completely torpedo sales of my first book.  I also don’t think  that they planned to pay for a book dump, then have stores order only two, so most stores never unpacked it.  And, of course, according to the push model then being used, that book and those numbers  took me ten years to recover from, to get even to the level of “normal beginner”.  (The name changes, though that house adores them, did nothing but make it harder for people to find me and for me to build a following.  Jim Baen told me — and Jim would know — that the numbers go off the COPYRIGHT page.)

Even from my small amount of success, I keep running against unpublished or small press published people who are at least as good as I am.  Yeah, sometimes it means that though their talent is great, they fail at something: submitting, sending out, application. BUT I don’t assume they’re idiots.  Sometimes, it’s luck and life circumstances.

Anyway, all this to say I don’t precisely feel envy of people above me in readership and distribution.  I want to get where they are, but I don’t want them to not be where they are.

Again, I’m not a saint, and I’m not bragging.  It would be like bragging that I never wanted to eat live snails.  It’s something left completely out of my makeup.  I don’t want to bring people down to my level, though I often want to get up to theirs, and sometimes – mostly on my friends’ behalf – I get a little annoyed when people who have a lot with a lot of help think I’m a lower life form because I’m stuck where I am (or my friends are where they are).

But we’ve got – partly because of the idea of Marxist economics, I THINK, in which everything is zero sum and if you have something it means I can’t have it; but also because of this odd idea that seems to affect mostly boomers (no idea why) that anyone who succeeds is crooked and must be brought low – to a place in society where we glorify envy.

People are considered worthy, not because of how hard they’re working or because they’re decent people and good friends, but because they’re “disadvantaged.”  I.e. they’re in a bad position, and this alone entitles them to bring others down to elevate themselves.  And people who are successful – at least in all books and movies – are considered somehow crooked and evil because they’re successful.

I don’t understand this.  I don’t think that a society as a society can survive this sort of upside down idea.

While we’ve always as a society been sympathetic to the underdog, now we’re sympathetic to the underdog qua underdog.  Forget deserving poor. The most deserving thing is to BE poor, and the only way to remain moral is to never try to do better, never “sell out.”

This was brought to mind by friend’s experience.  He is in a position, after a long time, to do something about writing a book he’s thought about for over ten years.  He’s been talking about it a lot, as writers do with their early projects, and he’s just got told that he can only do this because he’s “lucky” and that therefore he’s somehow unfair for doing it.

Look, guys, I know what we all told Josh K. (And told him, and told him – runs!) about homeschooling, and I won’t say anyone can do whatever they have their heart set on.  I know very well that any number of people end up in places in life for a time at least when NOTHING can be done, no matter how much we try or want to.  And sometimes the time you can do it, never comes.

I was there the year after Robert was born.  Between the depression and recovering (not least from six months on bed rest) there were days I counted myself lucky if I and the baby were both out of bed, bathed and dressed by two in the afternoon.  And the days dishes got done and we had time/energy for a nice walk down the street were red letter days.

However, if there’s something you want to do ENOUGH which is not bound to a particular time (so, not like homeschooling!  But a lot like writing) you can do it in practically any circumstances. Not all.  But almost all.  I did write – and send out – a novel during that horrible year.  Note only ONE 90k word novel, but given what all was going on, not bad.  It was my first personal rejection too.  And the other novel I started that year eventually won me a writing contest, which sort of got me on the road to publication.  At least it showed me I wasn’t delusional.

Now, I’m not going to say it’s easy to have a full time job or infants and a house you’re rehabilitating, or anything else and write (or do art.  Or compose.)  And yeah, some people have it easier than others.

But here’s one thing I noticed: once you start working on it and pursuing your dream (whatever it is), there will always be people who come out to attack you and go out of their way to try to stop you.  Most of these people SAY they too want the same thing, but they just caaaan’t.  Poor they.

However, I’ve lived fifty years in this world. I’ve seen a number of those people get their “opportunity.”  Do you know what happens?  They continue whining, sometimes finding the most transparent excuses for why they “can’t.”

Whining is a WHOLE lot easier than trying, and in our society it comes with its own crown of victimhood.  Pah.  And bah.

Don’t let these people get you down.  They’re all wanna be Evita Perons, unable to be happy until everyone else is in the muck.

Pity them a little, if you’re a good person.  Then run ahead and forget them.

The best way to live is to do what you can, work towards what you can’t (yet) and never try to pull others down to your level.

It’s what’s best for you.  And over time maybe it will turn the culture around, too.

This is not an announcement that I’ve gone fishing.  (Ah!  You guys know how cold it is on the rump end of the Rocky Mountains, right now?  Some people might be dedicated enough fishermen to go out in this but I – while fully appreciative of what one could call the contemplative aspects of fishing; or what I can sitting near the water with a nice book – have issues with the part of fishing in which you grasp a squirming, slimy creature and try to remove it from the hook without dropping it and/or spearing my finger on the hook.)

Rather it is a post on how things happen.  Individual things – like how you end up doing the things you do in life – but also societal things: what really moves and shakes the world, the limits of government power, and what is ultimately and always in our own hands.

When I was in ninth grade, the person I admired most in the world had her entire life planned to her retirement age: what degree she was going to take; where she was going to live; what she was going to work in.

I saw no reason to doubt she’d do exactly as she planned.  To begin with – if one believes in talent.  We were fourteen, and she might have done a lot of learning before I met her – she was talented at everything from sports, to art to academics.  And second, even though we’d just gone through a revolution, there was a certain feeling of rockbottomsolidness to the way of life in Portugal, possibly coming from each person not only being able to name several ancestors, but being able to tell you they’d all lived here and there, and their general life histories.  Governments and revolutions passed, but people ended up in a similar position to that of their ancestors, and, tech notwithstanding, the way of life didn’t change that much.

I looked her up – I think five? – years ago.  Let’s say her life didn’t go exactly as planned.  I had some indication of that already, because I knew she’d switched majors halfway through her second year in college and also, concurrently, was admitted to the conservatory for a music degree that was no part of her plans.

In fact the last time I talked to my best friend from childhood, the girl who shared my desk (it’s a two-person thing, in Portugal) in first grade, and from whom I’ve diverged and with whom I lost contact (It wasn’t my fault.  Not guilty yer ‘onor!  She married a Frenchman!)  she said I was the only one of us who could even vaguely claim to be doing exactly what I meant to.  Since at the time I thought my career was pretty much over (2003, the Annus Horriblis – and if you think that means the year of the horrible ass, it’s also not far off, considering how editors were behaving.  And agents, too) I thought that was a fairly sad statement.

But I am still doing more or less what I intended to do in Elementary.  I was going to grow up, live in Denver (hey, I’m STILL working on that) and write books for a living.)  Later on, in middle school, I decided I was going to be a journalist (and if you squint sideways you could say I’ve made some forays in that direction.)  And later still, in High School, I aspired to being a political gadfly and having every vile prog in the world get indigestion at the sound of my name.  (Working on it.  Like Denver, it’s a long term project.)

When you consider that at the time I formed this brilliant idea I had no idea where Denver was – I think I had it confused with Dover, since I thought it was by the sea – spoke no English (and had less idea how to publish in Portuguese than in English.  Still do.  It’s a problem, because daddy would like to read my mysteries, and he doesn’t read English), had no contacts in North America, and the internet as we know it, (which is allowing me to make strides towards those last two goals) was only a glimmer in its daddies eyes… it’s not bad.

So… How did I get here?  Well…  Not any way that made sense.

Last summer, at Liberty Con, Glenn Reynolds attended the Baen authors’ party.  Someone (I think Dr. Les Johnson) asked him how he’d got to where he was.  “How did you become the blogfather?” or something to that general intent.

The answer – like Pratchett’s answer on how he wrote, which gave me permission to pantse books – was a relief to me.  “Like everything in my life,” Glenn said.  “More or less by accident.”

And that is how I ended up here, and as close to my childhood dream as makes no difference, when you consider the dream came from an eight year old Portuguese girl, in a village of no consequence, writing out her letters with a quill pen in a one-room school house.  At the time I’d come up with that plan, neither of my parents (or my brother) had ever flown in an airplane.  Those of my family who had immigrated had gone as workers, and often illegal (sorry, it’s a fact of life.  No, I don’t agree with our laws being violated.  We just can’t stop it.  We need to get rid of perverse incentives, to get rid of illegal immigration.  Well, the current REVERSE incentives might do it too.)  My chances of coming over and living here, let alone being a professional author were pretty close to zero.  Maybe less.

So… how did I get here?  More or less by accident.  If I hadn’t run into a poster for an exchange student organization in a location that was not one of my usual; if I hadn’t been intrigued enough to try to figure out what the organization was; if I hadn’t been selected; if I hadn’t been placed in the states; if I hadn’t then met my husband…

Being a science fiction writer, I can very well imagine a hundred parallel futures, none of which ends with me here.  In most of them, I suspect, I’m now retiring as a public school teacher somewhere in Portugal.  This was the path of high improbability.  That it also more or less fit what I wanted to do is… not exactly a coincidence.

How could I have planned for this?  Back in elementary, how could I have sat down with a pad of paper – like my friend did in high school – and put dates to my dreams: 1984, fall in love with an American.  Ensure he falls in love with you.  Sending him Heinlein books might help.  1985, marry said American.  1986…  How could I?  What sense does that make?  And that even without taking in account the more improbable steps on the way to where I am now: 2001, make sure that literary fantasy series flops, so you can go on to write what you really want to, and actually have a career.  Trust me on this, literary fantasy will never be enough to life from.  Or 2008, make friends with guys at PJM so you can publish the occasional non fiction article.

Really?  How could I plan that back in 1970?  Unless I were psychic.  (Something I’ve never been accused of.)

And this – you knew I had a point, right, other than the one on top of my head? – is why I object strenuously to all forms of government planning, from monetary supply to the more abstruse forms of involvement with professional training (like the US limiting the number of doctors who can graduate every year.)

Because politicians and economists and all the people who are supposed to be the great panjandrums of planning are no more psychic than I am.  Worst, like everyone who is trained in a narrow specialty, they are often worse than the average Joe  at knowing what is coming down the pipe.  They get tunnel vision.  My husband, for instance, is brilliant at developments in his field and even secondary impacts – he told me eighteen years ago that the long distance telecom business was as good as gone, and had maybe another two or three years before the implosion started – but he spent years telling me that my spending my days on the blogs was a waste of time, because it wouldn’t last.

My friend who planned her whole life failed to take in account that at fourteen she wasn’t even done growing: she had no idea what her mind would become, or what would interest her later.  She couldn’t have enough information.

The government planning it for her, wouldn’t have done any better.

Let’s imagine the benevolent statism of some of Heinlein’s juveniles.  Say, an Earth authority, who really wants to keep things running the best they can, to provide for a swelling (eh.  Even the best predictors fail!) population.  Ten years ago, the planners would still have been going “We need x number of journalists.”

Technology changes, the world changes, plans change.  Some of the plans and tech and the world change in response to laws which think they’re going to control some portion of the world but which, instead, just make it go a different direction.  (No?  Obamacare – the end of full time employment as we know it.)

If an individual who is most concerned in it can’t plan his own individual life, because of the way it intersects with everyone else, what kind of being can plan the life of a nation or a world?  You’d have to be sort of a god, standing above it all, wouldn’t you.  As we know, and some other people are finding out, no such beings exist in the world of Earthly politics.

Oh, don’t misunderstand me – governments can and do change the course of things, only rarely the way they anticipate.  Think of the left’s long crawl through journalism, entertainment media, government and education, all with the purpose of establishing full control and full narrative control, so people could be living in 1984 and think it was paradise and that the people keeping boots on their necks were liberators…  All undone by a tech that for the beginning of its popularity was mostly used for disseminating porn and which is now still a haven for kitten pics and Heinlein flamewars.  (And if you think it’s not been undone, imagine what we’d know, and what we’d think without the net.  At least now we have a fighting chance.)

The individualists fail to organize.  The collectivists are fond of planning.  At least our side is aware our penchant is a shortcoming.  Their side… hoist on their planned petard comes to mind.  Couldn’t have happened to nicer statists.

Not that they don’t have power.  They still have power.  Mostly, they can cause most of us to die in horrible ways through revolution, war, famine or targeted mass killings.  Governments throughout history have excelled at all of those.  I doubt they’ve lost the knack.  (Though the sheer organization of the industrial age might be passing from this world – thank G-d.)

BUT if we survive, they can’t do much for planning how we live – and certainly not for helping us get where we want to go.  It’s not what it’s meant for.  Even if the people in government were saints, and motivated by the best possible wishes, it wouldn’t work.  They mostly are motivated by self interest and a will to power, and it definitely won’t work.

The law of unintended consequences is like the law of gravity.  You can’t avoid it while on Earth and dealing with corporeal humans.  The idea of control is an illusion.  Humanity organizes in a chaotic system.  Step on a butterfly and you might start up squid farms in Asia, or kill Martian colonies in the twenty second century.

So – supposing you want to get somewhere – if planning doesn’t work, how do you get where you want to go?

Why… by accident.  Or not.  It’s more like Zen archery.  You don’t aim, but you know where the target is, and you stay lose, and you intend to reach it. And then, instead of planning how to get there, you stay alert for possible opportunities to get where you want to go.  See an opportunity to work at something you always wanted to?  Give it a chance.  See something that needs doing and doesn’t pay?  Try it.  Who knows?  It might start to pay suddenly.  Stay open to chaos and make use of it.

Or maybe it’s like fishing.  You can stake out the perfect cove, put the right bait in the water, wait.  But if the fish slept late that day, you might come home empty handed.  On the other hand, start a bunch of rods going, with different bait, and you might have to dine on frog’s legs, but you probably won’t go hungry.  Or even better, get a boat, a net and trawl that lake.  Throw back what you’re not interested in.

As the man said, the game is rigged, but if you don’t bet you can’t win.  And, as with the lottery, the more bets you place, the greater the chance you’ll win SOMETHING.

It is the secret to surviving in times of catastrophic technological change, the secret to surviving the unintended consequences our “planners” throw at us, the secret to staying alive and getting (more or less) where they want to go.

Keep moving.  The terrain changes constantly and there are rodents of unusual size (we call them politicians!) Keep a buddy at your back to tell you what’s going on there.  Pick up your fallen comrades and  carry them along as you move towards your destination.

It’s a chaotic world.  The non-planners have the advantage.

There’s a different post on over at Mad Genius Club.