According To Hoyt

So, part of the issue with closing off Noah’s Boy is that, as you guys know if you read the second book Gentleman Takes A Chance, I have to deal with issues of kindness and lack of kindness, and when it’s right and just to be soft, and when being soft might cause more problems than being harsh.

Tom, my main characters (with his gf Kyrie) is, for reasons that will become obvious in the third book, sort of a “natural and universal daddy.”  He’s always trying to help people and be nice to them in the second book.  The big issue, of course, is that he doesn’t get the other side of the father thing: being firm and being a protector… until the third book.

In the second book and at the beginning of the third, Tom is having issues with this, and Kyrie has to be the “heavy” – who prevents his charitable impulses from biting them in the fleshy part of the behind.

This is something that took me forever to learn, and something that is, by and large, not taught in our schools.  You are taught it is good and kind to help everyone, and that you shouldn’t judge those who come in search of help, and that you should give to all regardless of deserts.  In fact the whole point of governmental charity (known as redistribution.  We’re not talking here about short and self-funded safety net, but extended, long term help) is that because we all “belong to the government” as they kept saying at the Democratic convention, no one needs feel bad about asking it for largesse.

The problem of that kind of impersonal largesse – or what I would call the dopy largesse that “we must not judge and we must give to all, and if they’re worse off than you they ‘deserve’ it” – is that it often does more harm than good.

We won’t go into how it harms those who might need a lot less help, but for whom there are no resources left.  That’s been covered in another post.

Instead, let’s talk about how it harms the “victims” of largesse.

Somewhere in my archives I have an article about Africa in which an African pleaded with the West to stop helping Africa.  His point was that when a man with a physics degree can make better money driving some international charity mukety muck around, then Africa is not going to develop its native talent or stand on its own two feet.  (And that’s before considering the fact that much of the money sent to Africa end up in the hands of war lords and despots, thereby not allowing Africa to develop a bottom-up political system.)  I’m not sure I agree 100 percent, but I do agree most of the aid is counterproductive or worse, and it should be targeted at things like children, pure drinking water, and such.  (And even that will cause distortions.)

Also somewhere in the archives is the story of when my youth group decided to help a poor family in the village. They lived in a horrible place, had a lot of children, and well, we wanted to help.  So we collected a bunch of money and gave it to the father…

Only to be told by my mother that the adults in the village had been feeding the kids and giving the kids stuff forever, but tried not to give anything to the parents, because it all went to drink, and then the kids got beaten and were worse off.  In fact, when feeding the kids you had to do it at your place.  If you sent them back with groceries, the mom sold it for drink money.  Ditto with clothes you gave the kids, which is why they went about in dirty rags.

Then there is the soup kitchen downtown in my city, which has such great and no questions asked services that bus-fulls of “homeless” come from Denver for them.

We’ll forget for a moment that it’s destroying downtown business (in cheerful collaboration with the city-council’s ridiculous parking policies.) because it’s really hard to run a bookstore – one of the businesses that closed – when vagrants come in and pee on the floor, or the books, while your patrons are browsing.  Instead, let’s talk about my walking past a group of these and hearing a relatively young woman – around my kids’ age – say she could back to her parents, but they’d make her go to school and stop doing drugs, and why should she?  She can get food, clothing and medical care at the soup kitchen, and she is “free” and no one can tell her what to do.

Looking at the wrecks of older derelicts around her, I couldn’t help but think that the “cruel” solution of making her go home and submit to rules she hates would be kinder to her in twenty years if she lives that long.

Cruel to be kind.  Kind to be cruel.  For a while now, the rule of thumb of my charitable giving has been “First do no harm.” We still give a lot, but most of it isn’t even deductible because it’s to people we know well who’ve hit a rough spot.  For the “impersonal” charity I tend to go with the same things that we spend our money on: stuff that privileges the education of the young and the ability of families to earn a living.  Or, occasionally, charities that help those who genuinely can’t help themselves.

Well, in this book (and for the next few) Tom has to learn to be a protector, which means occasional violence, but not unreasoning, not untargeted.  Showing him learning that without turning into a “bad” guy is difficult and has to be very carefully negotiated.

I’m working on it.

And our whole society needs to work on it too, because kindness and giving without controls only encourages the vices that bring about destitution and need in the first place.

This being Wednesday, there’s a different post over at Mad Genius Club.

I’m still fighting Noah’s Boy, though actually I’m fighting the crud, which is trying to make a comeback.  Yesterday I worked full time and got 1k words between revision and writing.  For me, that’s a sign I’m running a high fever… and I was.

Before you get horribly worried, this seems to be a recursive virus, both from my friends, who keep coming down with it again and again and again, and from talking to the people at the con.  It seems to be one of those that comes back lighter and lighter, till it stops affecting us.

Some years in Colorado Springs, we get these even when the rest of the country doesn’t, though this year the rest of the country seems to be RIGHT THERE with us.  (Thanks guys, we do appreciate the solidarity.)

This time does seem to be lighter, and my guess is I wouldn’t have got it at all except for the con straining the system, and other than making me late on NB where I CAN’T afford to be later, I’m trying to take it easy.

It occurred to me that though I exercise high and low justice around here, and the privilege of the banning hammer, I never explained the rules whereof the justice comes, which is very unfair of me and also somewhat un-libertarian.  Of course, this blog is not a democratic republic, but an absolute monarchy, in that I own the space and can eject whomever I please, BUT I’d still like to have people know when they’re stepping over the line and also to do a post laying it out, so in the future, you can say to a newby “You’re being a bonehead” and link the post.

The term comes from the Baen fan/author conference, known as the bar, which Jim Baen said had only one rule “Don’t be a bonehead” – only he didn’t say BONE.

Instead of defining it clearly, Jim had moderators who had the gist of what made for a lively conference.  This is important, because in my online life I’ve seen perfectly good blogs either made unbearable or even subverted by boneheads who came in and squatted over the comments section like poisonous spiders, making life living hell for the regulars.

RES has explained this effect best when calling it “the drunken uncle at a wedding.”  I don’t know if other people have experience this.  Not everyone was blessed with my mom’s relatives, which gave me a wide panoply of life experience.  However, this was immediately understandable to me, having experienced it from about age six.

You know, everyone is having a great time and then uncle someone or other gets drunk, and starts loudly making inappropriate jokes to every female of all ages, and calling them prudish when they complain or following them when they try to move away.  Later, for added diversion and depending on how intellectual he is, he will try to argue politics with other men, and take the most extreme positions possible, and shift the goal posts all over, and preen himself on how smart he is.

No matter how much you like uncle someone or other and understand he’s been a little funny since the war/his wife left/that incident with the mating weasels, at some point you realize other people are excusing themselves, developing sudden headaches, remembering dental appointments, or whatever, and leaving a party that was otherwise great fun.

Wise hosts learned that when uncle so and so started to get what he called “fun” and “relaxed” you tried to lead him away to have a little nap, and if that were impossible, you drove him home.  And if he insisted on doing this EVERY TIME you stopped inviting him.

It took me a while to learn to do this to the drunken uncles of the blog world, because I had some odd idea that I should allow free speech.  Only, I’m NOT a public utility.  I pay for the blog.  It’s my living room.  And the regulars here have mostly become friends I don’t like seeing upset.

Mind you, I encourage and welcome newbies and first posters – as long as they aren’t boneheads.

I realize some people aren’t being boneheads on purpose.  At least one of the occasionally regular posters periodically goes off his meds and goes from helpful to “OMG, WHAT?”  Other people just have really bad social skills, particularly in the SF/F field.  So I’m going to try to give some helpful hints.

So…

You might be acting like a bonehead if:

1 – You come in, a poster’s comment presses one of your hot buttons, and you decide whatever the comment casually referenced is the most important thing in the world.  You then proceed to:

a)      Comment on it by insulting the poster’s race/religion/sexual preference, which you can’t possibly know, but you’re SURE must be x y or z which you hate.  You do this completely unprovoked and it will seem to other commenters as though you’re coming out of the blue.  This is called “hitting.”

b)      Anyone else who comes in and even mentions this tangential point, in answer to you or not, you decide MUST be the original poster, even if they’re saying something different, so you immediately jump on it with “Ahah, I knew you’d concede.”

c)      Refuse to give up on your hobbyhorse, even when it becomes IN YOUR FACE OBVIOUS that you’re just upsetting people and not winning any converts to your cause.

d)     Refuse to give up on your hobbyhorse, even when it’s pointed out to you you’re filling the comments section with something that has nothing to do with the post and which unlike say hair dye or shoes, which have taken over comment threads before, is OFFENSIVE to a bunch of people who were enjoying themselves, and who have never done anything to you.  (I’m not saying my posts can’t offend people, nor that your comments can’t – I’m saying if it’s not related to the post and is going after people who’ve never hit you, you’re out of bounds.)

We all have hot buttons and most adults are at best walking wounded.  Most of us, though, learn not to attack total strangers who’ve never done anything to even lead us to believe they don’t like us.  The question here is “What exactly are you hoping to accomplish with this behavior?”  If you’re just making people upset – why do you want to continue?  It’s a wide and free internet.  Go somewhere else.

2 – You come in and define people’s religion/nationality/sexuality/political beliefs for them, even when they try to tell you that you’re wrong.  You then proceed to:

a)      Tell us how superior your nationality/religion/sexuality/political beliefs are to the ones expressed in the post or held by most posters. (And you often misinterpret these, or use reasons no one in his right mind would.)

b)      Tell us we’re stupid to be upset over a development in our own country, which you only know about from your country’s incredibly biased press.

c)      Act in the way my grandmother called “Having G-d in your belly” – i.e. someone gave you the sole ability to look into the hearts of everyone and you get to define everything.

Again, the question is “what do you hope to accomplish?”  If it’s to p*ss off people, don’t be astonished at the troll-hammering

3 – You come over to educate us in Marxist anything.  No.  This one doesn’t need aggravating behavior.  I don’t care what illogical beliefs you have, I had a bellyful of it and more in my schooling and I’m not going to give you a forum for a theory that has caused millions of dead and is looking to cause millions more.

An exception to this is if you are willing to listen and engage in honest discussion on why it’s wrong.

PRETENDING to engage in honest discussion and shifting goal posts brings on the troll hammer, because I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.

4 – Another instant troll hammer is if you come in and preach at us — usually completely unprovoked — that some race/nationality/religion/sexual preference is inherently evil and needs to eliminated forthwith.

My favorite variant of these are the white supremacists, who might perhaps want to take a look at the blog owner’s photo before peddling their rotten fish.  (Some day I’ll share with you the gems in one of these blogs which I followed back, including the fact they thought Portugal had gone down the drain because the population had become “miscegenated” – to prove this, they used pictures of the Portuguese Royalty in the 18^th and 19^th centuries… who were, like everyone else, relatives of Queen Victoria and had nothing to do with the population in general.  If they’d gone back far enough, they’d have found Prince Henry the Navigator was swarthy and rather Jewish-looking [His mother was Phillipa of Lancaster, but his father was an illegitimate son of the king by a lady from a converso family.] and was also possibly the brightest star that Portugal has ever produced so while they can be amusing and their delusions “adorable” – I don’t have time to mock them as deserved every time and also they highjack threads.  So, instant troll hammer.)

5- Never had to use troll hammer for this, but came close to it one time – I don’t care how infelicitously someone expressed something.  Before you accuse a regular of being a troll and chase him/her all over the threads, PARTICULARLY when you’re a relative newby, kindly search for that commenter’s name and see how often they’ve commented and what kind of comments.

Persisting in harassing people who have been commenting here for years about an irrelevant point of linguistic expression AND ignoring the blog owner when she says “So and so is NOT a troll” will get you banned. (Getting offended at the owner saying “So and so is often a pain, but is not a troll” leads to self banning and puzzles the owner who thought most of the comments AIMED at being a pain — at least half the time, when it comes to odd puns and weird theories.)

Understand, I’m not saying you can’t have lively discussion or even – if you’re both regulars – tease each other.  I’m not saying even that comment threads must keep to the topic (Ah!  Like any of you could do that.)

I’m saying that unprovoked hitting – say making fun of someone’s religion which hasn’t even been mentioned before, then doubling down when the person is offended – and pursuing hobby horses that are upsetting everyone else, and making the comment thread all about your particular obsession even though EVERYONE else is getting upset at you is likely to get you banned.

In fact, think of it this way, if you’re behaving like a kindergartner and the discussion has devolved to “did not” and “did too” at some point I’ll come in and ban the one of you who is not a regular, or who has done this more than once.  (And yes, I totally know you guys are going to do this in the comments just to get my goat.  Behave.  Goat blood is a b*tch to get off the floor boards.)

Feel free to ask questions or suggest additional rules in comments.  BE AWARE that I can’t require the guys to all wear quilts and that some of the women are allergic to fishnet stockings.  I can’t enforce that kind of rule.  (Or even put the guys in fishnet stockings.)

And now excuse me, I have a novel to finish.

Years ago, I was talking to an older writer friend and she said wasn’t it weird how the future they expected and anticipated, with refectories and public crèches never came to pass.  I pointed out that, though they weren’t provided in a centralized manner, it had come to pass.  Back then (early 2000s) we were living a rather hectic life and often stopped for take-out – along with every other family with two working parents, also stopping for takeout.

It is natural for science fiction writers to think of centralized solutions for the future they want to happen.  This is natural not only because most science fiction writers older than I (and even more younger than I, but the reasons are different.  The younger ones were indoctrinated rather than taught) thought that the only way to achieve brand new patterns of living would be through top down imposition, but also because it’s easier to write a government solution for something, than the myriad, lurching confused, responses of the market – no matter how much more efficient the second is, in the long run.

This is the exact same reason we often end up with our characters saving the world or something of the sort and in my case often in the space of two weeks (I like stuff to go fast) because it’s much harder to say “And then some guy in China did this, and then…”  Also, makes for lousy stories.  The climaxes just are no fun, if you have to show a bunch of people no one heard of before doing a tiny bit to turn the situation.

Anyway, my friend was shocked at the idea, just as she was shocked at the idea that as it was most people WERE being raised by strangers in daycares.

This brings me to a fascinating paradox.  We are supposedly living in an age when feminism won and therefore we have all become… men?

Look, I know some of you – possibly because I WAS saying heretical stuff – interpreted my blowing steam post as meaning that I wanted all women to go back to the kitchen, barefoot and pregnant.

Actually, I don’t believe in broad groups and that very much includes “male and female.”  No, I don’t think that those are “social constructs” – sorry –  even if some of the ways the inherent tendencies express are very much a cultural thing (after all, Elizabethan men wore make up.)  BUT I do think that when you talk about the statistical female and the statistical male you are not, in fact, talking about anyone who exists.  You’re talking about “in general, it is this way.”  Lies, damn lies and statistics.  Depending on where you hang out, you might not know a single woman who is in the center of the IQ curve, who loves shopping and whose greatest ambition in life is to have babies.  (I do know some women like that.  It always strikes me as offensive from a writing POV, the same way my Chinese dry cleaner annoys me.  I mean, shouldn’t these roles be less stereotypical?  What was the Great Author thinking?)

Although there is, broadly speaking, a female brain and a male brain, very few people have a perfectly gendered one.  My older son, in the few minutes before my eyes glaze completely over, has gone on about hormone baths in pregnancy and also how your hormone balance throughout life will affect your epigenetics.  Pregnancy does change your brain too, if you have kids and heck, an extended period on some contraceptives changes your brain too.  And one of the characteristics it changes is how well you fit your gender prototype.

Stereotypes of course got to exist for a reason.  Meaning they have SOME predictive value.  If you know someone who is madly craving a brood of children there’s a good chance the person will be female (though apparently once upon a time it was my dad.  And the partner who didn’t want ANY was my mom.  So they ended up with two.)  But in your circle of acquaintance, the person who really wants kids might be Joe, and the person who is a type A career driven maniac might be Mary.  And in ten years it might be reversed.

So – what do I mean by all of this?  Why am I confusing you?  There isn’t enough coffee for this – just this: people are not the group they belong to.  Humans aren’t chips to be moved around a board.  You can’t say “Group A was advantaged for centuries, so we’re going to punish their descendants.”  Not only aren’t their descendants the same people who got an advantage, but the reason that advantage existed might now be completely gone.  (For instance part of the reason males had an advantage in career was that, frankly, they couldn’t get knocked up.   Which meant their lives were less likely to be interrupted by stopping to have have babies [and trust me, it does a number on your brain] than women were.  Reliable contraceptives have stopped that.)

In fact, the ultimate definition of evil is always treating humans like things.  Humans have this tendency, statistics or not, to be highly individual.  Take me, for instance – for a while in my life (we were furnishing and rehabilitating a house) I hung out with the good old boys outside the hardware store, waiting for it to open.  I still like carpentry.  I was a tomboy until I had kids, and in some ways I still am (as you’d see, if you could glimpse me fighting the boys with nerf swords, up and down the stairs.)  So you’re thinking I’m a boyish type female.  I’ve certainly never had trouble competing with men intellectually or professionally.  BUT I love doing crochet, I enjoy dressing up and make up and if you saw me out – in high heels – for an evening with my husband you would think I was the girliest girly who ever stepped.  (The only form of shopping I like is for shoes.  Deal.)  I also wanted to have a dozen children.  (Stoopid lack of fertility thwarted me.)  And I chose a career that allowed me to work at home and raise the boys rather than the more monetarily rewarding career I could have had in translation or teaching.  (The fact I really wanted to write is neither here nor there.  The reason I quit my technical translation job was that I had pre-eclampsia with Robert and it does interesting things to your brain.  The reason I chose not to go back was that trying to establish myself in writing, instead, allowed me to stay home and raise him myself.)

The point is, if you try to fit me in either role, you’ll get me very upset.  (And trust me, no one wants me very upset.)

And I fit about as well in “the thing to do” now as I would have done when the “thing to do” was to “be a good wife and mother.”  I chose to have a career AND to raise my own kids.   So the career had to be one that allowed me to raise the kids, but I failed at soccer mom 101, because I was busy writing. Both were perfectly reasonable.  I had to do something intellectual or I’d go batty(er) and I always wanted to write fiction.  At the same time I’d seen the result of kids raised by strangers, knew there was a good chance my kids would be outliers of the type that always do worse in daycare, and I decided no, I wanted to raise them.

Yes, I spent years being looked down upon because I stayed home to raise the kids.  A gentleman who BARELY escaped having his head bitten off, this only because he was too stupid to talk to, at a party for a company Dan worked for in the late nineties, asked me what I did for a living.  I told him I was a writer – at the time I had sold my first novel, had five stories published and WAS working 8 + hours a day on getting the career off the ground.  Yes, I was normally working with the kids playing legos at my feet, or reading in my research chair.  He asked what I’d had published, and when I explained, he curled his lip and said “In other words, you’re a housewife.”

Now, the anedocte is illustrative of two things: first, he thought being a housewife was bad.  In fact, he thought it was so bad that he decided I was lying about writing (I still wonder how easy he thought it was to sell five stories and a novel.  Let me tell you, at the time, not easy) to cover up my condition as housewife.

He wasn’t the only one.  All through my life I’ve run into people assuming that a) because I’m married; b) because I chose to have kids;  c) because I chose to raise my own kids, I must have the IQ of warm milk.

Without an exception, the people making this assumption were feminists – whether male or female – and would have said that they were for female equality…

I’m fairly sure the shows showing every position of power from police captain to corporate exec as female (for double points female of color!) also think they’re striking one for equality.

My question is…  If we must all be equal, why must we all be equally male?  Why shouldn’t it be equality of opportunity: jobs have certain requirements, if you can fulfill them we don’t care what gender equipment you were born with.  (Unless the job is prostitution, where legal, of course.  Oh, wait.  That falls under requirements.)

I don’t at all oppose showing women in positions of power – though I’d prefer if it were made clear there is a price in both cases.  The stay-at-home, no-job mom will be paying a price in employability and also in social standing.  But the career woman also pays in an often (though not always) lonely life and in childlessness.  There is no perfect path.  You lays your bet, you takes your earnings.  BUT I do oppose showing women in EVERY position of power (or just about.  Sometimes you’re allowed a minority guy in those roles.)

Why is it that from promiscuity while young (though I think that is because of the misguided late-nineteenth century idea that if we all had all the sex we wanted there would be no neurosis.  We should be past that now) to single minded pursuit of career as an ideal, we are pushing women into male roles and giving male roles the high status even as we disem-power (totally a word.  Deal) REAL males.

It’s as though we’ve determined the best  thing possible for society is for everyone to be males or ersatz males.  And ersatz males are better.

In a truly feminist society wouldn’t the female roles be more valued?  Wouldn’t we have guys bragging how they stay home with the toddlers because they’re way better at it than their wives?  Wouldn’t we have women embarrassed to admit that kids were put in daycare?

And you know, the puzzling thing about this, is that – no sentimentality considered – traditional female roles were of paramount importance.  The raising of the next generation is not only vital, but perhaps the most vital to the continuation of the civilization.

It is also one done very badly by strangers, be they the government or private people.  It is not the first time a civilization has tried this.  In fact, squinting and from a distance, our pursuit of status through abandoning of the raising of our own kids is exactly what Rome did, and what the French aristocracy did, and what the British aristocracy did.  And every time – mark me – every time the kids thus raised either brought the civilization that created them down, or had a d*mn good whack at it, even if saved by peripheral events.

The fact that we consider raising kids low status shows how far we’ve come to devaluing women in this supposedly woman-centered society.  This is just like the promiscuity that is supposed to “liberate” women actually results in young men who never feel the need to commit to a monogamous relationship.  Who is it liberating?

Look, the old model was restrictive and oppressive.  No doubt about that.  There were, I’m sure, excellent scientific brains that could have advanced humanity but instead were expended in the dark dankness of a cottage, rocking the cradle, because women weren’t to be taught.  (For that matter, I’m sure that there are excellent brains covered by burkas in places where women are simply what’s between their legs.)

The new model is restrictive and oppressive.  Young women are taught that wife and mother is not an honorable choice even if they are working at home AT THE SAME TIME.  Even if their profession is demanding.  For that matter, young men are taught that staying at home to raise kids is somehow wrong.  (For a brief time my husband was the “kindergarten mom” and I went out to work.  The sneers were WORSE.)

Are there women who would do very well in combat?  Probably.  And given other psychological arrangements (like, perhaps the instincts of their male colleagues cause problems, so perhaps an all-female unit, if it can be managed) if they meet the requirements men meet, let them do it. There are women (vanishingly few) who can fireman-carry a 400lb man out of a burning building.  And if they pass the tests, for the love of G-d why not let them do it?

But please don’t push them into it, don’t lower requirements for them, and don’t sneer at them if they choose NOT to do it.  Value what used to be called “men’s work” and “Men’s ways” and “women’s work” and “women’s ways.”  It’s all human work.  It all needs doing.

In the same way – I know a few couples this way – if the man is more nurturing and wants to stay home with the kids, suspend the jokes.  And if the man wants to be an engineer and the woman wants to stay home and cook and sew and raise babies, what business is it anyone else’s?  Why should people be made miserable to fulfill dreams of past generations?

Oh, sure, I’d prefer a future in which because of tech we have even more flexibility: a future in which most people work from home and parents can supervise their kids’ education which is mostly online.  A future in which human potential is highly augmented by labor-and-time saving technologies.

But even then it won’t be universal, and the best way to GET there is to stop grouping people: by color, by gender, by … whatever.

Let each person do what they’re best at and WANT to do.  You’ll find that people are best at what they like – or at least they work harder at it.  And that everyone is better off, when people are allowed to do what they feel called to do.

I believe in individuals.  Whether the individuals want to be barefoot (pregnant is more difficult, because some of those will be male and others will be infertile) in the kitchen, or suited up in the boardroom, or driving a truck, or exploring Mars, or teaching toddlers, or nursing the sick, or fighting wildfires, or fighting on behalf of their nation, or researching scientific puzzles, or writing a novel WHILE rocking the cradle.

I think each person should do what they want and are best suited to, and that we should stop counting heads and thinking there’s a “problem” if there’s more outies than innies here or there.

Let’s stop pounding square pegs into round holes.  It ruins both the holes and the pegs.

 

*My older son, Robert, has a blog he rarely updates.  In fact, I think his last update was about a year ago.  He says that his life is not interesting enough, so he writes about his life in a parallel universe, which is much more fun.  This means, mostly reports from the Ultrabowl where teams such as the Colorado Cthulhus face the New Orleans Bone Dolls.  He has also written about the problem of hobo balloons infesting downtown and other, weirder things.  (No, trust me.)  Since (I suppose?) this requires a creative effort and he’s full up with college AND the Ninja Nun comic, you can see he wouldn’t update often.  However, his post on attending conventions, written before the Denver Worldcon in 08, remains one of my all time favorite ways of approaching cons.

Note that, as the son of a writer, Robert is hazy on the difference between SF cons and writer conferences.  Possibly, of course, because at sf cons he hung out with writers anyway.  Easy to get somewhat confused.  But other than that, it’s quite fun.

Today is the last day of the con and — argh — I’m not done with Noah’s Boy, partly because of course yesterday we ended up meeting with friends and fans and I didn’t run home to write between my panels, as I should have.  Truly, if we weren’t broke, I’d have got two nights at the hotel — which would have made it easier to work between things.  I’m now looking at G-d willing finishing tomorrow, and then doing the finale on Witchfinder on Tuesday (and I really AM sorry.)

Meanwhile, I got up late, and as I get ready to go out — Dan has a panel at 11 and I have a reading at noon — I find myself all out of words.  So I’m reposting Robert’s post on the lead up to Denvention 08.  Robert blogs here and has promised another Ultrabowl post next week.  And his Ninja Nun comics are here.”

G*d is a Pantser – By Robert A. Hoyt

Eventually, almost every writer comes to the conclusion that G*d is an author. It makes some sense, when one considers the nearly soap-opera-like setting many people, especially authors, seem to live in. Since the plot is moved along by the problems that the characters encounter and face, and humans in general come to a unanimous consensus that there are way too many problems around, we can make the safe extrapolation that whatever celestial plot we are taking part in is zooming along at a merry click.
And then it occurred to me that we are always assured that said plot is not going to go wrong. Most plotters can immediately see the problem, because no matter how carefully you plot it, stories come out the way you were expecting only if you were very lucky. And one could probably assume that, if we are to believe G*d can make the proverbial kidney stone even He can’t pass, in the form of free will and such, then by logical dictate we can assume that the universe could well be a technically demanding job even for the omnipotent. If you plotted it out ahead of time, when all you can do in the end is manipulate the circumstances around the characters and let them be themselves, the chance you’d end up where you were going would be infinitesimal. Given the assumption that you could see the future, you’d still be seeing all possible futures when the actions of the subjects were variable. This, I thought, presented a quandary, and I was not about to settle for the typical “C’est la vie” theological answer of its being a “mystery”.

And then, as I was watching McGyver, suddenly the mystery was solved. McGyver said that he didn’t plan things out in advance, because plans could go wrong… the very problem I had been pondering. Would it not be possible, then, that G*d solved the problem the same way McGyver does? I do not mean that on some higher plane, G*d is sitting there looking at earth and telling an angel “I need a paperclip, some bubblegum, and a fourth dimensional divine sphere”, but certainly a plan that you make up as you go along cannot go wrong. After all, if you aren’t certain what you are supposed to do next, then it’s hard for you not to do it according to plan; there isn’t a plan until you make one up, and then, of course, your actions in doing so almost necessarily assume you are going according to plan. Especially if we think of the universe as being, in a sense, a tremendous, complex game of solitaire, it’s impossible to know what cards are coming, but the skillful player excels in dealing with the cards as they come.
End conclusion? Our Author, who art in heaven, is in all likelihood a Pantser. He has a divine plan for you, certainly, but He might not know what it is yet. I was actually somewhat relieved upon coming to this conclusion, since it meant that the universe may be screwed up at times, but, if you take the long view, it’s awfully hard for it to go astray. Unfortunately, we probably ought to worry that, in the long view, history is also inexorably a story like “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”, and not like “Pride and Prejudice”, which would be a wonderful thing if not for the fact that we are the characters, and so ineffability is weighted towards our living in interesting times. Any historian can easily confirm that history is very rarely boring, and in fact has more sex and violence then a Brazilian soap opera.

It was while contemplating this train of thought that it occurred to me that most writers eventually go to a writer’s convention. Since G*d is reputed to be everywhere at once, we can probably assume that transportation would not be a problem in His case. Granted, your standard writer goes to a convention to network, maybe pick up some pointers on writing, although it is not unusual for them to go just because they want to have a good time and see some old friends. In most cases, G*d probably wouldn’t find that necessary. He already has the ultimate network, for starters, and I wouldn’t imagine He needs many pointers. But let’s face it… what’s the point of making a world if you can’t play in it occasionally? Most writer’s conventions are a lot of fun, even if they’re nerve wracking and even if you do go for business.

So, next time you look around a convention, be on the lookout. Don’t worry if other conventions are going on at the same time, He’s probably attending both if He’s going at all. He’ll be the quirky bestseller who you can never quite remember the nametag of, although you’ll come away with the strange impression it said “Mr. Jaho Vah”, and subsequently determine He was Swedish on this basis (speculation as to G*d’s nationality ends there, although it might explain a lot if He eventually turned out to be American. I will say, however, that although it’s a lovely country, G*d is almost certainly not Canadian.). He’ll be the largish man who sits at the back of the inevitable “How to Build Convincing Worlds” panel, giggling occasionally in a strangely unnerving way. He may, perhaps, express slight disappointment with the angel food cake in the hospitality suite, and is adamantly certain He can do it better. He will know all the secret parties and show absolutely no problems with staying up all night during the convention. He will know all the editors and agents, perhaps hinting incredibly subtly at some shady events in their past that no one could possibly know about during casual conversation, until eventually they include Him in the dinner party out of self-defense. You can spot instantly whether you have also been included in this dinner party, because one member will order the fish and be very fond of the dinner rolls (if the restaurant did not serve either of these prior to your party’s arrival, this is another dead giveaway), and no matter how little of either you originally had you will need several doggy bags for what’s left over. Writers in attendance who have previously had careers that dropped dead will miraculously see them revived, and people who were previously condemned to the slush pile with good reason shall be healed.

This, however, raises an uncomfortable possibility that there will also be demonic intervention. It is well known that the darker side of the occult attempts to thwart all things that the almighty does, which may well include taking a vacation. This is why preparation is of the essence. Firstly, be aware of evil forces when you see them. Keep in mind that small press editors, animé fanatics and filkers rarely invade cons en mass or travel in groups. Perhaps mischievous little tricks like the guest of honor being unable to get a badge will give it away, or if nothing else, loud groups of people who manifest outside your door at three AM to torment the three hours you have allotted for sleep.

If demonic forces do invade the conference you are at, it is important to keep in mind the con-goers basic handbook for occult defense and survival, which I will include some excerpts from:

1: The basic field kit for a con-goer should consist of at least one standard bell, one book, and one candle (Your standard issue BBC. It is very rare that you will be able to see Monty python on this kit, however.) The bell can be of any description the user wishes, although a shop bell is not recommended unless one is fighting demonic influence in the dealer’s room. Religious books are preferred, although in most cases a Heinlein book or in a pinch even something by J.K. or J.R.R. can be used by a true believer. Care should be taken with pronunciation in versions of the bible written in the original Klingon, and throat lozenges are recommended. Sadly, Manga has not shown a great deal of potency although ones with higher age ratings may be used to amuse demons with short attention spans while you run away. For the candle, use your own discretion. Something suitably impressive is usually available in the dealer’s room. Flame throwers are effective, but you shall have to convince con authorities they do not work and put a big orange tag on them. NOTE: You should not include garlic, protective herbs, or silver bullets. In the first two cases because they have absolutely no effect on the forces of darkness, and the best usefulness you can expect out of them is they may be used to flavor you. Silver bullets would only be effective against werewolf demons, which are, unfortunately, a completely unconfirmed species. If you do choose any of the above, you should take the precaution of wearing a large, noticeable protective amulet. Not that this will do you any good, but it will make IDing your remains simpler.

2: Stay away from Foci of evil. If you feel an irresistible urge to go watch the filking hour, take a few deep breaths, and look up train wrecks on YouTube. You will receive the same perverse satisfaction, but with less danger.

3. Know your way around the con hotel. Because nobody needs to run into the middle of the J.K. vs. J.R.R. pajama challenge panel when they’re looking for the exit.

4.No matter how great the urge, do not attempt anything you saw on Buffy the Vampire slayer on actual demons. You should not take advice on fighting the forces of darkness from a girl who apparently went to the afterlife primarily to unwind in between huge climactic battles.

5.Avoid being badly plotted. Most writers know exactly what I mean. Do not do anything that you would not write a character doing because it would be obviously stupid. Do not under any circumstances become the best friend of anyone, since there are fifty-fifty odds that you will die in a crucial battle with the con-demons if you do. Do not develop a love interest, and if you start to, find the section of the hotel which still has cold running water and use it.

And finally:

6. Do not do something to annoy someone who can crush your career like a bug on a semi truck’s windshield. Because the prospect of being out of work in this business is probably worse than facing Satan himself. You are planning to survive, so be as plastically jovial as you usually are with people you don’t like and who have power over you, so that they remember how nice you were even in a crisis. Certain editors and bestsellers are probably at least as powerful as G*d, so even if you run into Him, do not bet you are saved.

Above all, remember that if you do run into the almighty, the little touches make the difference. For Catholics, a cross in your Starfleet insignia may garner some favor, for Jews, perhaps a nice yarmulke with Klingon sayings. Since writers tend to work on a “share and share alike” system, and helping newbies is common, you could get some sympathy from our Heavenly Author and become one of the few writers who actually appears to have G*d on their side.

Major cons may attract more attention from the almighty, depending on how literally one takes “the first shall be last”. Keep in mind the above signs, and you should do fine. With a little preparation, you’ll be ready should Denvention turn out to be a religious experience.

Or, worst case scenario, a metaphysical warzone.

Okay, before I start this, I’m going to warn you I’m going to utter several heresies.  It’s not anything I’ve never said before, but we’re so cocooned in a nest of false reality, that these things still have the power to shock.

When I was little, my mom had this gargantuan pressure cooker.  I mean, I’ve never seen another one that size.  Because mom tended to feed the entire extended family on weekends, I think she bought some of her cooking implements from restaurant supply stores.

I was terrified of the d*mn pressure cooker, because there were stories of people getting their faces blown up in them, and I’d run across the patio when mom brought it out, set it in the middle of the patio and opened the steam valve and let the steam escape, before she opened the pot.

You could hear that thing whistle a mile away, like an oncoming train.

That’s sort of what I’m doing today.

A con is a social situation and a wise man taught me that only a fool or a sadist tells the truth in social situations.  My blog on the other hand is my blog, and if you guys aren’t used to the steam by now, I’ll eat my hat.

So this is my blog post to avoid blowing up in someone’s face and/or taking half the room with me.

Today at noon I’m scheduled for a panel on how YA has changed since Heinlein and Clarke wrote for Boy’s Life.  Note that there, the “boys life” slipped in – not “the golden age” but “Boy’s Life” – pretty clever, uh?  That tells you the direction they want this panel to go.  Nifty, uh?

I don’t find this stuff amusing anymore.  At the back of my mind, clanging like a funeral bell, the thought goes “What can’t go on, won’t.”*

And guys, let’s face it, this can’t go on.  It just can’t.  We made some joking comment to older son yesterday.  You see, he had one more humanities requirement to fill and after despairing of anything interesting (no, they don’t have any classical history, which was his first and abiding love) he settled on Jane Austen.  He likes Jane Austen.  He grew up on Jane Austen.

We teased him that he would be knee-deep in girls in that class.  Both boys looked at us like we were nutbars.  They’re knee deep in girls in EVERY class.  These are stem classes, and boys are maybe ¼ the class, at best.

I’d guessed it was somewhat like that – I’ve seen our friends’ SONS fall by the wayside since middle school, while their SISTERS, not notably more endowed with brains than themselves, had As.  I’ve seen my own kids’ classes.  It’s not just that the teaching style, the demands on timeliness, putting tab A in slot B etc are far more suited to girls learning styles, it’s that many of the teachers – almost all female – have an ax to grind, and their ax ALWAYS grinds on the boy side.

But I didn’t realize that college ratios in stem were that out of whack, too.

So, do let’s talk about YA fiction – and why I’m on this panel except to start a fight I don’t know.  I don’t WRITE YA fiction, except for the novel I’m trying to re-write, and I haven’t read any specifically YA fiction since Harry Potter.  (Pratchett doesn’t count.  I’d read his laundry list.) – and Saturday morning cartoons, and commercials, and–  DO let’s.

So in Heinlein’s time there were a lot of male main characters.  Yeah, okay, fine.  If you think that women and girl characters weren’t treated with respect, then truly, you haven’t read Heinlein.  What you have read are the feminists ranting about Heinlein.  NOT the same thing.

Oh, yeah, I forgot, Heinlein’s women wore aprons – therefore eeevil.  (Not, in the fifties clothes were way more expensive, therefore aprons, and people CLEANED a lot more intensively than we do.  Heck, I still clean that way,  Look kids, I hate aprons for OTHER reasons – as in, they catch and bind, and I can never find one when I need it.  But I buy my clothes at the thrift store, so I can afford to replace the $5 pairs of jeans when I can’t find any non bleach-splattered.)

Nowadays, though…

When Marshall was three he came to me and told me he wanted to be a girl.  I get alarm bells at the back of my head, the sort of incoming signal you get when you start going “Is this serious?” and “Is it something I did?”  So, very carefully I ask him why, trying to look perfectly neutral.  (And here you guys have to trust me, but Marshall, in both learning style and presentation and play was my very much boy son.  In fact, he was the most MALE child I ever saw growing up.)

He answered quite easily, “Well, it’s just that girls get to do ALL the fun stuff.”  So I sat down with him for Saturday morning cartoons.  Yep.  Girls have all the adventures.  And boys are either dumb or evil, and sometimes both.

In fiction it’s not that naked (it is in commercials) but you get it nonetheless. 100 pound females take out armies QUITE routinely.  (Oh, fine, but Athena is bio-engineered.  And her husband is her equal.  Deal.)

I have a friend who thinks this is good.  She also thinks it’s a pendulum and this is the “revenge” for the times when “the boys got to have all the adventures.”

She is missing the point.  She is missing the point by a mile and a half.

Those stories were REAL – i.e., they fit with the universe around us – and ours aren’t.

(I told you I was going to be a heretic.  Oh, and the kid got over this impression.  More on that later.)

Look, men and women are not the same.  They can be equal before the law, but they can’t be EQUAL.  They serve different functions in society, or in a sane society at any rate.

Or look at it another way: men and women were shaped by different evolutionary pressures.  I remember reading that human ancestors first formed in bands because of pregnant females, who needed someone to look after them, and who couldn’t walk as far as the males.  I don’t know if that’s true, (I read it in Scientific American) but considering how complicated our pregnancies are compared to most animals, it might very well be.  Our young CERTAINLY require a lot more care and vigilance than most young.  And for a longer time.  It’s the price we pay for the brain.

What this means is that in general, the pregnant women and the old ones, and perhaps the juvenile males or the older males, stayed behind in camp and looked after the littles, while the men went out and hunted.  We do know from primitive tribes, most women forage.  The men hunt.

BOTH functions are essential.  Yes, meat in the diet is important, particularly for large brains.  BUT often the men come back empty handed, and it’s the women’s berries and tubers that allow the tribe to live to hunt another day.

Would a female who wanted to hunt be accepted?  I understand in some tribes they are, at least while unmarried.  BUT would it be practical to encourage all the females to hunt, and all the men to gather berries and look after toddlers?

Um…

Let’s leave aside for a moment the fact that violent exercise of that sort while pregnant might not be the smartest idea and that frankly you don’t FEEL like doing it.  Also that women athletes, who run miles every day often stop ovulating.

Let’s instead look at me.  I don’t think my husband is strange.  He’s the best of husbands (trust me) and he adores the boys.  He’s FAR more patient than I am with them.  BUT when they were toddlers, he did  not have the “psychic” bond.  (It’s not really psychic, of course, but it might be instinctive.)  What this meant was that – we shared an office – I’d get up from my desk, go running down the stairs, come back up and he’d be all like “What?” and I’d go “Marshall was about to overflow the bathtub again.”  And he’d go “What?”  And I’d have to say “Well, there was silence, then a very quiet sound of running water, which meant he was being stealthy.  And he was breathing fast.”  “How can you hear his breathing in another floor?”  And I couldn’t explain.  I just could do it.  The bond slowly dissolved, over time.  I mean, I still pay attention to them, but I’m not connected by a sensory tether.

The explanation might be as simple as women being naturally multi-taskers, while men concentrate better (hey, studies show this.)  He concentrated better on his work, but I could hear the kids.

A tribe that sent the toddlers to the bush with a bunch of men would shortly have no toddlers.

In fact, maybe some tribes did this.  It’s like my son and I the other day, trying to sort out why most people aren’t individualists.  Heredity.  Imagine the proto-tribe composed entirely of individualists.  “Come on man, today we hunt mammoth.”  “Who is gonna make me?  You and whose army?”  Yeah… if there is a tribe that did that, we’d NEVER know.

“But Sarah, we have the pill and all sorts of modern stuff, and women should be encouraged to break out of their traditional roles.  Why should you be tethered to child raising?  Let’s free that half of humanity.  That’s why it’s important to present women as leaders and—”

Brother!  You’re not listening.

You missed the part where we were SHAPED by evolution.  Evolution is a funny thing.  It takes a LOOOOOONG time.  Oh, fine, okay, we’re self-tamed, and we might change ourselves faster than nature intended.  It’s still not something you change between a generation or the next, or even two, or three or ten.  NOT when evolutionary pressures have been changing male and female brains FOREVER and picking the most successful.

And then, even if that were your goal, you’re going about it ALL WRONG.

Heinlein’s women were accomplished and they were good at many things (if you read him you know he often showed them smarter at book learning and abstract thinking than men.  They were also wives and mothers.  It is their being wives and mothers that excites the hatred of our “feminists” who, of course, are the establishment voices and who control publishing and entertainment and even our news – either de facto or the screaming at being “offended.”

And thereby hangs the inanity.  First, our most “accomplished” women aren’t reproducing.  Well known fact, and something that frankly I wrestle with everyday.  Part of the reason we only have two kids was probably the high stress I put myself through trying to break into publishing in our best reproductive years.  Women’s bodies aren’t BUILT for continuous high stress.  (Men’s aren’t either, but weirdly their sperm production gets better.  We stop ovulating, because, well… For men it’s “pass it on before you die.”  For women it’s “We’re always threatened, no time to have babies we have to carry and share resources with.”  We are not EQUAL.  Not before nature.)  Even women who are married (and a lot of our high achievers don’t have time for that, or lack the courage to buck the establishment) among our best performers, will rarely have kids or many kids.  The women who ARE reproducing still and in droves are either from very traditional segments of the society or being supported by the government.

If your goal is to change evolutionary direction – brother, you’re doing it wrong.

But let’s go with your goal just being having a bunch of women in power, and a bunch of men as their toadies.  I often thing that this is the goal of most boomer “feminists.”

I even understand them to an extent.  Remember, I was raised in a country that was at least 20 years behind the US.  My first big trouble was for refusing to clean up after my brother who was 10 years older.  I thought he could take his own fargin banana peel to the trash can and it wouldn’t hurt him.

The fifties were an aberrant time because so many middle class women could afford to make no money, which meant middle class men were important as sole bread winners (no, this is not normal, historically, and partly had to do with affluence, part with societal dynamics.)  That meant the culture in the forties and fifties here – and sixties and seventies in Portugal – picked up all sorts of junk about men being more “important.”  No, not in fact, I know.  There were all sorts of  protections built in for women and girls, too.  But when you’re a pre-teen you don’t see that.  You just see boys lording it over you, and you want to make them eat dirt.

And a lot of the women ten to twenty years older than I never got over it.  This is all about getting their own back, and never mind what it does to the world.

I’m going to be blunt and heretical again: men’s and women’s brains are not the same.  There is a reason men engineers are more “natural” than women engineers.  There is a reason, even now you find fewer women than men working in engineering, though we’re training more women than men.  It’s not discrimination.  It’s that  men are better at spacial visualization.

There is a reason most nurses are female – women have been shaped through evolution to be better at perceiving non-verbal signs of distress and at dealing with the sick.

Now keep in mind that I’m not talking about ANY individual.  This is “statistical likelihood.”  The best nurse I ever had was a guy.  And I’m so awfulbad at dealing with sick anything, that I even shy away from sick cats – while my older son (you know, looks like a Mafioso, is built like a brick sh*thouse) is a natural caretaker, gentle, attentive and kind to those who are sick, old or impaired, human or animal.  (He comes by it naturally.  My dad is like that too.)

No, I don’t think all women should be nurses or teachers.  I also don’t think we should push all of them – or most of them – to be doctors or engineers and push the boys to the caring professions.  And I PARTICULARLY don’t think we should shape our YA fiction that way – i.e. telling lies to the young.

And that’s what our YA has been doing.

Sometimes I wonder what future civilizations will think of this psychosis, (then I remember there won’t be any – at least not any adhering to our culture.)  What will they think of 100 lb girls taking out men four times their size in books and movies.  What will they think of all the girls who are great warriors and brilliant engineers while the man are doltish knuckle draggers.

What besides saying “couldn’t they tell reality isn’t like that?”

Which brings us back to Marshall.  Once, when he was in fifth grade, we were shopping together (groceries.  I hate shopping – deal – so I take my kids along as comedy relief.  They hate it too, but they’re funny.)  I don’t remember why I reminded him of his “I want to be a girl moment.”  He looked at me and curled his lip.  “Yeah, I got over it.  I realized it wasn’t real.  There was no relation between girls on TV and in books and real girls.  Most real girls just want to talk about hair and clothes and go shopping.  The fun ones will play space-games, but mostly they just want to treated like they’re a space-princess and rescued and stuff.  I’ve yet to meet one who likes fighting and running.”  (And here, kids – I LIKED fighting and running as a girl.  Of course mostly I played with the boys, markedly increasing my female relatives’ white hair.)

But this is all a fantasy, because once Islam takes over, all the books from our time will be burned.  After all, there’s no need for any reading outside the Koran.

What’s that you say?  Well, it will be Islam or something very similar.  Perhaps a new form of it.

What can’t go on WON’T.  You can’t keep lying to the young.  For one they notice.  For another those who don’t, those who buy the culture lock, stock and barrel don’t reproduce.

If I thought Islamists were half as intelligent as they think they are, I’d assume they were investing in our publishing houses and pushing the crazy feminists, so that when the revolt comes – it will come.  What can’t go on forever won’t – the boys would all be attracted to Islam and the girls all ready to lay down the burden of being disapproved for wanting to do what women want to do – have kids.  Nest.  Have a safe place to retreat to. – that they’d convert in droves.

I don’t think they’re that smart.  BUT I do think a correction will come.  And since it’s not a pendulum but a sort of crashing reckoning with reality, I think it will be terrible and might destroy us.

And no, that’s not what I want.  What I want is Heinlein’s world, with maybe a little more flexibility – he was working for fifties publishers, after all – where, you know, women could be brilliant engineers and work from home while raising six kids (our tech will help with this, too.)  And where men went out and had adventures, but usually in the service of women, children and civilization.  It’s a lesson boys need.

If a little more flexibility is applied, and men can stay home with the kids and not be frowned at, all to the good (though please, G-d, have technology augment their ability to monitor toddlers.)

I want a world where you can be what you want to be, regardless of what’s between your legs and some desiccated woman’s revenge-agenda.

We can have it.  All that’s standing between our world, where we’re turning men anti-social in droves, and making women so neurotic most teen girls I know are on heavy anti-psychotics (wouldn’t you be?  Grrrrrl power, but the men are keeping you down.  How do you even reconcile that?) is giving up on the stupid fantasies of stupid people.

And we might not.  We might not correct in time to save the future.

But I’d like to.  And now that YA doesn’t have to go through NYC, maybe we can.

Perhaps we should, at the very least, try.

How about some boys who are bluff, protective and adventurous?  How about some women who are smart, capable and feminine?

Or how about YAs that have kids that seem real to you, without pushing anyone’s agenda?  Isn’t that worth the trying?

*And we’ll leave for another day the fact that Heinlein’s day YA dealt with revolution, societal organization and other important issues, while ours deals with sparkling vampires.  Mind you considering the wretched preparation – educational and social – we’re giving these kids, and the debt they’ll inherit, perhaps we don’t WANT them to learn revolution.

UPDATE: Credit where it’s due.  The feminist stuff was NOT brought up.  The idea that what is being written now is just as good was… and some of it is.  Some of it appallingly bad, of course.  All in all not a bad panel, but I took issue with the claim that freezing out sf (versus fantasy) is NOT a publisher thing.  At least, I’d like someone to explain my numbers, otherwise.  OTOH — hard sf doesn’t fly with kids, no.  BUT it flies with precious few adults.

UPDATE: Welcome instapundit readers, and thanks to Glenn for the link — no, I haven’t checked yet, but only one thing sends my counter through the roof like that.  I apologize verb tenses are all over the place in this, I have “finishing novelitis and didn’t revise.”  (Now you know what fun I am to my copyeditors.)
Additionally — The people here know, so I was unclear and confused at least one commenter — my kids are in STEM degrees, and most of their courses are STEM.  This is why we thought the Austen course would be a change.  We’re such innocents.

 

 

 

*Yes, I’m still trying to finish Noah’s Boy.  On the good side, my health really is better.  I’m starting to look at the TBR pile and going “mmm” instead of “Not fiction, not fiction, it engages emotions and I’m TIRED.”  And today I walked the usual three miles, without undue huffing and puffing.  I PROMISE to get you a post of Witchfinder, and maybe the whole end by Sunday evening at the latest. — The con in town is this weekend, and I’m booked solid through Saturday.  I’ll take the laptop, like when don’t I, but…  I SHOULD be done with NB by then.  We’ll see.  These might be the longest cursed fifty pages EVER.  Anyway, meanwhile give a kind ATH welcome to Cedar Sanderson.  Now, I don’t agree with EVERYTHING she has to say, but …  I’ll write my own opinion on Saturday, shall I?  (Possibly between panels!)*

 

On a misty January morning I took my youngest daughter to see the Hobbit. We went in partial costume,  both of us wearing floor length cloaks, and we went because she had started writing a story, and then quit. All of my girls have written stories at one point or another, and they never finish them, a problem I had for years.

I took her to this particular movie so I could show her how a great book starts: writing for love. I have been looking forward to seeing the Hobbit movie, I’ve read it many times. But taking her to see it was a snap decision. You see, I try to encourage my kids to read, and write. I thought taking her to see the movie would help with both. After the movie we talked about Tolkien, writing that timeless tale, and within the move, Bilbo writing a story down for Frodo. She started telling me about her story right after that. Will she finish it? Time will tell.

My own love affair with writing started with reading. I used to read a lot, sometimes a few books a day. When my children were born I had gotten mostly, er, clean of the habit. But nursing an infant and tending a toddler meant I was stuck at home all the time, and I needed to read. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get to the library, definitely could not afford to feed my ‘habit’ with a growing family, so I turned to the internet.

At some point, I came across the concept that if I’d run out of things I liked reading, I could write what I wanted to read. I’ve told myself stories in my head for a long time, so it was a natural progression to start putting them onto the computer. Paper and I don’t work well for long stories. Long story short, I wrote off and on for a decade, but never sought publication.

During that time, I’d been told that the short story market was dying, and that it would take years for a novel-length manuscript to see an editor’s desk, much less acceptance and publication. So I metaphorically put my stories in the desk drawer and closed it. I was going through a very dark phase in my life, and for a long time I could only cling to my children and weather the storm.

When the light came out from behind the clouds, I could see that putting the stories in a desk drawer was not my only option. I started to send my short stories out for publication. I got involved with a writing group. At the insistence of my eldest daughter, I wrote a novel. Then my writing group encouraged me in the world of self-publishing.

I’m pretty stubborn, lots of people will tell you that. My life hasn’t always been peaches and cream, so if I can do it myself, I will. Self-publishing, the ability to be my own publisher and have control over my writing, that seemed ideal. I took the bit in my teeth and ran with it.

I now have a handful of short stories available through amazon, and more coming. I just finished editing and creating a cover for my first novel, the one I wrote for my eldest daughter. Last couple of months, I finished a short story and a novella and will have those out soon. And to top it off, I did actually sell a few stories over the last year. One is out in a print anthology (it’s a very short story) and I’ve now been able to sign my name to books. Which is addictive. I highly recommend book signing!

I’ll never earn a living as a writer. I don’t even expect it to be a lot of income. What it is, is inspiring to my children. All four of them are writing, at levels appropriate to their ages, which is sometimes humorous to read. I know they write because they see me writing, they sometimes get to read the stories, and they see that I love to write. If nothing else, that’s why I write.

Sometimes I write around them. Literally, in the years I typed one handed while nursing. I often write in spite of them, one sentence at a time as I referee fighting, cleaning, and feeding times. Once in a while I write because of them, creating stories I know they will like. But if they write, and read, and grow up valuing art the way I think they will, it’s worth everything, and that’s why I write, ultimately, for my children. Telling them stories for love.

I am still trying to finish Noah’s Boy (Yes, that does mean WF might only come on Sunday.  Deal.  Hopefully it will also be all of the “Cursed fifty pages” left)  which means things are a little scattered.

I thought I’d give you a business report on the indie publishing venture, so here are some things I’ve found in no particular order.

Since I raised the prices to 2.99 not only am I making more money, but I’m making more sales per short story.

The space operas continue to outsell everything else, and the Nuns in Spaaaaace (With Unconfined Wings and Ganymede) continue to outsell everything else.  I regret to say I didn’t have time to finish “A Future Prayer” which is a Christmas story with the order of St. Lucia of The Spaceways AND space pirates…  So I can’t report on that.  My guess is if I do it before next holidays, it will outsell everything else and leave me scratching my head.

Do consider, as an aside, that I never managed to give these space operas away till DST was published.  Um…

Giving things away for free works.  I know, I know.  You’re shocked and amazed, right?  However from November through the end of December, I kept one short story free (more or less, the flu didn’t help) on Amazon at any given time and that REALLY helped sales of the other stories.  As soon as Noah’s Boy in, I shall resume this.  Frankly, it might be worth my time/effort to try to write a short story a week again.  We shall see.

At some point, in the not too distant future, I’ll be publishing my future history here, and then saying which stories go where.  Also, at some point there will be a collection of twenty or so future history stories.

So, how much money am I making from short stories?  Well – it’s not insane.  I have out maybe something short of forty stories on Amazon (fewer on other venues) and I’m making around $200 per month, from Amazon.  I have no idea how much I’m making from the other sites, since Smashwords pays quarterly and delayed.  They also don’t have as much in (because stories first go exclusive on Amazon for three months.)  But let’s say I’m making $50 there (Barnes and Noble is negligible for me, though friends tell me they make good money from B &N.)  That means that over the year I’d make around 3k from short stories, supposing I don’t add anything else.

Correction, I’d make around 3k from short stories that were already sold once, or which were never sold and were dying in the drawer.

Let me put this in perspective –  3k  is a respectable mid-publisher advance for a new writer.  And this is for backburnered/drawer/out of print work.  I’m tempted to say “oh, what a brave new world,” only the book tainted that expression.

Because I like money and because I just ruined myself on college books (and that’s without counting the tuition which will punch me in the face come next months’ bill.  Two boys in college.  What was I thinking?) but also because frankly it needs done, I’ll be rewriting/restructing the YA fantasy novel that’s in the drawer.  Look for Shadow Gods sometime in March, if it all goes well.  (Older son is drawing the cover for me, too.)

Witchfinder should be thereish, too, because I HOPE to finish it at a run as soon as NB is done.  Now, it’s going to be a stone-b*tch to edit, but a month or so should do it.

Because my contract with Baen for the Shakespeare series is ONLY for webscriptions, Naked Reader will be bringing out editions of the original trilogy… soonish.  (I haven’t talked to them about scheduling yet, but I am working on covers.)  They are, actually breathing down my neck for A Fatal Paws, the first orphan kittens mystery, which SHOULD be finished soonish.  I’m sorry if this sounds like I piled no end of work, but most of these are done/almost done – the flu just pushed everything back and then Son of Death Flu, this time it’s serious, kept me down another month.  Then I was looking after #1 son…  You have no idea how incredibly backed up things can get after that.  And that’s not counting house cleaning and such.

Right now I’m in that amusing phase (not) where I can’t let myself do too much, because I REMEMBER what happens when I do.  But I’m really much better and I HOPE to finish NB tomorrow, though I freely admit it might be Friday.  I just hope my editors restrain the need to strangle me.

On the good side, today was the first day I both left the house AND took a long walk in two and a half months.  This inactivity is so rare for me, that I can’t begin to tell you HOW rare.  I’ve learned through hard experience that I NEED to get out of the house at least once a day and that exercise is essential for me to feel human.  I feel remarkably cheered up by “taking a turn” in the fresh air.  I’m also incredibly out of shape and get out of breath in no time. Never mind.  That’s fixable.

So the scattered report on Indie venture a year plus on is “it shows great promise, but the author must on all accounts NOT get sick while she’s trying to run two careers (traditional and indie) at once.  Or you fall so far behind it’s rather disheartening.

Anyway – feeling better, working hard, starting to see some money that at least promises that a few more short stories and novels might mean we still have a roof over heads when kids leave college (ah!) At least it gives me HOPE which is more than my writing career has had in a long time.

And now I’m going to bed, because  I have a hard day’s writing ahead of me tomorrow!

We all have blind spots.  And some blind spots are universal, particularly in these days of fast change.

I realized this as I was thinking of one of the back-list short stories I brought out under Goldport Press.  It was written… eighteen? Years ago, published ten years ago (I think in Absolute Magnitude, but I’d have to check and I’m lazy.)

Ten years ago – heck, fifteen years ago – I was using Internet searches to find information and reading most of my news online.  And yet, this story assumes the character, being out of the country has no access to information.  Her family members don’t send her email.

Yes, it is a period piece, having been written eighteen years ago, but all the same, I read it over, edited it and brought it – ALL without, EVER hearing alarm bells at the back of my head or thinking “people finding this first won’t know it was written eighteen years ago” and making the necessary adjustments (it would be a little more work.)  I just didn’t NOTICE.

Blind spots.

Politically I think the left has more blind spots than the right simply because the left is accommodated by entertainment and mass media and has been for decades.  It’s easy to dismiss the new media and to proudly proclaim that you are mainstream.

And you might very well be mainstream, but you’ll have blindspots the size of the Taj Mahal.  There is nothing quite so cute as American socialists being totally unaware of socialism’s many failures (no, truly, Sweden is not getting trotted out again.  Sweden is tiny and has a peculiar culture – and even there it’s failing under impact of hordes of foreign takers.  Also, no one would mistake it for a dynamic land of innovation, even though it was just that before the present regime. Deal.)   Or the fact that they don’t know that all over the world “socialism” is the euphemism for “communism that isn’t ready to shoot people.”

But it’s not their fault.  Our mass media never reported how rotten the stinking corpse of communism was by the time the USSR fell.  It also never reported the millions used to subvert American institutions.  (And anyone, anyone claiming that “capitalism has failed too” will have to point me out to ONE example of unbridled capitalism in the modern world.  Doesn’t exist.  It’s all hemmed in with “regulations” – er… sealed for our protection, I guess.  The closest we come to it is the sort of crony capitalism of Asian countries and that’s closest to fascism than anything else.  If you think that America is “unbridled capitalism, you REALLY do have a blind spot.)

The right has some blind spots too, usually in “moral” areas.  People who are otherwise smart enough not to believe Cuba has “world class” health care actually believe that Cuba has eliminated AIDS by quarantining those infected.  The fact that I travel semi-regularly to a country where tourism to Cuba is not unusual and HAVE read advisories about er… frequenting ladies (and presumably gentlemen) of uneasy virtue over there BECAUSE HIV is rampant, would say otherwise.

It is sort of like believing there are no homosexuals in Muslim countries because their leaders tell us so.

Or believing that China is a raging economic success (which I grant seems to affect leftist economists too.)  Or believing that Brazil is (Bother!  If someone had pumped as much money in here as we have in Brazil we too would be an “economic success.”  It won’t last, the timber is bad, even if the house is pretty.)  Or believing the population figures out of Arab countries where – come on guys – an army of ten thousand is reported as an army of a million.  (And there are never any Americans at the airport.)  Apply the same divider to population figures.  It is what it is.

But right or left, we ALL have blind spots when it comes to where we’re going.  Right and left, we have to work at focusing.  We have to work at seeing where the changes are – and where we’re going.

Yeah, I’d challenge those on the left harder and demand they look closer, because they believe in central planning — which means they have to work harder to come up with a coherent plan in the face of a tech that’s moving so fast it has the possibility of taking us – and rapidly too – out of all known parameters of human civilization so far.  (And please don’t come up with the plan where you create superior humans to lead us.  I wrote those books.  It doesn’t end well.)

Ori talked in the comments yesterday about perhaps the Constitution having to be rewritten to accommodate the new tech.  I don’t think he’s right.  Amended in the particulars perhaps, but not in the fundamentals.

The particulars, however, are a doozy.  Let’s start with representation.  All the representation in the Constitution has to do with the area in which you live.

How will this apply when we’re entering an era where someone might live in an area they have absolutely no ties with?  No?

Come on.  To a great extent, we are already there.  I work for out of state companies, have colleagues I talk to all over the country (and a few all over the world.)  I buy stuff from all over the world, via Amazon.  My economic interests and my associations are impacted by a multitude of out-of-state events and decisions.

Yes, what my state does can affect me too (for instance I can’t get money with an Amazon Associate’s Account, I have to pay local tax and my city is saving money by turning off lights on the cross streets. [I wish I were joking on that last one.])

And please, please please don’t say we just need “A stronger federal government” because the wind that’s a-coming respects no federal governments better than it respects state ones.  This is where the left is caught with its pants down and the Russian winter howling up their backside.  Their whole model is based on the idea that a country’s government can redistribute and “make things less competitive and more fair.”

The cracks (pardon for using the word with the image in the last paragraph) in this are already obvious when it comes to outsourcing and customer service and other jobs that are easily exported leaking out of the country at speed.

But that trickle is about to become an hemorrhage, and you can’t stop it with regulation.  It won’t work.  Once the tech is there that anyone can work from anywhere at all (and we’re very, very close) countries and governments that try to hold their populace in an outmoded form of territorial subjugation are going to find themselves holding nothing.

Yeah, we can all go North Korea, and sometimes I think that’s the end game of most “progressive” tactics “turn back, turn back” to the early twentieth century when this stuff could work.  It won’t work.  Not world-wide.  North Korea, like Sweden, is a peculiar instance of place and people and culture.  It won’t apply universally.

It doesn’t matter how much governments want everyone to travel in trains, people are not going to forget the private automobile.  And no matter how much you want us to read the approved papers, we have the Internet.  And no matter how much you want us to live in certain areas, if we can work from others and it’s cheaper – we will.

I’ve read some truly scary stuff from the seventies about representation by groups you claimed membership in.  Mind you, this was from the left side, so it was bizarre nonsense.  Congress would have to accommodate representation for several unions, plus “collectives.”  For instance, I’d be a member of a Writer’s collective, an artist’s collective, a mother’s collective, a woman’s collective.

Just the name alone is enough to make me gag and fall in a fit of Tourette’s.  But let’s forget that for a moment.

Some book – Diamond Age? – had people swearing allegiance to various groups and those groups represented them.  I’m closer to liking that, of course, except that it feels like an incomplete solution because it’s unenforceable.

Look, you can enforce authority locally and territorially, because you can march troops in and physically make the subject comply.  You try that in a group – say neo-techno libertarians – that’s spread all over the world.  In the end government and its authority ALWAYS comes down to “you and whose army?”  The idea that it’s anything else is a fairytale for grownups.  (In the US it’s our army, but it is still someone’s army.)

The best I can imagine is that you pay an amount to belong to a certain group which will then fight for your interests, (which, yes, might involve physical force.  Read the account of the revolution/terrorism in Friday for how.)

But if things are going to go that crazy, you’ll also have to pay some sort of local fee to belong to your local polity.  Why?  Because it don’t matter if your entire neighborhood is sitting on its front porch, reading its Bible.  If the central government for your area loses control (or goes completely bonkers, which looks likely at least for me) then some bad dudes can still come along an beat y’all up.  Unless you hire defenders.

“But Sarah” you say “You’re talking about a sort of poll tax.  A place where people pay to have a say in the common governance of the groups they belong to, including their neighborhood.”

And?  I’m not saying that this is moral or right or just or any of that stuff – in the end that stuff is always secondary to survival – I’m just saying it MIGHT work.  I don’t see how our present form does, though.  Not long term.

No?  See, this … dislocated residence versus work, versus shopping is going to hit EVERYTHING – not just politics.  EVERYTHING.

Yeah, they can put patches on it for a moment, like making Amazon pay tax.  But catalogs haven’t traditionally, and if Amazon has to, it just means smaller companies spring up to do what Amazon does and they won’t…  In the end it all spins out of local control.  And fast, too.

Right now, your livelihood depends to a great extent on where you live, how much your house is worth, the cost of living for your area, its relative safety, etc etc etc.

Spin all those out in different directions.  Suppose I CAN work in NYC and live in Iowa.  Yeah, many of us (okay, I like big cities.  Deal) would still want to live in the big city for a variety of reasons, but we don’t have to, and my guess is the majority of people wouldn’t want to.  (I realized the other day that at least one of the reasons I used to like living in big cities — access to entertainment, lectures and books — is irrelevant because Amazon.) So… what does that do to … property values?  Cost of living? Availability of stuff that has to be shipped in?  (The enormous costs of feeding a place like NYC are offset by the sheer size of the population being fed, so it’s worth to have a lot of things available that would, in other places, not be worth the price of shipping.  I.e. there is more variety because there are more people there.  Even losing half the population will affect that.)

Real estate prices are going to go insane.  EVERYWHERE.

Now take in account all the people who will be caught five years from retirement, and their house is suddenly worth nothing.  It’s much much worse than 2008.  In fact, 2008 might have been the first foreshock of what’s to come.  As for real estate, just having people start to telecommute preferentially (no, it’s not science fiction.  Like ebooks it’s something we’ve been talking about for decades, but I suspect when it hits it will be with stunning rapidity.  I also expect it not to be more than ten years out.) will cause a huge upheaval.  No?  Commercial buildings.  Yeah, sure they can be converted to residential, but at the same time people will be moving out to Podunk where they can have forty acres…

And yet stuff like the infrastructure for the Internet will still have to be maintained, as will highways and…  Yes, there are solutions for it, other than what we’ve been using.  But it will take removing the blinders and looking – REALLY LOOKING – at what’s coming down the pike.

Neither the left as it exists now, nor the right, as it exists now, have the solution to what is happening because we’re all prisoners of the time we were born in, and the tech we learned as kids.  No matter how much we think, really think we’re up to date, we’ll forget that the Internet exists, or that people can google-search someone.  Or at least we will when reading an old story.  And then we’ll fail to see all the ways the “new way of doing things” affects us and everyone we know.

The tech we have – the future we’re speeding towards – is one of greater individual freedom and choice and less ability to enforce conformity.  This is good and bad, as anyone has found out who has homeschooled a kid in the age of Internet courses, and also as anyone has found out who has had to warn their kids off  the more bizarre Internet sites.  (And not just porn.)

It is good because in the battle between those who want to control others and those who just want to be left the f*ck alone, those who want to be left alone are about to have the upper hand.

But human nature doesn’t change overnight, and there will be bullies, local, national, international, trying to create their own little North Koreas in their lifetime.

Which means the rest of us need to be very aware of where the blind spots are, and where we can escape them and how.

In other words – the future is great, but there will be very, very rough patches before we get to a place where we’ve figured out what works.

Until then, kindly tighten your seatbelts. Also, to quote Heinlein, keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark.  And take off your blinders.

(Because today is Wednesday, there is a new and writing-related post at Mad Genius Club.  [In this case Writing Business Related post.])

I am a profoundly un-athletic person.  This used to surprise people who knew me when I was young, and now looking at pictures I sort of understand why, as I was tall and muscular and rather enjoyed physical exertion.  I liked hiking and running and I walked everywhere where it was even remotely safe to walk.  (Okay, partly because I was also a skinflint and didn’t want to spend money on buses and trains.  But that was only ancillary.)

My problem with most sports was in fact coordination, not strength or enjoyment of physical exertion.  This is probably traceable to my being a premature birth, and awful astigmatism but in Portugal at the time (we’d learned to chip our flint in the NEW way ;) ) few people knew that.  I learned early to dread gym class because my teachers made the assumption people at the time would make about a well-grown girl who really didn’t want to play dodge ball or volleyball.  “You’re afraid of taking a ball to the face and spoiling your beauty!” and “You’re a spoiled brat” were the things most often hurled at me.  They hurt all the more because I couldn’t understand where they came from.  I OFTEN took balls to the face (and other things – if someone say threw a book for me to catch, I was likely as not to get it on the face, since I usually stepped the wrong way.) No one had ever told me I had a face worth protecting.  And as for spoiled…. Brother, I wish I’d been.

It worried me more to be told stuff like that, because I’d start wondering if I’d done something to make them think those things – and what could that be.  It took me until my thirties to realize that some number of people are stupid, that – like many writers – most people deal in stereotypes and default to the easiest one, and that it is no part or parcel of my lot in life to be responsible for stupid people.

Eventually, in ninth grade, I had a gym teacher who had given up on the more demanding job of therapy.  He looked at me and a friend who had the same issues and said “Were you two born premature?”  After that, he basically gave us therapy, and while I’m not the world’s best coordinated or most graceful person, I probably hit the low range of normal in both of those.

Anyway, because I enjoyed physical exertion and liked rough play (being a tomboy till marriage tamed me) while I hated sports at school, I LIKED playing at stuff.  Needless to say, in the way of such things, most of my friends had similar issues to mine – or at least weren’t the most athletic creatures around.  (We also solved physics problems for fun.  Wanna make something of it?)

So one summer – we must have been 13 or so, the thing to do became to play a deranged version of volleyball in my mom’s enclosed back patio.  Years later, when I came across Calvin Ball in the Calvin and Hobbs comics, I laughed myself sick, because it was rather like that.  What we played was volleyball or soccer, and occasionally handball, and if you count the times we put the ball into a bucket suspended from the rain gutter, you could call it basketball.

The main thing was that whoever had the ball at the time could make the rules.  So, you’d be dribbling the ball, realize it was going to slip, and say “Dribbling is forbidden” as you held the ball and ran.

I loved that game.  In the end, the advantage went to people who could think fast and were glib talkers – two fields in which I had the advantage I lacked in coordination and visual acuity.

Calvin volleyball was tons of fun for all of us for a while, but eventually it ended in tears, because someone called foul, and how do you call foul on rules that keep changing?  The people who were less mentally agile or less devious were at a serious disadvantage, and when they yelled “it’s not fair” we had nothing to oppose.  Unlike in the physical coordination games (in which I was always at a serious disadvantage) we couldn’t tell the ones who weren’t good at it “but the rules say.”  There were no rules.  Or worse, there were rules that kept changing depending on how fast the people with the ball were in thinking them up so they could keep the ball forever.

So the Summer of fun Calvin Volleyball ended with a big fight and two of the people who’d been regular players never talking to me again, and my brother, who was older than I by ten years told me it was perfectly predictable, which did NOT win him any brownie points.  (How can a genius IQ man not know that “I told you so” will not endear him to his headstrong sister?)

When I created Eden, in Darkship Thieves, I wasn’t thinking of that.  In fact, I wasn’t thinking of much of anything except creating a society with as few laws as possible, that still functioned.  I used to be a capital L fire-eating Libertarian, and that was my opus.

By the time I came to re-write it and make it publishable, some of the polish had worn off my shiny Libertarianism, and I sort of perceived that no human society can operate without – at least – habit setting in.  People need to know some minimal stuff to count on.  So I gave them custom, tradition, and the court of public opinion.

Then as I was trying to noodle what happened in Darkship Renegades (the book was not being talkative.  I knew they were forced to come back to Earth, but I couldn’t see WHY.) no lesser person than Eric S. Raymond told me that I had a problem I had to think through, because in the end what Eden had was too changeable to be safe, and under stress (attack from Earth on energy collectors) it would splinter and become, in fact, Calvin Government.  From that thought, both DSR, the next still untitled book, and The Earth Revolution series were born.

Lately I’ve been thinking of that in regards to our founding documents, too.  Oh, we have a Constitution, and it’s written and everything.

Which is, to our purposes, nothing since its range of interpretation has now gone so far as to permit people being taxed for what they DON’T do.   Once you’re at that point, the people who have the Calvin Ball are making the rules er… fast and furious, and not only isn’t it fair, but by being fast and glib they have the right to keep the ball forever and to make the rules that allow them to always win the game.  (And before someone says anything, no, I don’t in fact think they understand that they can’t remake the rules of economics like they remake the rules of government and on the fly – Most of them being lawyers, I think they’re under the impression words remake the world.)

Don’t misunderstand me.  I’m not saying the Constitution is written in stone and no amendment should be permitted.  I simply think the ammendments must be well thought out, carefully discussed and put to a vote. (Which won’t prevent us screwing the pooch – look at prohibition – but it will keep it to a minimum.)  The Constitution should be taken seriously, enforced and – if enough people think it’s become intolerable – amended.  BUT it should be difficult to amend it, and it should be done with care and deliberation and with unintended consequences always before our eyes.

That process is what prevents the “person with the ball” from changing the rules on the fly, to ensure they rule forever.

If we were still following the Constitution, elections would still be important but they wouldn’t be vital.  Whom the current clowns appoint to the Supreme Court would be important and might give people heartburn, but we’d be protected by the basic rules.  You couldn’t take the ball, start running with it towards the agreed-upon goal, spy the bucket hanging from the rain gutter, yell out “And dunking it in the bucket wins a bazillion points” and then win the game that way.  The rules are agreed upon before the game starts, and they change very slowly and very carefully, so that everyone knows them and they have to be followed.

Oh, I know, the game is then not as much fun for the people in charge, and yep, they’re right, some people are going to get hit by the rules – some people are always going to get hit by the rules.  We’re born equal before the law, but that’s the ONLY way in which we’re born equal – and some people are going to do well out of it.  It’s natural for those who have power – and for the type of people who are attracted by power over others – to want to be the winners.  If someone is going to lose, why should it be them?

Because the rules can be made so the fewer people lose, so that playing fair is allowed, so that creativity and hard work is rewarded and so that the game is fun for most people, of course.  Because one way produces wide-spread prosperity and a flourishing society and the other way produces… North Korea.  On the other hand, North Korea is, of course, lots of fun for those on top.

The most important words in the Constitution are not the enumerations of power or all the nifty things that our government can do for us.  Other countries have Constitutions like that, and they neither prevent the onset of dictatorship (one of the reasons why Fascism is always descending on the US, but always manages to fall on Europe) or the big fight that comes at the end of a game of Calvin Volleyball.

No, the most important words in the Constitution are contained in the tenth amendment: The powers are delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

We bend other amendments to impinge on it, and make a mockery of it to our own risk.

Calvin Ball Constitution is nothing more than strong-man government.  One way or another, it always ends in tears.

A quick call for any authors in the DFW or nearby area — or who wouldn’t mind traveling here — to take part in an all day author event at the Bedford Public Library on March 23rd. Authors can set up tables to sell their books as well as do the meet and greet thing. Readings will be scheduled and there will be some one and two hour clinics throughout the day. If you’re interested, let me know here. Thanks!