Yeah, I’m still struggling with Noah’s Boy.  Part of the process I was talking about to a friend on Saturday goes like this: you begin a book and it’s rather like pushing a very heavy rock up a hill.  Then you reach the top, and you look at how much further it’s got to go, and you look at all the moss and stuff that’s smeared it on the way up and you think “this is the ugliest ro–  Er… This is the worst novel ever written.  I’ll never be able to show it to anyone.”  Then you sit there a while and gather your breath and if you are a newby writer, you flit away again, and start a new novel, pushing a cleaner and much nicer rock up that hill.

Certain types of newby writers never finish anything.

If you are another type of writer – either more experienced, or you have friends who are more experienced and who’ve told you “Every novel dies halfway through” then you push on, and in a little while, that novel hits the downward slope and starts rolling down the slope, with you barely keeping up.

I think it’s something inherent in the human brain – because I heard other writers talk about it – that on this phase, even the most meticulous of plotters finds connections and reasons and motives he or she hadn’t thought about.  And then you finish the book, and send it to your betas, and they tell you it’s a book, not a cabage… and then you start rolling another novel uphill.

There is one thing I omitted from that process because it doesn’t happen every time (though it’s happened consistently with all my fantasies, which makes me go “um”) and that is “the cursed fifty pages.”

These are usually the last fifty pages.  Remember all those connections you saw, all those motives?  Well, unless you plotted very well in advance and aren’t given to “plotting by fit of brilliance” which I am.  (I.e. suddenly seeing it all clearly in a fit of brilliance and throwing something more into the soup.  This is why I can’t revise more than three times, because after that it’s not Jack is in love with Jill who is in love with Jim who is in love with someone else, but Jack is in love with Jill who is in love with Jim who is really an alien pretending to be human and is only waiting to lay eggs in Jack, who will pass them onto Jill and that will be the beginning of the Earth invasion – all while I’m trying to write a fantasy short story with an innocuous love triangle.

What it means mostly is that I get bored once the story is clear, and try to make it interesting for me, which, usually, by that point, my being in a snit at story character and the act of writing, means taking revenge on the characters by making them people not even their alien mothers could love.

The last fifty pages are the sane part before that.  Sometimes they are literally the last fifty pages of the book, sometimes, when the book has been particularly difficult – glares at Tom and Kyrie – they are fifty pages of connecting material or back story or, G-d knows—whatever.

They are where you remove the alien love plot and put in sensible motives, and where you decided that your character (RAFIEL!) is too much of a cry baby and try to make him sensible again.  And when…  You get the point, right?

Noah’s boy has been particularly difficult because, through no fault of its own, it has been outlined for – four? – years, and sold for that long.  Only I took off on a jaunt of writing space opera, and Noah’s Boy got forgotten.

And that’s the other thing.  When you come back to something that’s sat that long it’s always difficult.  But in the time since it’s been sitting, I’ve gone on to my first love of Space Opera, and written a couple of mysteries to boot.  What this means…

Well, when I first took Dean W. Smith’s workshop – the very first – he told me that I should trust the process and that writers learned by doing.

I didn’t believe him.  Of course I didn’t believe him.  After all, I’m me.  Life is something to be got through hand over hand by your fingernails.  This thing of learning to write by writing seemed too simple and frankly too sixties.  (Those who, like me, were born in the sixties know exactly what I mean.  We grew up being handed down boomer platitudes like “Nudity is nothing to be ashamed of, man, we’re all naked under our clothes” [Usually when some older guy was trying to convince us to peel off.]  “All you need is love” [usually when some older guy was trying to convince us that not putting out was a mistake] or another of a dozen things that automatically bring out the worst in us ever after.)  “Trust the process” seemed to inhabit some region next door to “if it feels good, do it” and just three steps from “Open your third chakra.”

So I rolled my eyes and went “Well, Dean IS older than I” and went on believing I needed to study, analyze, dissect and intellectually LEARN to write.

Not saying I was completely wrong, mind.  I still do that.  If I read a novel that’s particularly well done and/or hits me like a punch between the eyes, I am going to diagram and dissect it.

But…

But Dean was right too.  And if I hadn’t had the immediate knee jerk reaction to sixties-sounding lingo, I’d have seen it too.

You see musicians and painters and every other sort of artist practice ad nauseum.  No artist expects to sell the very first picture they draw.  No pianist gets up from the piano stool after one lesson and gets booked into a concert all.  There is learning, sure.  You learn the theory behind what you’re doing.  You study with your head.  But then your train your hand, and your body, too.

Which brings us to…

Writing is not a physical thing, you say.  You can’t train the same way.  Like fun it isn’t.  Talk to Speaker to Lab Animals (or my older son) and they’ll tell you training the brain is a lot like training a muscle.

A brain is still physical and part of your body.  A lot of the physical tasks you do, like driving, involve the brain – and most of it is done on automatic.  To an extent writing is the same.  Even training yourself to be IN the story, and ignore the physical fingers hitting a physical keyboard that allows you to convey the story to your fans is training.

Then comes training to BE in the story.  Then other training.  For me it involves following the twin threads of logic and emotion, and knowing when I’ve violated one of them.  It used to be when I first started writing that I didn’t know when I’d broken something in the story.  I only knew something wasn’t right, and so stopped dead (sometimes for years) before I could go back and look at it and go “oh, of course.”

Now I can usually tell when I’ve stepped off the ledge, and go back and fix it before it stops me.

Only Noah’s Boy was OUTLINED years ago – more importantly – it was outlined five novels and a dozen short stories ago.

The writer who outlined it is not the writer who is writing it.  In fact in many ways, by allowing me to write space opera, Baen unleashed more growth and change than I’d experienced before in five books.  It was much harder going back to Noah’s Boy than it was going back to, say, Heart of Light, after eight years of letting it sit.

My first problem with it was that it felt too small, and also like this should be the book where I kick the series into high gear.  Only there was nothing of that in the outline.  So…  I started introducing it, along lines that, weirdly, were planted in previous books.

The problem with doing that is two fold, though.  The Shifter’s series is not the Darkships or its brother series, the Earth Revolution series.  It is in many ways set in the quotidian, however fantastic it might be.  Some of the charm of it (at least for me) is that this dragon and panther shifter are in a way (or are trying to be) normal young people and cope with money issues and young love.

So, that had to still be there.  Plus, in this one Rafiel falls in love.  And that had to be there.  It’s part of his growth.  But on the other hand there was this massive plot that has to be put in place, so that it can propel the rest of the series without getting stale.

My second problem was one I’m prone to when I outline well in advance of writing.  There are things that seem perfectly reasonable in outline that will simply not work when it comes to writing the book.

Yeah, outlines are logic.  But real characters aren’t.  And I don’t hear/see/feel the character until I actually start writing.

So in outline it seemed perfectly logical that a great-great-great-granddaughter of the Great Sky Dragon would obey his orders and try to marry Tom.

Brother!  It’s perfectly logical, particularly in an Asian culture.  It is also completely impossible for me to write.  It’s even more impossible for me to have Rafiel fall in love with this creature, and to have the creature hang around (with Rafiel or not.  No spoilers – grins) for the rest of the series, pretty much.

So…  Bea Ryu became someone else and very American, yes, with some Asian ancestry (about ¾), Japanese and Chinese and everything in between, but also a Scandinavian grandfather and an American upbringing.

And then the problem was how to make the plot still work.  And then exactly what the lineaments of this greater menace were, and how much to show in this book.  And then I became aware of what the plot of this book does to Tom, and it’s very, very hard to make him do what he has to do without breaking the character and making him someone the readers will hate.  At the same time, there are thing she has to do I didn’t even think about, because in the outline Tom can pull what I’d call a “Kirk trick” – those who are fans of the original Trek know what I mean – something twisty and verbal/mental jujitsu and people will leave him alone.  But the only reason that worked with Kirk is that they left the planet before his opponent could go “Wait a fracking minute.”  In the tight confines of small town Colorado, that can’t – in fact – happen, and the opponents can’t be total dumb*sses and we KNOW they’re not doormats.  So when he pulls his brilliant trick, they’re going to come up with something…  What Tom will have to do  to stop that and keep those he loves safe is something I’m very much wrestling with right now.  It has to be convincing.  It has to be strong… but it can’t make Tom into a total bastard.  Um…

So … I’m in the cursed last fifty pages – that can be as man as a hundred, or as few as thirty, but they are called “the cursed fifty pages” for convenience.  I’m actually starting to see the book take a shape I like, except for Rafiel annoying me, but he usually does.  (Uppity Lion-boy.)  Though even he is growing a bit.

I meant to write a blog post about the concept “sins of the fathers” and also about how we’ll “study peace no more.”  But we’ll leave that for (an)other time(s.)

Tonight I’ll try to do my post with the readers’ publications, and put it up at insty – but until then I’m going to be in the office furiously trying to exorcise the cursed fifty pages.  (I heard exorcise wheels are good for this.  Oh, come on, you were going to say it.  I just anticipated you.)

I WANT to get this done by tonight or tomorrow night at latest, and then I can start giving more thought to my blog posts and resume (sorry, everyone, sorry) the long interrupted blog tour.  (Between illnesses and all, it will now be a joint tour for Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men.  There’s also some stuff I want to do for the Tatler – but it will have to abide in patience till Noah’s boy is on Toni’s desk.  And then there’s shwag, for both DSR and NB and we’ll talk about how you can get some for your very own.

Until then, you guys tiptoe gently past my office and keep an eye out in case I leave my purse in the fridge and get out of the house with a frozen chicken under my arm.  My sons can’t be expected to keep this sort of vigil alone.

See you on the flip side.

Is writing a white art?

I’m quite serious about this.

To clarify I mean writing as in fiction writing – telling stories about things that (as far as we know) never happened anywhere. Non fiction, particularly creative non fiction can have a similar process but doesn’t usually.  More specifically I mean writing as I and some of my friends (published, unpublished, confused and never finished a novel) do it.  The “now someone is here and is dictating and will drive me insane if I don’t write it.”  Gateway writing, Kate Paulk calls it.

And by “white art” I don’t mean anything racial – before we get the loonies wanting to stone me or worse the loonies wanting to pat me on the back – I mean in the sense of the arcane, magical arts, the lore of the supernatural where, for instance, a blessing on a new dwelling (unless you do it by burying some unfortunate by the corner stone, of course) is a white art, but raising the dead is a black art.

Now that we clarified that, let me repeat – is writing a white art?

The question used to torment me.  I was afraid I was doing damage to myself, and possibly the world by conjuring up these things that never existed and imposing them on reality.

It is neither such a stupid idea as it sounds, nor is it originally mine.  Various religions proscribe lying, and what is fiction but an elaborate lie.  And stories, particularly novels have been considered (at various times) as dangerous to dabble in as any of the magical stuff.  It was assumed they’d do something to the writer (admittedly it was assumed other arts would too.  And it’s probably right.  The process is very similar.)  And even in these days, we assume a high ratio of madness/art.  “He’s a writer, so he’s nuts” is quite a normal thing to hear.  I suspect most of the time they mean it as a pre-requisite, but I wonder if that’s true.  Eric Flint once said that if you aren’t mad when you start this job, you will be.  He later backpedaled and said that he meant because of all the time we spend alone.  Perhaps that’s what he meant all along, but that was not my feeling when he said it.

Oh, at the time he said it, there was plenty of justification for it.  There was no indie, and we were at the whims of editors, with our career potentially terminated suddenly because we “said the wrong thing” to the wrong person.  THAT will drive you bananas.  Even if you’re not in danger of saying the wrong thing.  It’s rather like living in a totalitarian state, I think.  You watch yourself ALL the time.

BUT – this is important – to me at least the bigger force driving one towards madness is the encouraging of thoughts and impulses most people squash or don’t think about.  The impulse to create out of whole cloth.  The need to create really convincing lies.  Or, in some cases, listening to the voices in your head and trusting them to tell a story.

That is how I work, of course.  I was talking to a friend yesterday and she was asking about my process, and then, with remarkable acuity said “Most of your work is getting out of your own way.”

Which is true, of course.  The thing appears, as it were, in misty and milky form, unexpectedly, and then …  and then it starts “pushing” at me.

I could never answer the question “are you a pantser or a plotter” because I can do both and function as both.  Writing an historical book, of necessity, for instance, requires fairly detailed plotting in advance, so I know what to research and which books I’ll even need to buy.  (Actually it’s two phases, the first being to read about the people, place, event in general and then, as the novel starts to form, plot it out, buy more detailed books.  Then write it and when finding something that I forgot to look at (like what they ate for breakfast because in the outline I didn’t put in that minor scene-filler) make a note on the manuscript and order the relevant book, so it will be ready for the rewrite.)  Even in Space Opera I like to have some idea where I’m going.  Which is why my subconscious shrugs and says “hey, boys, let’s humor her” and – this was required in the old model, anyway – lets me write an outline.  And then…

I have a friend who sold an episode script to star trek.  In the end, they kept the title, and one of her lines.  She had, for years, a cartoon on her cork board, that read “This is where we start departing from the script” – and had someone holding a placard that read “act one scene one.”  Half the time I think my novels (and often the longer shorts) are like that.  “Oh, sure, let the little woman have her outline.  We can just ignore it.”

The thing is, if I tell you which books were written from plot and which let me see one chapter at a time ahead and that was it, you’d be surprised.  You really can’t tell.  In fact the “one chapter ahead” stuff is often more cogent, coherent and saner.  Because in the plot-ahead books, I often have to force it and then I’m unhappy with it, and it often doesn’t make internal sense.

So, we come back to it.  These things of the subconscious, these monsters of the id… Is conjuring them and letting them roam the Earth quite a “clean” activity?  Is allowing them out better because it spares other people creating their own, or perhaps encourages sickish fantasies?  Is what we produce the collective dreaming of the human mind and we few just the receptacles where it pushes through with unstoppable force?  (This would explain how several people at once, who have never had contact with each other, come up with the exact same idea.)

I don’t have much choice one way or the other, mind.  My grandmother once was explaining to me the consequences of refusing gifts of the other kind.  She said there was this young woman who was supposed to be – well, the closest definition is Pratchett’s hags: midwife, healer, with some whoo hoo stuff and some headology thrown in – and she refused it.  And the pressure of the refused power slowly drove her insane, till she was going around with her hair unbound, and unable to function in every day life.  And then she gave in…

I can’t say I’ve ever gone around with my hair unbound (when it’s short I do it all the time.  But it meant something different in the village.  It meant presenting a decent and sane appearance to the world.) but there IS something similar.  If I don’t write it, I start dreaming the story and day dreaming the story and it does become very hard to function in real life.

Mind you, surrendering to the voices in head and day-dreaming is much easier than writing.  Writing is a craft and a learning, it is taking the monsters of the Id and training them, and letting them shamble out into the world OUT of your head.

The people who never learn to shape the dream or who refuse to, usually end up on medication… or should.

The craft of making them live in other’s minds, involves killing them a little.  You have to tell the character in your head that you really don’t care what he had for breakfast.  What did he do about fighting the bad guys?  It’s removing some of the reality from them, to make them believable on the page.  To make them real for OTHER people.

And it brings me again to “is it a black art?”  Because when the mist comes, formless and without details, but with force and urgency, you have to take that… vitality and shape it.  You have to trust parts of your brain that frankly should be decently covered.

It’s faintly indecent.  And possibly dangerous.  And ultimately you don’t have much choice.  You have to get out of your own way and let the things out.

Bell, book and candle?  Or perhaps mind, keyboard and reference books?

The fact remains that most of the writers I know are SOCMOB (Standing on corner, minding own business*) when two bad dudes or in this case characters come up and make the writer do stuff…

Okay, so the stuff they make us do is not QUITE as bad as eating someone’s face raw.  And, heck, some of us get paid for it.  But what is it?  And what does it do to us and others?

*(Sitting in my front porch reading my Bible is not any better.  I’ve tried.  Now I have Biblical characters tromping around my head demanding I heed them and write them.  They’re not very good about waiting their turn, either.)

 

*Okay, I’m still writing NB, plus at three in the morning we had to get up, change the bed completely and… yeah, someone in the house is on a little p*ssing reign of terror, and we don’t know which of them or WHY.  So–  Remember a while back I said I’d post stuff from the drawer now and then because I have like 20+ books started that didn’t sell, and I’m trying to get a feel for whether y’all like them or not and what to do with them?

I grant you this audience is not possibly representative, but you’re the only ones I have in terms of “fans who’ll give feedback.”

What follows is highly weird.  I ALMOST was forced to write it to the end, and I have several doubts about it.  For instance, can a foreign-born chick write something not only set in the south, but dragging the Civil War ghosts in, and not get crucified, particularly at Southern cons?

My agent thought both that I couldn’t, and that I should submit it under a pen name “possibly something Southern sounding” which I think made it worse.  So it never got sent out.

But I wasn’t intending to spoof or traipse into anyone’s territory.  I’d just spent a year writing six books and homeschooling the genius, then in three consecutive weeks: I had RWA.  I gave the genius his tests for certification by the supervising school and signed him up for the local high school.  I had to prepare for World Con AND clean the house (because we had friends staying) in about three days.  My explanation is that my brain fried.  I woke up the first day of Worldcon, with all the packing to do, and this chick in my head, with an accent you could cut with a machete.  And I HAD to write her.  The following was written early morning, one day, before Worldcon.  It’s not my fault.

That said, it’s been dormant a while, and it probably won’t PUSH me to write it, but if ya’ll think I should I’ll put it somewhere in the queue.

Warning: Contains relatively mild sexual situation towards the end.

Without further ado, I give you A Proper Southern Devil.  (Oh, and it’s not exactly spoofing the south.  In my head I HAVE a Southern accent, on account of having lived there my first seven years in the US.  That’s how I HEAR myself.  I’ve considered find a speech coach to make my exterior match what I hear in my head, but people think I’m nuts.)*

 

 

Down To Georgia

 

 

 

Look, honey, ain’t nothing special about what I do. I wish there were. I’m not the first and I certainly won’t be the last southern girl whose mama taught her to pack her exorcism kit in her purse whenever she went out for a big date. You got your protection – in case he forgot – and your other protection all tucked into that little purse of yours, and you don’t admit to either because, well, it is all about butter not melting in your mouth, ain’t it?

What I do is different not in kind but in degree. After spending her whole life protesting about my using grammar like ain’t and double negatives and railing against my hatred of nylons and my smoking in public, mama up and died and, son of a bitch – yes, she would have glared at me for swearing too – if she didn’t leave me stuck with the family business.

The call had reached me on a cool spring morning, high up in my rented loft in Denver, Colorado, where I’d run away – at least that’s what mama always said – to pretend I was no Southerner or – in my view of it – to get a job in commercial art and use my degree.  As Aunt Janeybelle’s slow drawl poured into my ear, slow as trickling molasses, I looked out my window, at the still-snow-capped Rockies.  “Well, Honey, it ain’t no use saying you didn’t break her heart, because you sure did,” she’d said.  And, “Her last wish was that you’d come home.”

And I can’t say it was mama’s wish that dragged me but legalities.  Mama’s only daughter had to come and do something about the household and such.  I delayed for two weeks – there was no memorial service and mama was cremated the day after her death – but at last there was nothing for me but to make my way towards the home I’d so long denied was mine, taking the first flight I could from Denver to Atlanta, then renting a car to get to Blazes.  It wasn’t that Blazes didn’t have an airport of its own.  Oh, Lordy no.  Our town of three thousand had everything that you could find in them bigger metropolises.  Or at least everything a body could want.  Just ask Aunt Janeybelle.  But on a good day, the Blazes airport could get tied up by the simultaneous take off of two pigeons and a crow.  Which left me to drive two hours to Blazes, along the highway bordered by indistinct greenery – most likely kudzu – and to think of what Aunt Janeybelle had actually said, beyond reproaches and recriminations.  My mother had died, as the obituary went, suddenly, at her residence.  Which I had to presume meant heart attack or stroke.

Aunt Janeybelle, had said mama had died of her broken heart brought on by her trouble. By which I supposed the fact that papa had gotten – in mama’s words – the hell out the day I was born.  But if that were what had killed mama it had taken its sweet time to work, since I had turned twenty eight just a week ago.

I drove down the Georgia highways with the windows tightly rolled up and the air conditioning on.  I’d rented a smoking car, and I filled the ashtray to overflowing and perfumed the car with the smell of tobacco.  Virginia Slims.  I’d come a long way, baby.

One feel of the outside air in the airport car rental lot had been quite enough, thank you so much.  While the Colorado air was crisp and dry and cool, well behaved air that did not intrude on you or demand anything of you, the Georgia spring was perfumed with more exotic fragrances than the most whorish of houris.  It wrapped you like a sweaty embrace between tangled, body-warm sheets.  And it didn’t give you a chance to ignore it.

I did slow to a more moderate speed as I turned off the highway and onto the rutted road that led me past a weathered, moss-covered sign welcoming me to Blazes, Georgia.

Blazes was — all told — a long main street and a straggle of farms in each direction.  Right at the center of Main Street around the centuries old park, there were the Baptist church, the Presbyterian church and, noticeably newer, the Catholic church.  To the side of that was Holy’s General Store, run by the Holy family since forever – Marylee Holy had gone to school with me – the school was past that, a sturdy butt-ugly building of fifties construction and managing to house under its flat roof all grades from kindergarten – usually called Kiddiegarden by the locals – to twelfth with no fuss and no muss, thank you very much.

Until I was about six, there had been trees on either side of the road and the road was unpaved.  But as more and more people got cars, they’d cut down the trees and paved the road.  I remembered mama had been right testy about their cutting the trees.  She said they had taken all the charm out of Blazes.

To me blazes still had plenty of charm, or didn’t, depending on I felt about it at the time.  When I was little and had first heard about the War Between the States and how Sherman had burned Atlanta, I’d imagined that Blazes had got its name from being burned to the ground.  But it turned out Blazes had been there long before the war and had always been called just that.  Aunt Janeybelle said it was because of our sunny climate.  Mama said then it would be called Steam Bath, and by the time they’d gotten to where they’d argue like that in front of me, I was old enough to have no opinion at all, save that I wanted to get the hell out of Blazes, and the sooner the better.

Past the cluster of churches, store and school the main street down which homecoming parades rode and where the Elderberry Wine festival took place every fall came to an abrupt end.  Or at least a stranger would think it just ended, in a confusion of cypress and a tangle of kudzu.  But if you looked very carefully, straight ahead, underneath all that green, you’d see that an unpaved road continued from there.

I gunned for it, hoping that no one had let trees grow in the middle of the road or something.  After all, this path led to only two houses.  Or rather, to a house and a set of ruins.

Time out of mind, the winding bit of rutted track had been a road at least as traveled as the main street.  At the end, it had branched off into twin plantations – what had been at one time twin homesteads started by two families that had got king’s grants at about the same time: the Childes and the Thornblades.  But the last Thornblade had died in the War Between the States and their plantation had been torched, house and fields and all.  For some reason, it had never been reclaimed – probably because Blazes was in the ass end of nowhere and even developers had never found us yet.  It, like the fields that had once been my family’s were just left to grow over with wild plants and kudzu.  Mama said our fields had been sold, but if so, no one had done claimed them.  And if someone owned the Thornblade’s place, they were no more interested in it than the owner of our place was.

Which just went to show you, I thought, even if I wasn’t absolutely sure what it showed.  I wasn’t very coherent, since I was dying for a cigarette but didn’t dare light it till I could see the way clearer ahead.

And seeing clear was a problem right enough.  Because you see, the kudzu and the Spanish moss hanging from the tall pines on either side of the road, had turned what had once been a narrow road into a tunnel, filled with a filtered green yellow light.  It was, I thought, just like one would imagine the bottom of the ocean to be like, with the tropical sun shining above.

A shiver ran up my back, because it was as if I were driving under water, as if I were drowned and long dead.

Nonsense.  But my hands were white on the wheel, as the track veered now left, now right, amid the green-hung trunks.  And then, as suddenly as it had closed in around me, the track opened up.  Instead of a tunnel, it became a country road, meandering drunkenly along a well-beaten track, with the trees where they belonged, on either side of it and well away.

I took a deep breath, and, by touch, without looking, pulled a cigarette from the pack on the passenger seat, and put it between my lips with fingers I was surprised to see were trembling.  I grabbed for the lighter the same way, and lit my cigarette, sucking the nicotine into my lungs as though it were heaven-sent nectar, or perhaps reviving water.  I didn’t know why I’d got so worried.  The track was clear enough out here, and of course mama wouldn’t have let it get grown over.

Mama hadn’t been dead all that long.  Something like a stabbing pain with no physical place made my heart clench, and I sucked another lungfull of nicotine, driving with one hand to the turn off to our house, leftward, and past what had once been gracious, tall gates and were now rusted permanently open and covered in vegetation, the walls that they had once ornamented now mere piles of unruly stones.

Inside, there was what had once been a garden.  Mama always said that her mama talked about her grandma speaking of manicured lawns and azaleas and oaks, rose gardens and orchards.  But it had been a century and almost a half a one since we’d had gardeners.  The plants had grown riot and the ones that could survive had, some thriving more than others.  Blackberries infested the grounds, rambling like carpetbaggers all over the other, weaker plants.  Their fragrance mingled with the scent of the roses – auntie Janeybelle said they were heritage or antique roses, whatever that meant – which also grew riot everywhere and even climbed the trunks the stately oaks still standing, even if senescently rotting from within.

There was no kudzu within where the walls had once encircled.  I wasn’t sure why.  There just wasn’t.  It wasn’t like I’d ever seen mama – or grandma, when she’d been alive – do anything at all beyond picking the blackberries when they were ripe.  Those blackberries, grown in our garden, made the sweetest jam in all the world.

And suddenly I found myself craving the jam I hadn’t had in eight years.  And I remembered Mama in the kitchen, at the end of summer, tending to a giant pot of the stuff, as it bubbled slowly with sugar, over the fire on the back burner of the gas stove.  Tears stung the back of my eyes.

Making that jam was my mama’s only domestic gift.

The smell of that blackberry jam penetrating every corner of the house had been a signal that summer was over and school about to begin, and the sweetness of its taste had been bitter too, because it meant my days of freedom were over, and soon I’d been taking the bus to Blazes School and spending most of my day confined there and away from the house and whatever interesting things Mama might be doing during the day.  I’d always been convinced Mama did some wonderful stuff during the day, when I was absent.  There seemed to me, back then, no rhyme or reason for me to go to school otherwise – not since I couldn’t remember a time when I couldn’t read, and I’d read everything in my path all the time.  It seemed to me left well enough alone I’d have learned whatever the school had to teach.

But Mama said I needed to learn what people were like, whatever that meant, and to my childish mind that meant she was up to something during the day.  Something she didn’t want me to know about.

As it turned out, I was right – though I didn’t know it that day, as I pulled up onto the flagstones of what had once been a gracious terrace.  Mama said the double French door –  right in front of me – had actually once been the back door to the house and opened off the ballroom, but we’d used it as our front door, all my life.

It was on the bottom floor of three which climbed gracefully up, with a wrap around porch on the bottom and two verandas above.  It was built of mellow grey brick.  You could sort of tell, from the vestiges on the brick, that – for whatever reason – it had once been painted, or maybe whitewashed, but I was glad that it didn’t need to be kept up.  Because we didn’t even use most of the bottom floor, much less keeping all of it up.  Brick maintains fairly well, and our roof was – mama said – asbestos and likely not to disturb anyone as long as we left it alone.  And likely to outlast us all, too.

It had outlasted her.

I stood up – without remembering getting out of my car – clutching an almost-gone butt  of cigarette, and realized I was crying which was plain stupid, wasn’t it?  After all mama had been dead two weeks, and crying was not going to bring her back.  Crying paid no rent.

Sullenly, as if it had done me wrong, I opened the trunk of the car, and dragged out my suitcase.  I’d packed enough for two weeks, in as tight as space as I could.  When I’d left, eight years ago, I’d left behind most of my clothes, and they should still fit.  Jeans and t-shirts was about all I’d brought, and the tennis shoes on my feet.

Oh, mama had always made me wear skirts and dresses when I came to visit.  Down here, I was Miss Childe and she said the locals noticed when I dressed like a common chit.  And perhaps they did.  But right now I didn’t care.  I threw down the butt of my cigarette and stomped hard on it.

What I cared was to dispose of the estate, donate what I could to charity and put the house for sale and get the hell out of Georgia.  Lord knew the house wouldn’t fetch much.  Certainly not these days.  But I’d make what I could of it.

Standing on the stoop, picking through my keys, I found my hands shaking again, for some unaccountable reason.  There was the key to my Denver loft, and how I wished I were back there.  There were my car keys for my car back home too, the battered jeep that had taken me up and down the slopes of the Rockies.

But I’d kept the key to this house on the chain, even though it made no earthly sense to always carry with you the key to a house that’s hundreds of miles away.  And right now my own life back in Colorado seemed like a nebulous dream.  It seemed as if I’d never left.

When the door opened, it was worse.  I entered what my mama said had once been a ballroom – and maybe it was – but which some ancestress had divided off with paneling so that I found myself on a prim and proper entrance hall with a table – with a telephone on it, the only telephone in the house – and a straight backed chair in which mama used to make service-men and bill collectors wait her pleasure before being allowed into the inner sanctum of the house.

I dropped my suitcase on the floor – the yellow mosaic floor that covered all the rooms in the front of the house and which lent credence to the idea that it had al once been one room – and I almost called out Mama, I’m home.

Remembering mama wasn’t – would never be –  home, was like a knot at my throat, and it made me catch my breath right quick, as if I were drowning.

Crying pays no rent.   And it wasn’t like mama and I had been one of those mother and daughter pairs who were best friends and who did each other’s hair and each other’s make up and went to the mall together.  Hell, I don’t think mama went to the mall, ever.  When I’d wanted to buy my prom dress, Aunt Janeybelle had driven me all the way to the mall in Atlanta, because there was nothing out these ways.  And mama and I had fought like cats and dogs and screamed at each other like banshees.  Bound to, when she’d raised me all by herself, and I wasn’t the most biddable creature around.  But she had been my mama.  The only mama I’d ever have.

I swallowed again, and closed my door, carefully.  Not that mama or grandma had ever bothered with the door much.  But I had lived away for a while, and I didn’t feel safe with it open.

I went into the house briskly.  My steps resonated hollowly.  The house was empty.  It smelled empty.  Uninhabited.  Isn’t it weird how you can always tell if there is anyone in a house or not?  You can feel it.  The air feels different and sounds are different.

Well, I was here.  Not empty anymore.  More or less blindly, I turned right, into what had been mama’s study and library.  The curtains were drawn and light looked much like the light in the green tunnel, only dimmer.  It cast a green penumbra on the oak bookcases, filled with books and notebooks in haphazard confusion.  In the middle stood mama’s desk, piled with papers and more books and a newspaper or two.

It had always been like that, I thought, swallowing like mad to keep moisture out of my eyes, and stepping over to the windows, to open the curtains with a ripping sound.

The light that came pouring in was grey-dim, much softer than the sun that had beat down on the highway just moments ago.  Looking up, I saw that the light had dimmed above and the sky was all over roiling clouds.  One of those squalls of spring was in the brewing.  Fine by me.  At least it had waited till I was safe and snug inside.

Turning my back on the window I frowned at the bookshelves and the desk.  Heaven knew what all those books were.  I for one had no clue.  Of all the books and notebooks in the house, the ones in this room were the only ones that had always been off limits.  Mama said it was none of my business.  Just as it was none of my business what she wrote in all those notebooks that she bought every month or so at the five and dime.

At some point – high school or so – I’d thought that mama must be a writer.  But if that were so, then she’d never shown her writing to a living soul.  And now I would have to look through the notebooks, I supposed, and figure out what to do with them.

And there was a dilemma.  Because if mama’s stuff was trash, yet it was mama’s, and could I burn it?  But if mama’s stuff was gold, too, what the hell could I do with it?  I had some writing friends, back home in Denver, and some vague idea their careers were no easier than mine – some vague idea it took more than a great story to make it big.

“Ah, damn it, mama,” I said, to the warm, musty air.  “You had to leave me stuck with this, didn’t you?”

I reached for a cigarette, and realized I’d left them, and the lighter, in the passenger seat of the car.  Well, I’d best go out and get it before the rain started pouring down.

Hastily, I started towards the door and tripped on a tear in the rug.  My eyes were strangely filled with water, which made it hard for me to see.

So my foot got caught and as I’d been rushing, my momentum sent me forward.  I reached for mama’s desk to steady myself, but the pile of books my hand rested on went tumbling.  My head hit the corner of the desk hard.  And there was darkness and silence.

 

 

 

Desperado

 

I came to lying on the floor of mama’s study, on the faded carpet that she kept atop the mosaic for when her feet got cold, she said.  The carpet was all big pink roses and green leaves.  Or had been, once upon a time, before it had all faded.  It had probably come from the attic.

I was lying on it, with my hand outstretched.  My hand was resting on a pile of books and, as I blinked and saw more clearly, I realized that the top one was a King James Bible with cracked leather spine.  The hell.  A Bible?  In mama’s study?

It’s not that mama was an atheist.  At least I didn’t think it was.  She’d never told me that there was no God, or that I shouldn’t listen when my little friends talked of the holidays and Jesus.  But she had withstood Aunt Janeybelle’s demands that she send me with her on Sundays to the church in Atlanta, and we’d never celebrated Christmas, not once.  Mind you, I’d always thought it was because Mama couldn’t be bothered putting up a Christmas tree.  At least after grandma was gone.  And before grandma was gone, grandma’d been right sick, and mama had looked after her and not paid much attention to the holidays.

And yet, not only was my hand resting on a Bible, but under the Bible and a little to the side was a silver cross with fat branches, enclosed in a sort of circle.  I remember that my friend Elene who does all the science fiction and fantasy art had said it was a Norse cross and not Christian, but… with the Bible…?

I started to pull them towards me, cross and Bible and all, dragging them because I wasn’t feeling all that well and didn’t want to sit up and pick them up.  And then I heard tapping.  Something tapping against the window.

Hail, I thought, and for once I did not mean the place where Sherman has been sent for torching Atlanta.  But the tapping continued, hard, and it didn’t seem like hail.  Besides, Georgia wasn’t Colorado where every now and then we got hail the size of Volkswagen Beetles.

My mind was none too clear, my head was still spinning from the blow to the head.  My eyes refused to focus and there was throbbing pain from my temple, where I’d hit the desk.  But I had to see what the hell was tapping at my window.  Besides, if I had concussion, I had to make it to the phone and call someone.  Or at least go back to the car and get the cell phone I’d left with my cigarettes on the front seat of the car.  Lying here and passing out and maybe dying was no part of my plans.

I dragged myself to sitting, while nausea pulled at my stomach, and turned to look at the window.  And blinked.

The first I looked at the window, I would swear there was a boy child out there.  Twelve, maybe less, at that time when males’ faces are none too sure if they are going to be young ones or adults and usually their various features are on a different time line.  This boy’s nose looked indecisive between a childish button and an aquiline slope.  His eyes were too big for his face – liquid eyes, the color of the Spanish moss out there.  It made him look like those postcard little boys, with eyes that no human could actually have.  His hair – soaking wet – was a blazing color between gold and red, like fire or a sunset.

But the most pathetic thing was his hand – reddened and spread out, the palm flat against the window and the fingers pushing on the glass as if begging to come in.

I blinked.  When I looked again, it was an adult man there.

Tall and rangy, as if he were half starving and been reduced to skin and bone and whipcord muscles.  The features were almost the same as the boy’s had been, only more regular.  The rest of them had caught up with his eyes, which remained, nonetheless, liquid and green.  His face would have been oval save for the blunt chin and the aquiline nose that prevented it being too sweet to be masculine.

But the hair was the same.  A blaze of glory, not exactly long and not exactly curly, but long enough to surround his face and curly enough to look as if it were as wild as the tangled blackberries in the garden.

And his hand – bigger, and with square fingertips – was still pressing against the window, so hard that his palm and fingertips looked white.  And his lips, under the pouring rain, were forming one word.  “Honey.”

The hell.  I blinked again, but he remained there, and now his lips were forming, “Honey, Honey, let me in.”

It was possible, all too possible, that he meant honey as an endearment, but it didn’t seem like it.  It seemed like he was saying my name.  And, yeah, I’m aware I have a weird name.  In Denver, I’d gone by Ney, preferring that to explaining to all and sundry that I’d not only been named Honey when our family name was Childe, but I’d been named Honey after my grandma’s great grandma, bless her heart, which must bespeak hereditary madness.

And this strange man outside the window was calling me Honey as if he meant it, calling me Honey as if he knew it was my name; as if he’d known me all my life.

Right.  For all I knew he had.  I couldn’t for the life of me remember anyone who looked like him, but then I couldn’t remember half of my high school class.  It wasn’t as if we’d been best buddies anyway.  Though by the time I attended the high school Blazes as about as integrated as it was gonna get, and though our family – that I knew – had no more money than any of theirs, and probably less, my mama had been known to be a higher class.  And therefore so had I.  Which had kept all the other children at bay.  Oh, I talked to them at school, and it wasn’t like we were enemies.  But there had been no one coming over to play, and there had been no sleepovers and no boyfriends or best friends.

I’d had some dates, but nothing really serious because we’d all known better – and I’d gone to the prom with my cousin Henry Albert, the son of Aunt Janeybelle and only because mama thought I should have the experience.

I squinted at the man on the other side of the window, trying to think from where I might have known him.  Had he sat next to me in Kiddiegarten?  Or pulled my braids in fourth grade?  There was no telling.

“Honey,” he said, his voice making the glass in the windows vibrate.  “Honey, let me in for the Lord’s sake.  I’m cold and soaked all over.”

Well, right.  And he didn’t look like a lunatic, or at least not like a dangerous one.  He just looked… cold and soaked.

I dragged myself up, with my hand on the desk, and stumbled out of mama’s study and to the front hall.  When I got there, he was already on the other side of the French doors, looking …  Well… looking no crazier than most Georgians.

Here I have to explain for the sake of anyone who might be reading this, and who might be from other parts.  Because my rainy-day visitor, shivering and dripping water on the front porch, under the shelter of the verandah, was wearing a confederate uniform.  This in itself was not all that strange.  If there was a Civil War renactment going on, any day of the week, there were a dozen of them.  No.  What made the blond man looking pleadingly at me through the glass, special was that he was wearing an historically accurate confederate uniform, for the end of the Civil War.  What this meant in practicality is that what he was wearing was barely a uniform at all.

Forget all the stuff about the grey and the blue.  By the end of the war, what men were wearing was mostly what other men had worn earlier in the war.  My late uncle Albert Michael, mama’s brother, aunt Janeybelle’s husband, had been a Civil War buff and he’d lived till I was fifteen or so.  He used to tell me that in the beginning of the war, the South was attired in uniforms from France or Poland, or something, all red with gold braid.

Perhaps they had, but what this man was wearing was a ragged dark grey jacket with insignias I couldn’t understand, pants that were some color between blue and brown, and what looked like – I’d seen them in museums – Prussian riding boots that came up to his knees.

I felt my jaw drop open in surprise, at this historically accurate splendor.  I threw the door open and heard the confused, slurred words, “Where is the battle?” come out of my lips.

His eyes widened and for just a moment he looked surprised. Then he shook his head.  “No battle,” he said.  “No battle, Honey.  I’ve been… lost.”  A crease formed on his forehead.  “You don’t know how lost I’ve been.”

I frowned in turn.  He didn’t look like a lunatic.  And his accent was definitely from these parts but overlaid with what seemed to be a cultured British accent.  Something that wasn’t exactly the province of some mad man tumbling among the wilds of this back country place.  I chose to take his word for it.  He’d been lost.  “This is the Childe house,” I said.  Which was just a little strange to say, but the truth was that I’d never bothered with an address on those occasions I had to write to mama.  Georgia Childe, Blazes, Georgia and the zip always found its way there.  It wasn’t like everyone in town didn’t know us.

It was all too possible he said something else.  I didn’t seem to be thinking sequentially, and I might have missed something, because what I heard next was, “May I come in?  Please let me come in?”  And the way he said it, all urgent and purposeful, I thought it must make sense.  I thought he’d asked to use the phone.

I stepped aside from the door.  “Sure,” I said.

He stepped over the threshold and there was a feeling that’s pretty hard to describe.  It was as if an electric shock had run not through me but through the air.  And then he was… staring at me.  There was a hunger in his eyes.  Not as if he was going to eat me – well, at least not unless I was very, very lucky.

I expected his uniform to smell – or at least to smell of wet wool and sweat because, let’s face it, you can’t be running around pretending to be a confederate soldier in the heat and humidity of a Georgia Spring and not sweat.  But though there was a hint of wet wool and a faint redolence of clean male sweat, most of all, he brought with him the smell of woodland.

When I was very young, I used to go out where the garden used to be and lie beneath the big fig tree, near the capped well, and read.  The smell he brought with him was the smell of that place – pine trees and moss, roses and blackberries.

I was so surprised by this, that I didn’t react as he closed the distance between us, and said, his voice all breath, “Honey, you are a sight for sore eyes.  I’ve… dreamed of you.”

And without so much as by-your-leave, his hands came down on my shoulders, and he pulled me close to him, crushing my body against what was a very muscular body indeed, harder some places than others.

I would have screamed.  I should have screamed.  Blame it on the concussion, but I was so confused, that I let him bring his head down, and let his mouth meet my mouth, and before you knew it, I was kissing a perfect stranger.

His lips were soft, his tongue had a mind of its own.  His mouth tasted of distilled liquor with an odd sweet edge.  And he was kissing me as if his life depended on it, teeth clashing against teeth, his breath ragged.

Hunger – and not for food – roiled off his body, as he pressed against mine and drove me back and back, against the wall.  Which was good, all things considered, because I was having a lot of trouble standing up.  It must be that concussion.  Same reason I didn’t scream.

He came up for breath for less than a second and I truly have no explanation for why I didn’t let loose with a shriek then, but I didn’t.  And then his lips were back on mine, his mouth sucking at my tongue like he could only breathe through my mouth, like kissing me was the only thing that could keep him alive.

Coming up for air again, he made a sound that wasn’t so much a moan as half a sigh and half a cry of need, and his green eyes were half-lidded, as if he were in pain.  Which he might very well be, since what I felt against my leg was definitely not a pez dispenser, and those pants looked a mite tight.

“I–” I started, but then I couldn’t continue because his hands were running over my body, warm, frantic.

“Why are you wearing breeches?” he said, but didn’t wait for an answer, which was good, because no one ever had called my jeans breeches.  But since what he did next was get hold of my t-shirt – yellow with artists do it colorfully splattered in red across the chest – at the neckline and tear it clean down, it went right out of my mind.  I just said, “Hey!”

And he looked up and said, “Don’t be missish, Honey, not now.  You don’t know what I’ve done.  You don’t know how I’ve dreamed of this.”

“What?” I said, trying to get hold of my shirt and pull it back together, even as those large, square-tipped hands were trying to work on my bra as if it were something he’d never seen before, and my mind was trying to run through everything I’d ever learned on rape prevention.  Which, mind you, was precious little, since I’d never had much in the way of fear of being raped.  I mean, I don’t jog in bad neighborhoods, I don’t walk in isolated places after dark, I don’t go out on dates with guys I don’t know very well, and I always carry a gun, and can shoot the nethermost wing off a fly at fifty paces.

Only I’d not brought checked luggage and you can’t fly with guns in carry on.  Not if you are just an artist.  And I didn’t know this man.  And I had no idea why he was squeezing his fingers under my bra and pressing them, hungrily, against my flesh.  I hadn’t ever heard of mad rapists running around in historically accurate Civil War gear.  Not even here.

And I wish I could say I’d gone cold on him, but it was stranger than that.  The part of me that could think rationally was thinking that this was a very strange encounter and that I was about to get raped.  And the other part of me – a part of me that to be honest I’d never been aware of except when I was painting and really immersed in it – was feeling the hunger and the need wrapped around this man.  It was an odd sort of hunger, an odd sort of need – a craving for love and comfort and acceptance, as if he were whipped dog, who had gone from doorstep to doorstep and at each one met with kicks and insults.  But it was more than that, because it came wrapped in unbearable-chest-crushing-grief, the sort that you feel between catching your breath and letting a sob tear out at the beginning of uncontrollable crying.

But, strangest of all, what I felt from him, wrapped around these feelings, was love.  Overwhelming love.  There was an odd softness in the green eyes, as they looked at me, that went well beyond any possible lust.  And his hands, warm and insistent, were also caressing, desperate, as if he knew me – knew me, loved me, had made love to me before and couldn’t wait to make love to me again.

I grabbed both halves of my shirt in a trembling hand, I wiped my mouth to the back of my other hand, more to gain control than to wipe his taste from my lips, and I didn’t even try to fight off his hand which had figured out how to unclasp my bra.  “Who are you?” I asked, as he pulled my bra up and dove down, his mouth hot and hungry on my left nipple, then up to cover my breast in soft, worshipful kisses.  “Who the hell are you?”

He blinked up at me, as if surprised at this question, and pulled away.  “Honey?” he said, concerned.  “Honey, you know me.”

I shook my head.  “No.  I’m sorry.”  My voice came out really shaky, because, let me tell you, it is a bit of challenge to manage to form words and everything while one of the best looking men you’ve ever seen is kissing both of your tits all over and doesn’t give any signs of wanting to stop.  Even if you have no clue who he is, and he seems to think you’re the bestest of friends.  I tried to remember some peccadillo, some azalea and moonlight romance the memory of which I might have suppressed because of a broken heart, but suppressed memories and broken hearts were something that only happened in aunt Janeybelle’s stories and never in real life and certainly not to me.  “I have no idea who you are.”

This got his head away from my breasts, which left them feeling rather lonely and neglected, strange as it might seem, and made him straighten up to his full six feet some.  “So, that’s why,” he said.

“That’s why what?” I asked.

“You forgot me.  Honey, what have they done to you to make you forget me?”

He grabbed my arm and squeezed hard.  “Was it one of the bastards…”  His eyes blazed with such crackling anger that I was afraid.  “The Lord knows I’ve shot enough of the bastards and taken enough revenge, but I didn’t know they’d done that!  If I’d known–”

“That?” I asked, now totally lost, and more and a bit afraid, particularly since his hand was holding my arm in a vise-grip.

“Your daughter!” he said as if this explained everything.  He spoke through tightly clenched teeth.  “I could forgive them destroying my home, I could forgive them burning everything.   I could have forgiven them killing me.  God knows I’ve deserved death.  But you!”

“I don’t…” I started, ready to tell him I didn’t have any daughter.  But he didn’t let me finish.

His hand left my arm and cupped my face, soft and tender.   After his painful grip it was the softest of touches, gentle and – despite the fact I could feel calluses on his hand – as soft as velvet.  “Honey, I am Gabriel Thornblade.”

“Thor– ” I started.  But clearly the recognition he hoped for hadn’t shone in my eyes, because his own were now distinctly moist.

“Damn it all to hell,” he said, as a thunderclap echoed as if on cue.  “We grew up together, you and me.  We were sweethearts as soon as we could say the word.  I just wanted the war to end so I could come and ask for your hand.”

“What war?” I asked, as a mad idea formed that this might be one of mama’s beaus who looked incredibly youthful.  Though mama had never talked about any of her beaus going off to Vietnam.  In fact, the war that had broken her generation apart and tore our culture asunder had seemed to leave mama as untouched as had most of the twentieth century, from which she’d adopted comfy clothes and cars and little else.

“Why, the war betwee– ”

“Honey Childe, have you run insane?” Aunt Janeybelle’s half-choked shriek echoed from the doorway.

 

 

A Proper Southern Lady

 

I was standing against the wall of the entrance hall, my shirt tore in half down the front, my bra undone and pulled above my breasts, leaving them bobbing, all white and round beneath.

In front of me was Aunt Janeybelle, as perfectly polished as a Southern woman could get.

Though Blazes was the back of nowhere, Auntie Janeybelle was not now and had never been White Trash.  She couldn’t have been to have married mama’s only brother, after all.  Though the Childes tended to marry off their boys, have the women keep the family name and inherit the house – at least since great great great grandma Honey Childe – Childe men were still Childes and they didn’t marry just anyone.

Auntie Janeybelle’s family had come from other parts.  Atlanta, I thought, though I couldn’t swear to it, and she had been the prettiest debutante once upon a time.  Now she wore a dark blue skirt suit, with a fluffy pink blouse and pearls around her neck, and her make up was so discrete you might not know it was there at all, save for the faint and tasteful lipstick.

She looked like one of those porcelain dolls you sometimes find in antique shops.  When she was young, she must have been real pretty – a smooth, oval face with round baby-blue eyes.  Age had not made her wrinkle so much as it had made her skin look stained and yellowed.  However her hair was as gold as ever I remembered its being.  I was sure it came from a bottle at this time, but that was the last thing I was thinking, as I panted, staring up at her, trying to think up of an excuse for why I was up against that wall and half-naked.

I realized that she was looking, her eyes very wide, at my temple, where I’d hit it on the desk, and I felt something liquid trickle from there and down the side of my face.  I reached over, half expecting it to be water.  Gabriel Thornblade – and who he could be, I plain couldn’t imagine, since all those people were gone – had been dripping wet, after all.  If he’d ever been there.  He seemed to have vanished like that, no more material than a soap bubble.  But my fingertips, as I brought them in front of my eyes, were stained dark red.

“Well, land sakes, child,” Aunt Janeybelle said.  Or perhaps Childe.  It was hard to tell.  “What have you been doing to yourself?”

I pulled my bra down, hooked it, and fumbled my t-shirt closed.  What had I been doing to myself?  Doing to myself being the great big question, since there was nobody around.  “I fell,” I mumbled.  And then looking up and giving her my best, innocent look.  “I don’t know how it came about.  I just tripped in mama’s study, and I fell.”

Auntie Janeybelle stifled a cry and covered her mouth with both impeccably manicured hands, with their polished, unnaturally long nails painted a lady-like pink that exactly matched her blouse.

I wasn’t in the mood for drama, though drama, it could be argued, was the birthright of every Southern-born woman.  “If you’ll pardon me,” I said, and ducked around her to grab my travel bag, which I carried with me down the hallway, past mama’s study and into the powder room in this floor.  The powder room was not a courtesy sort of thing in this case.

Though it did contain a toilet and a sink, the room was smaller than most closets and most suited to just powdering one’s nose in it.  It was so small in fact that mama always did say that it kept her slim.  If she gained any weight at all she would never be able to close that door again, and would need to give up on the powder room entirely.  Now I wedged my bag between the pedestal sink and the wall and closed the door in the face of Aunt Janeybelle who, wouldn’t you know it, had followed me and seemed disposed to follow me right into the bathroom.

Then I looked at myself in the mirror and bit my lip, refusing to give in to an impulse to have strong hysterics.  When Auntie Janeybelle was gone, I could go ahead and scream my head off, if it that was what it took.  But not just now.

I could have cried with mama.  I could have cried with grandmama.  I could have screamed at my friends in Denver and asked what the hell I’d been smoking, or how I’d come to hallucinate the world’s most handsome man in period clothes no less.  To any of them I could have said that I was going insane, but not with Auntie Janeybelle.

You see, she had always been there, this is true.  And it could be said that after grandma was gone she had helped mama raise me.  At least if you understand helping as telling mama every day and twice on Sunday that she was spoiling me and making me unfit for society.  And that my wild spirit needed curbing.  And that I read too much.

Aunt Janeybelle had the type of concerned, disapproving gaze that made me feel like I had forgotten to wash my face, I had dog’s doings on my shoe, or snot hanging from my nose.  To make things worse, she was so flawless all the time.

If I told her what I’d seen – if I told her what I’d felt – she’d think I had finally gone insane.  Not that going insane was something that Auntie Janeybelle disapproved of.  Not exactly. She seemed to think madness, like drama, was the proper right of any well bred southern lady.  She talked with pride of how one of her aunts was so high-bed and refined that she had spent years in a rest home, after a nervous breakdown.  Second to getting consumption – and that was definitely hard these days, though Auntie Janeybelle seemed to pin her hopes on the new antibiotic-resistant strains of tuberculosis.  Or at least she talked of them a lot – going stark raving mad – particularly after my dear mama died – would probably be the only thing I could do to prove to Auntie Janeybelle that I was a proper southern lady and that she hadn’t failed in making me one.

She would be understanding and triumphant and rush me to some discrete rest home with some name like Frail Magnolias Recuperation Institute, and put me in a straight jacket.  If I were very lucky, the jacket wouldn’t be pink, and she wouldn’t crochet a lovely frill for it.

So I bit my lip until the urge to scream passed, while I looked at my ashen face glaring at me from the mirror.

My face made a poor study.  I had always had a face in shape of a face, with a jutting, stubborn chin, brown eyes and what my mother called a button nose.  When I scrubbed up and tied back my unruly brown hair, which seemed to grow in several whirlwinds all over my head, I could be considered pleasant.  My worst enemy could not accuse me of being a proper southern belle, or , for that matter, a belle of any description.

But now, my normally olive skin, probably inherited from the father I’d never met – since mama had always been a proper peaches-and-cream Celtic beauty – looked that curious green tinge it went when I was sick.  With the red blood trickling down the side of my face, it looked right christmasy.  I grabbed some toilet paper and dabbed at my temple, then held it there, pressing lightly.

That seemed to stop the blood, and it didn’t hurt as if I had broken any bones.  My friend Terry, with whom I went out now and then, back in Denver, was a pre-med student and he’d said that if one had serious concussion one’s pupil would be a different size of the other.

At least that’s what he said when Julie – my roommate – had fallen on her head in the bathroom, New Year’s Eve, after she’d drank way too much Jack Daniels.  I remembered trying to hold Julie’s eyelids open while Terry shone a flashlight into them.  That is, until she came to and threatened to break all his bones, even the one that wasn’t part of his skeleton if he didn’t stop shining bright lights at her.  He’d judged it enough evidence that she was back to her normal and let her be.

Now I opened my eyes as much as I could and turned the light on.  It was just a naked forty watts dangling from its cord all the way up there, in the nine foot ceiling and I can’t say it did much to augment the light coming through the little palm sized window almost at that level.

And then it was pretty hard to tell what was my pupil and what was dark-dark brown iris.  I glared at myself, daring my pupils to be the wrong size.

Auntie Janeybelle cleared her throat on the other side of the door.  “Honey?”

When I didn’t immediately answer, being rather busy trying to discern if my pupils were the same size, she knocked at the door – a light, lady-like knock.  “Honey.”

“Yes, ma’am?” I answered, deciding my eyes were about the same they’d always been, and so were my pupils.  And besides, I remembered Terry had said that if you were concussed you’d throw up – which had been a world of good when Julie had lost her cookies all over his jeans and shoes, considering what she’d drunk by then – and I wasn’t even slightly nauseous.  Not since first standing up.

Auntie Janeybelle shuffled uneasily on the other side of the door.  It says something about her that her minimal movements, indicating uneasiness, made enough of a rustling noise to convey to me that she was moving this way and that a little, to let me know she wasn’t happy.  “Honey, I can’t say as I’m comfortable with you being there on the other side of that door.”

I glared at the door.  Well, I couldn’t say as I was comfortable with the idea of Auntie Janeybelle on this side of the door.  Let alone the fact that to fit she would need to lose almost all of her weight, and spread herself thin along the wall.  Of course, I didn’t say that, but made a sound best transcribed as “Um.”

Turning on the water, and hoping that would drown out any pearls of wisdom my aunt might have left in her mind, I splashed my face which made me feel better.  That is, it made me feel better until I realized that there was no towel in sight, and I would have to leave my face wet and dripping.

In a fit of wild creativity, I took off my shirt – it’s not like it was fit for anything else now – and wiped my face with it.  I swear it smelled of wild blueberries and trailing roses with a faint trace of wet wool.  I flung it from me quickly.

Aunt Janeybelle knocked again.  At this rate I was going to end up causing her to do serious damage to her nails.

“Ma’am?”

“Well, Honey, I don’t know what possessed you to go into your mama’s study.”

I opened my mouth, but then I couldn’t imagine what had possessed me either, so I just said “Um.” again and sat on the closed toilet lid to unzip my bag and look for a t-shirt that wasn’t split.

Aunt Janeybelle sighed, which was a normal reaction of hers to anything I did that she didn’t approve of or didn’t understand.  I pulled my t-shirt on, then looked up the wall at the tiny window and wondered if there was any way I could climb up the smooth plaster and get out through that window.  Mind you, squeezing through the window might kill me.  It was that small.  And if memory didn’t fail, it was about seven feet off the ground on the other side, but breaking my head dropping from it seemed preferable to enduring Aunt Janeybelle’s lady-like reproach.

Only then she would stand over my bleeding self and tell me I’d always been a tomboy, and if only mama had always taken me in hand early.  “Yes, Aunt?” I said.

“Well, dear, I’m sure no one ever did tell you, but seeing as…”

“Seeing as?”

“Seeing as your mama did die in her study…”

For a moment – for just a moment – I felt as if the floor of the bathroom had shifted under my feet, which was stupid, since it was made of the same solid mosaic as the rest of the rooms partitioned from the ballroom.  I grabbed at the sink with both hands, to steady myself, and when I spoke, I confess I was less than polite.  “She what?”

Aunt Janeybelle cleared her throat, just enough to indicate, as it were, that she disapproved of my hoydenish manners.  “She died right there, just sitting at her work table.”

“I see,” I said.  “And my mama did what exactly.  By way of work?”

There was a long silence from the other side, and then Aunt Janeybelle said.  “I don’t know.  You see, I’ve never gone into her study.  Not a once.”

“I see,” I said, and flung the door open.  As much as my aunt annoyed me, I supposed that I’d have to put up with her.  “Then who found her?  Henry Albert?”

My aunt looked at me, with wide open eyes, and for just a moment it was like she didn’t remember who Henry Albert was, which, considering he was hers and my uncle’s only son, seemed a little odd.  Then she shook her head.  “No.  Henry Albert is just like you don’t you know?  He done left as soon as he’d finished high school.  He’s in New York City and he says he’s some kind of lawyer, though what he wants among them yanks, I don’t know.”  She sniffed.  “Not finding himself a wife, apparently.”

Well, considering that Henry Albert had taken a keen interest in pulling wings off flies, he was probably making a fortune.  But I didn’t want to hear about him, and I returned to my question, “Who found mama?”

“Father Carver.”

“Who?”

“Well,” Aunt Janeybelle said, and looked mildly embarrassed, as if she’d been discussing some rare and strange disease.  Not that she would be in the slightest embarrassed by strange disorders.  Discussing birth, female trouble and menopause was mostly what women in my family did when they got together.  And though they banished boys from the room, it had never occurred to them to banish me.  “The Catholic priest, you know?”

I didn’t know.  Not an idea.  “A… priest?  Mama was Catholic?”

“No, no, no,” my aunt said, hurriedly, reassuringly.  “Nothing like that, I’m sure.  Only when Father Carver came to town… Lor’ I think that was after you left, wasn’t it?  Well, he’s about Henry Albert’s age, or thereabouts, and I guess your mama was like a mama to him.”

I resisted an urge to stare.  I couldn’t imagine my mama being like a mama to anyone.  Even me.  Oh, mind you, she’d kept me fed and clean, but there was none of that flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone that other mothers indulged in.  I started to wonder exactly who this Father Carver was and what he looked like.  I mean, there were stories about Catholic priests, and though most of them didn’t have anything with their seducing middle aged ladies… well… this was the South and it made people do strange things.

In my mind, the sort of purple romance ending in a crime passionale was forming, and I cut it short.  It was the Southern mind, you see.  We were never all that impressed by Wuthering Heights.  Not that we didn’t read it.  We did.  But it paled in comparison to the stories of crazy aunts locked in the attics, mad grandma’s who’d died for love, and the woman down the street who claimed she was eloping, but the next morning they found her dead, with a set of male footprints that walked beside her and stopped abruptly.

I’d read A Rose for Emily in college and suffice it to say that if I hadn’t found it to be precisely advisable behavior to keep your dead lover’s corpse and sleep beside him for years after you murdered him, neither was I particularly shocked.  It was just Miss Moreyne up the street, all over again.

But I wouldn’t think of what might have been going on between Father Carver and mama until I met Father Carver.  I did not think, at any rate, that mama was the sort to get in the type of relationship that ended in her death – though I wouldn’t say anything about her lover’s death.  Aunt Janeybelle maybe.  Mama, never.  “And of what did mama die, precisely?” I asked.

My aunt shrugged.  “The doctor said it was a stroke.”

I shut of my mind on the various meaning of stroke.  There are things one doesn’t think about one’s mama.  I’d go see Father Carver and enquire.  And his God help him if I didn’t like his answer.

Until then, Aunt Janeybelle was there, on the other side of the door, right in the path I needed to take out of the powder room.  And she was looking at me with this curious, sharp expression.

I cleared my throat.  There was no way to just shove her aside and get through.  Not without enduring a speech on my manners.  And she didn’t seem to be disposed to get out of the way on her own.  So I grabbed the t-shirt I had flung on the back of the toilet, and resisted an urge to smell it.  Instead, I folded it neatly.

“How you happened to rip that right across.”

“I don’t rightly know,” I said.  “It happened when I fell.”  Give or take a few minutes.  I looked up, as she was as close to the door as if she meant to come in, but couldn’t.  “Why did you drop by, auntie?”

She blinked, as if startled, as if her dropping by was, of course, something she did constantly.  For all I knew it was true.  After all, she was a widow, mama was alone too, and Henry Albert and I were quite gone.  Not that mama had ever liked my aunt much, but I guessed that after a while what matters is who is left of your generation.

“Well,” she said.  “Well, what with your mama having died here and all, I thought you might have wanted to come and stay in my home.  It’s closer to the shops and all.”

Never mind that the only shops in Blazes were a sort of general store and a five and dime.  I must have looked my reluctance.  I remembered Aunt Janeybelle’s house.  It was clean, with the kind of meticulous cleanliness that looked as though no crumb and no dust particle was allowed to fall in it.  It should have smelled of disinfectant, it looked like.  But instead it smelled of lilacs – a heavy, cloying suffocating scent.

And she crocheted covers for everything.  All her kitchen appliances wore wooly covers, as if they were very cold.  And what she did to hide her toilet paper involved plastic dolls with hoop skirts.  I shuddered at the thought.  “Thank you, but no.  I’ll be fine here.  It won’t be for very long.”

She looked like she was going to say something, but then she just shook her head.  “Well, suit yourself, but why you’d want to stay in this mausoleum!”

“It’s my home,” I said, and as I said it I realized that it was true.  This was home, a home knit in my bones, a home I could not deny or refuse, anymore than I could deny or refuse mama and grandma and that poor ancestress who’d had the misfortune to also be named Honey Child.  Oh, this was going to be much more complicated than I thought.

“Well,” she said, and frowned.  “At least you must come for dinner at my house tonight.”

“All right then,” I said, and started to step forward, hoping she’d get the hint.  She dug for her keys in her huge pink purse, and stepped back, still looking at me.  “I shall expect you at five sharp.”

I wanted to tell her that five wasn’t night, nor even evening, but it wasn’t worth arguing.  “Thank you.  I’ll be there.”

A strong urge to get her out of my house had taken hold, because I’d just remembered – or thought I remembered – a letter half-showing between the pages of that Bible.  With all my luck, it would be a love letter to one of my long-dead ancestresses.  Except that I thought I recognized mama’s handwriting on it.  And I couldn’t imagine reading it in front of my aunt’s prying eyes.

Aunt Janeybelle made her twittering way towards the door.  When she was on the porch, on the other side, I remembered Gabriel Thornblade standing there, dripping rainwater and sexiness.

“Aunt Janeybelle?”

“Yes, dear?” she said, looking way from the bowels of her capacious purse and up at my face.

“Have you ever heard of a Gabriel Thornblade?”

“What?”

“Gabriel Thornblade?”

She blinked at me.  “He wasn’t supposed…”  She stopped and shook her head and it seemed to me she swallowed hard.  “He was the last of the Thornblades.  The one as died in the War Between the States.  Your grandma had a painting of him somewhere, I remember seeing it once, when she was sorting things.  A little painting, you know, a miniature.  With all the other old stuff.”

Since old stuff described most of the house, this wasn’t exactly helpful.  And I wasn’t about to believe I’d made out with a ghost.  “But there is no one by that name now?”

My aunt tittered, a gentle, ladylike laugh.  “Oh, no, dear.  The Thornblades were all quite gone.  Though they say…”

“They say?” I asked, imagining that they said there was some distant relative or something.  This was just what I needed.  I’d made out with some loony Brit – judging from the accent – who’d come back in search of ancestral glories.

“Well, they do say that Gabriel Thornblade walks.”

“Walks?”

She looked at me with sudden impatience, mixed with irritation, as though I’d just asked her to explicitly define the phrase female troubles.  “They say he is a ghost.  He wasn’t a good man.”

And with that she turned and left for her massive bright green SUV which she’d parked next to the rental car.  I watched her putting on driving gloves – gloves! – before she climbed into her car.  And I thought as hard as I could that I sure as hell and Georgia, I most certainly had not been making out with a ghost.

Yes, the title means I’m in a silly mood.  Years ago, a friend of mine ran a small press magazine and got a submission in that advertised itself as a “multifarious, splendiferous” story.  If you are the author who actually thought it was a good idea to put that on your cover letter, I’m sorry because that has since become a joke for my writing friends.  If we have something we’re really not sure about, as we pass it to our friends for an opinion, we make sure to tell them “This is a Multifarious, Splendiferous Story.”

At any rate, that title sounds better than “Various Odds and Ends” which is what this post actually is.

First of all – I meant to do this last week and spaced (oy, let me tell you what this week has been) – any of you who want to promote a work, leave me details and an Amazon link (unless it’s not on Amazon, of course!) in the comments.  Sometime, probably Sunday, I’ll assemble a post, then put the link at instapundit.  My bit for indie publishing and maybe, just maybe it will help you guys a little.

Now, onto the next important bit – Yes, I see the few of you who are regular commenters are tapping your feet – I’m delaying Witchfinder again, and I’m sorry, but I haven’t finished Noah’s Boy – this comes under what this week has been – and at this stage of Noah’s Boy I have to keep the whole plot in my head, as I pull the closure shut, and I don’t have space for anything else.  So.  The only thing I can promise you is that once Noah’s Boy is sent in (G-d willing by Monday, please) I will then – after sleeping two days or so – sit down and finish WF because it’s about 50 pages from close, and those I’d prefer to do at a run anyway (because of keeping the whole plot in my head, at the end.)

The week that was – my older son (he admitted to it, so I can leak who it was) had well, I guess they consider it major, surgery to correct a minor but eventually life-threatening congenital issue.  We’ve been putting it off, and hoped it would be small enough that nothing needed to be done about it, but it finally became obvious the surgery would be needed and, his being a Senior in college (though he might do another year and get a chem major too) it was time.  So he had it done on Wednesday and stayed at the hospital through Thursday.  I stayed with him.  I was supposed to be writing on the laptop, but it never happened.

Because it is considered major surgery and it’s SUPPOSED to limit his movements (well, he is male and young, so he keeps thinking it doesn’t, which requires my being around to stop the more foolhardy stuff.  Not bad foolhardy, but he hates to be a trouble, so…) the post op has involved considerable vigilance and help from me.  I’m not complaining.  Robert is a good patient, relatively.  Unfortunately, it also entails a certain amount of depression on his part, which means if he wants to discuss things for an hour or two and catches me on my way to the kitchen for coffee, as a break in writing, well…  We discuss it.  Mostly he’s been studying history of the revolutionary period, so it’s fascinating anyway.  (No, not for school.  On his own.  We decided when the kids chose degrees that they should take STEM because the humanities they can study on their own and the languages I can teach them.  Not because they weren’t interested in humanities, but because STEM is better for jobs and doing “real” stuff.  So the kids usually have a “learning” project going on.)

On top of that, I’ve been going through this weird thing where I sleep a lot.  I thought it was either hormonal (rolls eyes.  Yeah.  That’s usually a problem.  The fertility never worked very well, but also won’t shut off fully, and it’s working about as “well” as it ever did) or just emotional exhaustion.  Turned out it was a sinus infection left behind as a souvenir by the latest quasi-flu.  (Son of Death Flu, Enter The Virus.)

I’m on antibiotics now, and yesterday was the first time I felt entirely myself and didn’t spend three hours in this sleep so profound that I woke but couldn’t move when Robert called for help.  (Turned out it was Havey attacking his cane, so it wasn’t help-help like “I’ve fallen” type of thing, thank heavens.  I wanted to get up, I couldn’t get my body to.)

Anyway if all that sounds like a lot of excuses… It’s not.  It is explanations, though.  I was working very hard at Noah’s boy every minute I could, but life interfered.  It must get done in the next couple of days, though – must – because I can’t do this to my publisher.  So, let me do that, and then I do the end of Witchfinder, I promise.  BTW, because it’s going to end up goatgagger size (I already know sections I HAVE to put in) it will probably be released at 9.99, which means those who donate in advance are getting a bargain… even though most people donate way more, so…

Oh, yeah, as a side note, if any of you could recommend something like a diary of biography of someone in special forces, I kind of need it for the next serialized novel.  No rush, but it is sort of kinda needed.  (Though it’s only really needed for the beginning and “feel”.)

Okay.  Now I go work on Noah’s Boy.  Post your stuff you want to advertise!

Some years ago, at breakfast, my younger kid looked up, stared at me with bleery eyes and said, “I’ve seen the apocalypse.  It all ends in chickens.”

To understand he’s not completely insane you have to see that he was probably still asleep and dreaming.  He’s one of those people who can be dragged out of bed at the normal time the same as everyone else, but he’s not awake.  He looks awake, insofar as his eyes are open, but he’s still dreaming and somewhere else.  When I asked him what he meant, he just looked at me blankly and said “WHAT?” as though I were crazy.  (And yes, Kate gleefully stole the prophecy for the con books.  We writers are despicable beings.  We not only steal from each other’s books, we steal from each other’s LIVES.)

This morning I woke up with the memory of his saying that, and the tone of voice, and the utter horror on his face.  And out of that deeper mind, the idea came “Yep, it all ends in chickens.”

The world usually does.

Let me explain.  This all comes from reading Dave Freer’s post on his visit to Zimbabwe.  Zimbabwe for us could be substituted in a sentence with the words “hell on Earth” and it would work just the same way.  We know of Mugabe’s violation of property rights; we know of the incredible inflation that made the Weimar republic look stable.  Those of us like me, from far-wandering families, have cousins who fled when Rhodesia first became Zimbabwe and cousins who fled much later, in the oughts, when it was said it was not safe to be white in Zimbabwe.

But Dave’s son married a girl from Zimbabwe who fits the parameters of “an English rose.”  And they attended the wedding there, with clearly a lot of her white relatives.

And Dave says things are getting better.  For a given definition of better.

I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that this country is in for a very rough time, maybe the roughest time we’ve ever endured, simply because what can go on won’t, and because in a time when technological change is pushing is towards greater individual choice, responsibility and freedom (yes, I can expand on it) our exquisitely trained “managing” class (not just in government, companies, churches, charitable societies are all on the same boat) has been TRAINED to hate our foundational principles and to idolize Europe’s centralized system which was moribund back in the seventies, and which is now completely at odds with the direction of the technology.  (No?  France invested tons in this video communication system, which never fully got off the ground and which has been lapped by the haphazard frontier that is the internet.)

However, in the United States we tend to take everything as all or nothing, our rough times and our happy times and… everything in between.

One of the first things that struck me about America was how seriously we take our history, our habits, our–  By which I don’t mean we know it exquisitely well, because, particularly recently, we simply haven’t been taught – I mean that every American I know obsesses about whatever his source of interest it, whether it’s something like scrapbooking, or something like reenacting the civil war.

No, this is not common.  Not in Europe.  Perhaps it is the longest weight of history that lends all of it a sort of “shrug, it will pass.”  Or perhaps it is that we are (or were, at least) a people of law, and of all being equal before the law.  What was written in the constitution and the declaration mattered.  It made us who we were.

Other countries in the world pay less attention to their founding documents.  Their citizenship is a matter of people and history and blood.

I can’t fully tell you all the ways in which America is different – or how little the rest of the world “gets” us.  I just can’t.  I can’t even explain it to them.  My brother, for instance who likes reading history (though mostly historical fiction) was once telling me about this history book he found and how it was probably something I couldn’t get here, so he’d send it to me when he was done reading.  This is when I sighed and informed him that back then (pre-Amazon which changed my buying methods) I belonged to the history book club, and I’d read that book a year ago, and by the way there was also this, this and this.

See, in Portugal they have this idea of the US as “futuristic” which to them means that nothing that isn’t as new as tomorrow matters here.  The idea of oh, my plumber, who is a civil war reenactor and can tell you what a soldier ate for breakfast on any given day of any given year of the war (perhaps a very slight exaggeration, but very slight, trust me) and who spends his time, money and considerable skull sweat studying the civil war, doesn’t fit into their idea of America.

Because they don’t get us.  And we don’t get that the rest of the world isn’t like us.  Even I tend to forget that, anymore.

It is perhaps easier if I tell you that US is like someone with borderline Aspergers, compared to a normal person.  Lacking a long history and the organic understanding of how history works – having experienced a break with the past that comes from many of our citizens not speaking their parents’ language – and being, further more, a people created by words, we attach great importance to laws, regulations and words.

In the kindergarten of nations, we’re the kid with thick glasses and a book, the kid who grew up surrounded by adults and never really had a childhood.  Periodically we have to wade in and tell them they can’t play that way, because it’s against the rules and this is how it will end – and they resent us, of course, PARTICULARLY when we’re right.

(In that sense, btw, what we’re going through now is our attempt to act like the other kids, so they will like us.  It won’t work.  And it will end in tears.  And frankly, we’re starting to worry the other kids.  We’re too big and responsible to act like them.)

Anyway, part of what that affects is how people are looking towards the coming rough times.  Americans tend to follow from the principles and “where this leads” and so most of the people I know are expecting some sort of Mad Max future.  They’re looking up recipes for “Neighbor au squirrel.”

But as Dave hints – and as I’ve experienced – that’s not the way the world ends.  And this time, it really might not be the way the world ends because you have to throw the tech in.

Yes, some areas will go Mad Max.  I was telling a friend shortly after Sandy that he really must have a backup plan in case NYC goes all “Escape from NY” because I don’t have enough guns to go in and rescue him.  (Will NYC be one of the areas that goes Mad Max?  I don’t know.  Actually I think they’re first on the list of “most likely to glow with radioactive light” – but that’s another aspect.)

In law and on paper, yeah, we’re headed to a total collapse that would lead to that sort of thing…  But the US, never having experienced that sort of collapse doesn’t know, bone deep, that collapses are never that absolute.  Having watched collapses – Zimbabwe – at a distance, we see them as absolute.

But humans are humans.  Humans are no more law abiding when society falls apart than they are when it’s whole – in fact, they’re less.  Even in a country as law abiding as the US (we are.  Truly) we’re each of us already violating three laws before breakfast because the d*mn things have multiplied to the point to obey one you have to violate the other.

When laws and rulers (yes, I know they’re supposed to be administrators, but most of them, right now, from corporate managers to the president, are under the misguided impression they’re rulers and acting as such) are suicidal, the normal person still chooses NOT to commit suicide.  And contrary to the Marxist view of society which has influenced many of us whether we know it or not (having it shoved down your throat for seventy years does that) humans are not in general “everyone’s hand against everyone else” unless a kindly government prevents their killing each other.  Humans, in general, are social animals who cooperate for mutual benefit.

Take the internet.  Yes, you have hackers and scammers.  But they’re a minority and easily avoided.  Most of the internet is a good place to: learn; find like minded people; engage in mutually beneficial business.

So the government falling apart doesn’t mean society will fall apart – particularly not if we have the internet.  It just means a lot of the stupid laws and regulations get ignored, and people go about the business of surviving in the best possible way.

And it’s likely to end in chickens, because they’re the easiest and cheapest to keep of the domestic animals (well, the city chicken movement does it bizarrely, with special fodder and all, but you can keep them cheaply – trust me – on leftovers and cooked rice and such.)  In Portugal in the seventies every suburban backyard became a chicken farm.  We ate a lot of chicken.

But you know, when you eat chicken you don’t starve.  People traded and survived and some of them (inventive enough) even thrived.

It worries me but only a little, since my skills – the advanced ones – are of the word kind, which is harder to trade on the side.  OTOH, in the seventies we didn’t have the internet.  And my guess is people will find a way to buy stories, and I’ll find a way to sell them the stories… even if it all falls apart.  It’s not like out tech will magically go back to the 19^th century.  It won’t.

If the currency is worth nothing, then we work with another currency and in ultimate instance with weight in gold.  If the government is not trustworthy, someone will issue bonds.  If the laws are stupid, we ignore them.  People do what they have to do to survive, and I expect pragmatic, sensible Americans will keep surviving.

Not saying that for some places and some people, it won’t be hell on Earth.  Not  saying some states won’t be in serious trouble and turmoil.

Just saying that in some sense, the tough times will burn away the dross, that life will go on, that the new tech will become even more important – and that there’s life at the other side of this and, given how much faster things move these days, even people my age might get to see it.

This is not cheery talk.  I said it before, and I’ll say it again: the central government has important functions, which it’s neglecting to go sticking its nose in things that don’t belong in its sphere.  One of them is “To provide for common defense.”

It’s likely we’ll lose a city, maybe more to enemy action.  It’s likely we’ll see foreign troops land and our own troops too unorganized to mount a proper defense (which is why a well armed populace is important.  Assault rifles h*ll.  I think we should have shoulder-mounted rocket launchers.)  The rest of the world can’t survive without us, and in many places “let’s attack them” is the logical response.  And don’t come back and tell me that an armed populace can’t face an army.  No, of course it can’t, in the battle field, etc.  BUT it can d*mn well make an area too hot to hold.  Look at what the Afghans did to the Soviet occupiers.

It’s possible even that our own government will make things more difficult for states trying to survive (no?  Look at preventing border states from defending their borders.)

But in the long run, the technology itself, the way life is going is running against the centralized ideas of government.  In the long run, everything is pointing to a future that’s geographically decentralized and d*mn hard to govern from a central place.

In the long run the dysfunctional managers in the centralized organizations become more and more irrelevant, and individuals take over.  And let’s face it, we, the odder elements of society, are perfectly suited for that future.  Provided we don’t panic and assume the worst will happen, and neglect the tools of civilization.  Provided we keep our heads down and work – for the mutual benefit of ourselves, of society, of civilization.  In our own inimitable way.

When the dust settles, then we’ll see what functions of government we can’t do without.  I’m betting very few.  Mutual defense.  Territorial integrity.  Keeping the peace between the States.

For the rest we’ll have to go back to learning that individual humans are not some sort of monsters, needing a boot on their necks to behave like decent beings.

And we will.

 

The other day I found myself reading this study about overpopulation.  Well, the study was supposedly about overpopulation, at least.  I’m talking about Calhoun’s study on rats in a cage, rats who were supplied with every possible resource and yet, supposedly, when the population went above a certain density, found themselves exhibiting various pathologies, some of which will sound eerily familiar: a period of oversexuality leads rapidly to a period where the rats can’t connect with each other for sex or anything else.  There’s cannibalism, violence, apathy and a general falling apart of rat society.  Population falls precipitously.  Those rats that are left behind are too… socially inept to rebuild.

I can’t remember how I got to the study.  I was sure it was through Instapundit, but a quick search doesn’t show me the link.  Perhaps I’m missing it?  At any rate, the link I followed and the article I landed on said that the author of the study was upset about how his study was used, to create the idea of finite resources and the horrors of overpopulation.  I read the article first with that idea – the idea that the man somehow got clobbered by the anti-human-wave, those who think that any humans are too many.

But as I read it I became aware of something that seemed to have got lost in both the interpretations of the people who took this as the model for an overpopulated human society and even in the interpretation of the researcher himself (unless I missed something.) *

He talks about the point at which population outstrips the roles available to rats.  When rats don’t have a role in society, they disconnect from it.

This made me pause and sit back, because – as you guys probably know – I’m convinced we’re nowhere close to overpopulated, even as we’re displaying many of the rats’ symptoms.  Of course it could be a matter of our brain thinking we’re overpopulated (there is the perception we know more people than we know, due to TV and other media) or even of our being too densely packed together in some areas…

It could be a matter of that, except that another explanation is much, much more likely.

I’ve been talking about the falling apart – no, the tearing apart, the deconstruction – of Western Society since WWI.  And what hit me was this – human society doesn’t depend on population or even on population density to create roles.  Humans can create – or destroy – roles for themselves more or less at random.

The whole talk of the anomy and purposelessness of modern life has been with us since at least WWI and possibly before.  It is in a way a risk of affluent societies – when you no longer have to fight for every meal, you, being human, have time to sit back and ask yourself stuff like “Why am I alive?  What does it all mean?”

But the other part of it has nothing to do with affluence, but with the deliberate ripping down of roles.

No?  Ask yourself: if you’d asked pretty much anyone on the street in the 1910s what it meant to be a mother, or to be married, or to be an employee, you were likely to meet with a set of beliefs that, in them, comprised those roles.

No, I’m not saying that everyone in those days lived according to those roles, or even that uniformity in roles is desirable.  I’m just saying that there was a certain unanimity in the culture about what those roles were supposed to be.  People would then define themselves within the role, within the role but with a twist, or against the role.  (Perhaps the number was smaller, but I’m fairly sure there were any number of CONSCIOUSLY bad mothers, even back then.)

Now imagine going out on the street and asking anyone what those roles mean.  You’re not likely to come up with even a coherent minority view of any significance on what those roles mean.  The roles have, in fact, disintegrated.  Fallen apart.

Which means, humans being social animals, that people simply don’t know who they’re SUPPOSED to be.  They don’t even know what they’re rebelling against, because there’s nothing concrete there to push against.

This solved for me, at a glance, various things that had puzzled me for a long time: such as why people who consider themselves rebels are rebelling against a norm that hasn’t been a “norm” for almost a hundred years.  They don’t seem to realize it’s not there, because they need a role, even if it’s the role of rebel against something.  Finding themselves adrift is far more terrifying that trying to fit a model.

Or why the first thing I noticed about American was how much happier they were than Europeans, because, at least back in the early eighties, Americans were involved on a volunteer level with organizations in their communities, at a much higher level than Europeans.  (I wonder to what extent the fact that we now all have to work way to much and that local volunteer communities are falling apart is responsible for the Europeanization of our society.)

Or why science fiction people – particularly those involved in the field as either small gods of fandom, con goers, participants in some science fiction book club, or “just” costumers – are in general less prone to the pathologies of the time.  Yes, yes, we are weird, but we are not a “falling apart” kind of weird.  It’s because, by gum, your role might be secretary of the local SF readers’ club, but you care passionately about it, discuss meetings, prepare food for parties, and are in fact someone fulfilling a role.

Yes, I know, several of you are going to prescribe religion as giving meaning to life – and that is true as far as it goes for those who believe.  For those who don’t believe, unless all of you really want to create a club of passionate heretics and church-haters, it’s best if we don’t consider that route.

However, it also explained to me why people join cults and why educated Western women choose to convert to Islam.  It gives them a role, you see, and a fairly clear role, which is important if you are a person of not particularly passionate beliefs.

Human life must always – yes, even for me – be balanced between wanting freedom and fitting into a role, because that part of us that is animal is a social animal and needs to know where they fit in a hierarchy. Any hierarchy.

The good news is that, without binding prescriptive rules for roles, we can give people guidelines that allow them to find their own roles.  We can define “Adult human being” (the line between adult and child is now being blurred) as “someone who takes care of himself and those who depend on him.”  We can define “good” as a person who lives up to his obligations.  We can define “self-supporting” as a goal to aim for.  We can even define well informed and well adjusted as a minimum of things people should know.

The bad news is that to do it we’ll have to fight against people for whom there is no sin except “judging” – people so emotionally confused they fight against the idea of defining even things like “A common language of trade.”

People who are, in fact, engaged in tearing down the very idea of social roles, and who, then, can’t understand why they can’t engage with anything or why everyone is so lost and without purpose.

They, of course, blame capitalism.  This is handy as, taken to its extreme, it allows totalitarians to build a society in which roles – mostly master and serf – are once more tightly defined.  Perhaps they sense this.  Perhaps it is what drives them towards results they – objectively – claim to not want.

But we know better.  If we want to preserve freedom, prosperity and hope for the future – in a word, civilization — we need to start redefining society in terms not so prescriptive that those of us who are odds or very odds are pushed out of the polity, (I’m a libertarian chick.  I’m going to err on the side of freedom) but not so loose that no one knows what he’s supposed to be or where it matters.

Let’s start by affirming that humanity matters; that the future of humanity matters; that “overpopulation” (also known as “the danger of too many humans”) is a bogus fear.  Each human born brings with him uniqueness and the possibility of innovation.

Let’s start by saying the most important role for any adult, free individual is to support himself, to look after those who depend on him, to keep his promise and honor his contracts.

And that humanity, such as it is, neither ape nor angel, is yet worthwhile.  Let’s establish it is worth it to work so that the future is always better than the past – and to dream of new worlds, of new universes, and of wonders yet undiscovered.

We might not live to see it, but it is the duty of every human being to work so our descendants will.

Enough of this rat cage.  It’s time to own infinity.

* Some of these ideas came from a discussion with my friend Bill Reader, and at this point I don’t know which of us came up with what.  He has promised to write his own take on this as soon as work lets up a little.

*I have a post on Selling Your Soul In Installments, over at Mad Genius Club.*

No, this is not a post about Solyndra.  Nor is it a post about General Motors.  It’s not even, in fact, a post about federal monetary policy.

It is a post about something rather deeper than that.

I’m still working on Noah’s Boy – in the time it would take me to finish, I failed to reckon with a prickly young male in pain, who would need to be not just helped when he won’t ask for help, but cajoled so he doesn’t get too depressed.  Not complaining.  It’s not onerous duty.  It’s just taking time, which means I’m later than I expected.  (To be honest, and not to blame the boy for everything, I also am not up to expected strength and after what should be a mild amount of work, fall in these death-sleeps. ) But I’m not sick anymore, and the kid is recovering, and writing is actually going well, even if the book has taken some very odd turns, which I refuse to talk about.  You’ll see.

Anyway, as always when I’m deep in writing, I can’t stand to read anything new and therefore I read an awful lot of old stuff or stuff I’ve read a million times before.  This is convenient, because I leave books scattered all over, and can pick one up and randomly read three pages, without having to read the whole book at a sitting.  Right now, it’s Agatha Christie.

While cooking dinner yesterday, I was re-re-re-reading They Do It With Mirrors.

If you haven’t read the book, you should, because if you do read it, you’ll see why so many “liberals” hate Christie.  They do it with mirrors, by its very premise and several, matter of fact, old-grandmotherly, but completely accurate insights, pokes a thumb in the eye of a lot of the left’s premises.  It starts by telling us there are fashions in philanthropy and how, after World War II the whole fashion in philanthropy was the reforming of criminals, particularly young criminals.

Later on in the novel, Miss Marple delivers herself of a curious, open observation on the insanity of devoting vast resources to this endeavor.

Without giving away too much of the setup, the whole novel takes place in an old mansion which has been converted into a sort of institute to help young men who have had run ins with the law.  The place is full of psychologists, psychiatrists and educators.  It is also, in the way of the best Christie novels, full of an odd extended family, the result of the main female character’s (Miss Marple’s old friend Carrie Louise) four marriages.

One of the members of the family is a granddaughter, half Italian and temperamental (one of the delights of reading Christie is seeing how the British, mid-century, viewed several other people in the rest of Europe, and how different that is from the way I grew up viewing them as Portuguese.  The way British view Italians is more like the way Portuguese view Brazilians: uncontrolled, sexy, fiery.)  She has spent WWII in the states, and there married an American.  Now she and her American husband are living in this crazy mansion-institute, where the family is devoted to rehabilitating criminal juveniles.

Someone – I don’t remember who – tells Miss Marple that the young American can’t understand what they’re doing, because Americans worship success and can-do attitude.

Miss Marple then delivers herself of a little peroration about “Whether we worship failure” and goes on to note that while rehabilitating young criminals is in fact – probably – a noble cause, shouldn’t some resources be given to the people who do in fact make good?  She mentions men and women who come from bad backgrounds, overcome everything to live decent lives, and yet no one is rushing to give them an education or help them find work.  Or even, young men and women of good families, who didn’t do anything wrong, and who would love a little help and never get it, because all the help is going to those who have failed and fallen.

I just know someone in comments is going to bring in the parable of the prodigal son, and the whole thing about there being more rejoicing in heaven for a lost sheep recovered than for a hundred righteous ones.  We’ll get to that.  For now, let’s simply contemplate the fact, that nowadays America resembles more the England Christie was letting Miss Marple unload on “we are in love with failure.”

Part of this, as Beth noted in the comments yesterday, is that all of us have, at some point, experienced being an underdog.  But this is only a partial explanation.  Most of us have also experience doing everything right and only needing a little – a very little help – to get to our goals… and not getting it.  Because we were battling, we were on our own, and therefore it was believed we didn’t need help.

It is one thing when – in my opinion – resources are misallocated to make profoundly handicapped children SEEM to perform normally (don’t throw things at me, okay?  Mainstreaming has its pros, as it has its cons, and it varies with the degree of the handicap.  However, one of my best friends when the kids were in elementary school was the grandmother (and guardian) of a profoundly handicapped young man.  The system was failing her kid as badly as it was failing mine – the difference being it was spending a fortune to fail him.  They had two aids who went with him through the entire day and did the work for him.  No, I know that’s not what is supposed to happen, but the young man had an IQ of 48.  It might have been possible to teach him basic literacy – I really don’t know.  I know a profoundly handicapped girl in my elementary left 4^th grade literate and numerate – but not at the same pace as the other kids, not in the same classes, and not with the same materials.  Since the school insisted on “mainstreaming” him, it took two aids: One to keep him quiet and one to do the actual work he was supposed to do.  In third grade my friend got him transferred to a school where, instead, he had an “aid” or instructor, but she was TEACHING him, at his own pace.) while no resources are available for “above average” children because “they already have an advantage.”

There are several debatables in the case of children, giftedness and advantages, and we could argue all of them forever.

But it is something completely different when there is a degree of volition involved in the failure: when the people for whom resources are being diverted, for whom every door is being open, for whom every effort must be made are those who have, to use a Victorian phrase, blotted their copybook pretty badly. People who have chosen to do that which they knew to be wrong.  People who have demonstrated, at the very least, an ability to squander resources and opportunities.

And yet, it is these people we are taught to help.

We have turned the Victorian morality on its head.  Now the “deserving poor” are those who have been brought to their straits by addiction, by uncontrolled sexual behavior, by their own choice – in the end.  Yes, I know that a lot of the homeless on our streets are untreated mental patients, and that is our shame and our failure as a culture.  Yes, it is true a lot of those treat their problems with addictive substances.  But in the end, if you suggest giving them help conditional to their being treated, the same people who say we must help them will howl and say that no, help should be unconditional and only in the form of handouts – so that you are subsidizing both the addictions and the mental illness.

I think the mechanism that has brought us here is double.  Part of it is a genuine reluctance to “judge” – which can be in some ways admirable.  Most of us who have any empathy at all know that “there for the grace of G-d” and to an extent that’s a good thing.  We can see the factors that led someone astray: untreated mental illness, addition, horrible family background.  We can see, as it were, the whole person through the broken one.

This is admirable… to an extent.  And I’m not saying no efforts should be made to save the ones who fall and who genuinely want to be helped up again.

But the other mechanism is people’s wish to feel good.  If you’re doing good to feel good about yourself, then the more undeserving the subject, the better you feel about yourself.  Look, how little they did to deserve this.  Why, hot d*mn anyone else would demand at least a gesture on the part of the recipient of charity, some show that he’s ready to turn his life around, but not you.  Oh, no.  You’re so good that you will give all to the least deserving.  Now, that’s some treasure in heaven you’re accumulating, right?

Look, I’ll be entirely blunt.  If you are a celebrity with more money than brains and you want to squander your money that way, it’s your business.  It’s stupid, but it gets you what you feel you need: more reasons to admire yourself.  This type of charity might, in the end, be just another way to reinforce your narcissism.  And that’s fine.

In my charity I am almost painfully careful to make sure I “first do no harm” – but that’s something else, it’s my choice and besides, I don’t have millions to squander, so it makes no difference.

BUT – and this is a very important but – when it becomes a matter of public policy, THEN as a taxpayer  I’m being forced to support failure over success; I’m being forced to reward dysfunction over trying.  I’m being forced in fact to subsidize people doing wrong on purpose, in order to be “deserving poor” under the new rules.

And when an entire culture becomes this way, to the point I’ve had to explain to more than one beginning writer that no, just having a character abused doesn’t make that character VIRTUOUS, on the contrary, most people who are abused for no reason get pretty upset and can act out; when I have to explain that if they want to show the character is great and worth it, they have to show more than his being pummeled by fate (even Harry Potter has his magic.  And talks to snakes) we are on very dangerous and shaky ground.

The prodigal son repented and came back – and didn’t expect anything, but to be allowed to be a workman on his father’s farm (and did not get another share of the inheritance he’d squandered) and there might be rejoicing in heaven for a sinner who repents, but there is no rejoicing in heaven for a shepherd who spends his time feeding the one sheep who keeps running away, even while the other sheep get eaten by wolves.

And besides, those are sacred matters.  The parables are about one’s relationship with G-d, who – presumably – can see into human hearts.

We humans, on the other hand, can only look into records.

And while the theory that failures always happen because someone had factors leading to it; and the theory that criminals are more sinned against than sinning, are very reassuring – they lead us to believe our own failures are excusable – reality tends not to be as pliable.

All of us if we think for ten minutes can name friends who had EVERYTHING against them and yet made good.  All of us, if we think for ten minutes, can name friends who had every advantage and yet made nothing of them.

To say that poverty leads to crime is to insult every poor person in the world.  Our prisons are full of people who grew up with every material comfort, even if they might have been theoretically “underprivileged” (And how is that for a mealy mouthed term?  Is there a “right” amount of privileged?  And who decides?  Doesn’t it assume that wealth is privilege, handed to people by some authority and responding to some measurement, rather than something they earn themselves?)

So, where does this nonsense come from?  Other than bureaucrats wanting to feel really virtuous with taxpayers’ money?  And us having evolved a centralized system that gives them a lot of money to feel powerful with?

Well, it comes from bureaucrats wanting to feel really virtuous with taxpayers’ money.  Also from the fact that the … shall we say less deserving sectors of society know very well how to work that need for bureaucrats to feel powerful.  They’re much better at this than the poor but honest (or the rich but honest.  Or the middle class but honest.)  After all, pretending to be something or other is better than working.

Then there is the fact that if you give money to deserving poor, if you give them chances and a legup, they will make something of themselves, and they will no longer need the great and generous bureaucrat.

It comes from charity from a centralized source and not at the local level, where people are known and where it is known whether the money handed on is going to be squandered on drink or worse, instead of on baby formula.

How did we get here – to where it is considered a legitimate function of the federal government, or even the state government to determine who should get help?  And how much help they should get?

No human society that has any resources at all has ever chosen to let their weak drop through the cracks completely (no, look, even hominid bands were shown to care for the sick and weak.) It is true that families, villages, even states, can decide someone isn’t worthy of help for stupid reasons.  We’re all humans.  We all have blind spots.

But moving it one level above doesn’t get rid of the biases, or the blind spots.  All it does is make it bigger and less controllable.  In the end, faceless charity dispensed by people who don’t know the object of their kindness always turns into the same sort of charity performed by celebrities on the faceless “undeserving.”

The more underserving they are, the greater and more glorious the donor can feel.  And the state worker can think he’s overcoming local prejudice, and federal do-gooders assume only they can see impartially, like G-d.  They will help these supposed “undeserving” and show the greatness of their mercy.

But they are not G-d.  They are fallible humans, using all the resources of society to purchase failure in order to make themselves feel better.  Of course what you purchase, you get more of.

That which you ignore and punish — striving, behaving well, trying to be good — you get less of.

It’s a suicidal hobby for a civilization.

*I fell in love with reading history when I swiped my brother’s high school textbooks when I was five or six.  But by the time I was in college and reading for my American Culture class, I found myself giggling insanely at how stupid the book — and the stuff we had to read — was.  It was one vast slough of despond with group after group being exploited, dehumanized, etc.  The only way to be well thought of was to lose a war or be exterminated.  Southerners went from being villains to being heroes once they lost the civil war, for instance, to being villains again in the present day.  One couldn’t follow the thing with rationality — at all.  TX Red just explained why.  As with the slough of despond on “literary science fiction” shelves the answer is “because the elites are so childish they think depression makes them sound adult.” — Okay, so TX didn’t say that.  She says far more interesting stuff and better than I can.  We must prevail upon her to guest more often! — Sarah *

 

Human Wave History or Where have all the Stories Gone?

by TX Red

Hi. My name is Red, and I’m a historian. Today’s episode of “As the Pages Turn” is about the Human Wave approach to history.

 

Have you ever looked over the shelves of history books at your local bookstore and scratched you head, wondering why so many older works are still in print, while the most recent award winners vanish within weeks, if they are ever stocked at all? Why is it that a small collection of local stories sells steadily at the county history museum, but the Great Dr. So-and-so’s scholarly monograph about class, gender, and labor relations between Irish and Mexican workers on the local railroad gathers dust?  It’s because people want to read Human Wave history but the majority of current academic historians do not write it.

Barbara Tuchman, Will and Ariel Durant, William McNeil, Bruce Catton, Shelby Foote, V. G. Childe, Paul De Kruif, all wrote Human Wave history. David H. Fischer, David McCullough, Anne Applebaum, and Steven Ozment still write Human Wave, even if the Academic Ones sniff at some, if not all, of their work. Which leads to the questions 1) just what is Human Wave history and 2) what the heck happened in the Ivory Tower?

I’ll answer the questions in reverse order. By the late 19^th century in England and the United States, a loose consensus later called “the Whig School” of history had emerged as the dominant voice of the academic history field, so to speak. The Whig School held that history was a chronicle of improving life, more civil rights, economic prosperity, and that things were getting better and better, despite a few setbacks (the Thirty Years’ War, the Dark Ages). Then along came the First World War.

The Whig School staggered, but it was not until the 1950s and 1960s that academic history dove head first into the grey goo. Progressives, who had begun moving into the universities in the 1920s, became the leading voices in historical thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. The Marxist approach to history became more and more common and Marxist-derived philosophies from France and Germany and Italy became popular, “cutting-edge,” and trendy. Academia embraced theories that held that all of humanity’s past is nothing more than a struggle for power among groups, with Europeans being the worst oppressors.

At the same time, new subfields of history gained acceptance. Social history, looking at customs and cultures, became stronger in the 1940s and 1950s. Computers made population studies and statistical history (“Cliometrics”) possible. In the 1970s, the environmental movement encouraged the development of environmental history. Because young scholars had to either do original work in their field, or refute earlier work, they gravitated towards the new sub-fields. Those changes, plus the 1960s foments in the US and Europe, produced the modern Slough of Despond that is much of academic, post-modern history. At its worst, everyone is either a victim or an oppressor, the world is going to heck in a hand basket, and it’s all the fault of the DWHtEMs.* Instead of political and diplomatic history, the best fields to focus on are “Area Studies” (Women’s Studies, Subaltern Studies, Chicana/o Studies, LGBT or Queer Studies, world without end, amen) or the hybrid interdisciplinary studies. If you ever want to cure a chipper mood, go into a university bookstore and look at the books required for area studies classes. Then cruise over and glance at the books written by the university’s faculty, or browse the “new books” shelves at the college library or in the university press catalogue.

However, Human Wave history survived, in large part outside of academia’s inner circle. Barbara Tuchman never went to graduate school or taught at a university and her works are still read, referred to, and in print. It is a rare professor of US or European history who does not own a set of the Durant’s works, or at least know where he/she/it can find a copy. Academics still look askance at Shelby Foote, even though more people learned about the US Civil War from his books than from any of the thousands of monographs written about the topic. Stanley Vestal was an English professor who wrote history on the side and taught his students how to make money, for Pete’s sake! David McCullough is a popularizer, but he’s worked with Ken Burns so he usually gets a pass.

 

So, what is Human Wave history? In this historian’s view, Human Wave history is history that tells the stories of the past without dragging the reader into despair. A Human Wave historian uses humor, good writing, and a common-sense view of the world to show the reader what happened, then steps out of the way.

Human Wave does not make the past pretty, but it does show how people who got knocked down found ways to get back up. For example, a new book came out last fall about life in Eastern Europe between 1944-1954. The author points out that people found ways to cope with the imposition of Stalinism, carving out pockets of sanity, falling in love, having children, and being ready to regain their freedom when opportunity presented itself. The light kept burning despite WWII and Stalinism, and the historian shows the reader that. The author also did a lot of hard work in archives and conducting interviews, but she writes so well that you don’t see the effort.

Human Wave history can be adventure stories, even if the adventures do not always end well. Several new books about Robert Falcon Scott have recently hit the shelves. Not a happy tale, but still an inspiring one if told honestly. Norman Cantor’s and William H. McNeill’s books about the Black Death, another cheerful topic, draw the reader into the time and show how people endured, then clawed their way towards greater independence and prosperity.

Human Wave does not bore. If you are like me, you’ve tried reading about what sounded like a fascinating topic, only to doze off because the writing style sucked the life out of the past. Some historians maintain that lively writing trivializes the topic, to the extent that a major international university press is infamous for its dull works. No! There’s no excuse for writing grey, gooey history, or science, any more than there is for writing grey, gooey fiction. People can make even water law interesting to read about— not page-turner thrilling, but interesting enough to finish the book. Paul De Kruif’s The Microbe Hunters turned epidemiology and microbiology into a gripping tale for budding scientists.

Human Wave does not induce guilt for being human. Environmental history, my specialty, runs the risk of turning into “humans destroyed paradise” or “Western capitalism poisoned the water, made the soil blow away, and has doomed the planet. Woe, woe.” Human Wave history reminds us that no group of humans ever “lived in harmony with Nature.” What was done in ignorance can sometimes be reversed, or at least ameliorated, through knowledge once someone says, “oops. OK, what can we do to fix/undo/learn from this?”

Human Wave history does not blame the world’s ills on any one group. For example, yes, the Chinese invented a number of things before the West did. The Chinese, for their own reasons, did not take those things and run with them. This is not the fault of the West, nor is it an example of Western cultural imperialism.

Human Wave history does not preach and neither do Human Wave historians. They lets the story tell itself, with some interpretation where appropriate, but not at the expense of the story. Try reading Roll, Jordon, Roll: The World the Slaves Made and then guessing the author’s politics (no fair peeking). You can’t. Nor can you tell what color, sex, sexual preference, favorite food, or religion (if any) the author had. It’s just a Human Wave story.

So, how do you find Human Wave history? You might look at some of the authors listed above. Find out what is still in print and selling. Ask your librarian what she or he recommends. Find an Odd who reads history for fun and see what they like (or don’t like) and why. Skim the reviews on Amazon, GoodReads, and other sites. What have you got to loose?

 

*Dead White Heterosexual European Males.

 

 

*When I met Kate Paulk online — eight?  Ten? years ago, the last thing she (or I) could imagine her doing was writing humor.  Kate’s mind tends to take a turn for the dark, then go darker, which is somewhat weird because she has no interest whatsoever in writing horror.  She is, however, a true gateway writer — in fact, she came up with the term — one of those people for whom the stories arrive from some distant shore of the subconscious mind, and MUST be written.  So, some years ago, after she’d been exposed to enough cons, she sent me these (three?) chapters and asked me what I thought of it.  I put it off a little because I wasn’t in the mood for dark and gore, but then I read it, and was shocked.  Oh, there’s dark and gore.  I mean, the main character is a vampire for crying out loud.  But I found myself laughing too, because well…  Well…  It’s funny.  [And then you feel a little guilty at laughing.]  The novel poured out of her and my only contribution was a) pointing out to her the police would be involved unless there was a reason not to be — like magic or something that turned them away — and that she couldn’t have famous people as themselves.  She could have friends thinly disguised, with our permission — Dave Freer and I are rather obvious — but everyone else had to be a composite of at least three people UNLESS the depiction was wildly complementary.  So even though the novels often involve real incidents overheard/seen at cons, you can’t “decode” them like a roman a clef, because each person is three or four people.  The weird thing is how often some incident she described that HADN’t happened, happens afterwards, or someone not written into the books takes on the characteristics of one of the characters.  As she puts it “that universe leaks.”  Anyway, sometime ago she sent me this post about how she manages to make the ick funny, and since I’m working on Noah’s Boy (Might take an extra day.  Looking after a post-operative male takes TIME — dang creatures try not to ask for help and hurt themselves.) I thought this was a good day to put it up.  Our very own TXRed sent me a post which will go up tomorrow about Human Wave History, and then I have about five posts I have to write or burst…  But for now, enjoy Kate, and I go back to Noah’s Boy.  Kyrie just got kidnapped and I have NO idea where she is.  Grrrr.  Argh.*

Laughing Through the Icky Bits — by Kate Paulk

As an author I find one of the most challenging things I have to do (aside from marketing, but that’s because I suck at it) is to describe something truly horrifying in a way that won’t send my readers running for the bathroom or have them turning a delicate shade of green and putting the book down. I want them to KEEP reading, after all.

 

My preferred tool, as those who have read ConVent and ConSensual will know, is to use humor. The humor offsets the horrible just enough that the full gross impact never QUITE happens, at least until the reader has finished the book and stops to think about some of the things I described. That’s the intention, at any rate.

 

It’s not the easiest technique (the easiest is called “cheating” and involves not describing anything at all, just having the characters react), but it tends to be worth the effort. Besides, I can’t stop myself from going dark, but I can use a lighter tone to describe the horrible so I don’t end up with second-rate horror.

 

My first method is to use the POV character’s voice – which is one of the reasons Jim in the con vampire books is such a delight to work with. He’s sour, cynical, and practically defines snark. When he’s in a good mood. He’s also seen just about everything, so he’s not going to freak when he’s confronted by the aftermath of a gruesome sacrificial ritual.

 

Then I add in the very human tendency to notice and get distracted by all sorts of odd details. In reality these are usually irrelevant – the way that severed finger looks like an undersized raw ox-tail has nothing to do with the essentials of making sure the owner of said finger isn’t bleeding, packing the finger in ice so it can be reattached if you can get it and its owner to a hospital in time, and of course getting the owner and finger to the nearest hospital (in this case that endeavour didn’t result in reattached extremities – it was only a quarter inch or so of finger that got lopped and the 5-some hour wait in extreme heat for the Flying Doctor service to get to the camp plus flight time pretty much eliminated any viability for the operation anyway). In fiction of course, they can be relevant and used to offset the horror of whatever is being discussed.

 

That’s more or less how the Hello, Kitty bondage sacrifice scene in ConVent plays out. I gave enough detail for an imaginative reader to picture the scene, then had the Bosting spawn arguing that it couldn’t be real because it didn’t look enough like the video games, and Ricky Bosting complaining about things that shouldn’t fit where they obviously had been fitted (further detail omitted to spare the sensitive – if you want to read it you’ll need to buy the book). Rather than dwell on the extremely gruesome nature of the sacrifice, I focused on the characters doing what normal people faced with something horrific will do – they’ll blank the worst of it and focus on some small detail that avoids the worst implications.

 

I did something similar in ConSensual with one of the bodies, complete with a seriously bad joke ripped (I think) from one of the Achmed the Dead Terrorist routines (“They found him there, and there, and there…”). In that one, the character who cracks the joke is deliberately using it as a way to avoid freaking out. The fact that this character is a werewolf and presumably accustomed to gore makes the impact stronger.

 

When I read Pratchett, I see him using similar techniques (although he does a much better job than I do – but he’s not writing this post. I am. Nyah nyah) to soften the darkest edges of his stories and let the humor carry the point. Someone who laughs, even if it’s a laughing, “Oh, yuck!” is going to be more favorable towards you than someone who doesn’t. And a point that slides in ever so gently while you’re laughing your anatomy off is one that you didn’t see coming and you might actually get, where if it’s being belabored with a sledge, you’re going to try to avoid it.

 

(Yes! Go me. I’ll now have people reading ConVent and ConSensual trying to figure out what I’m trying to sell you.)

 

Sarah’s done this as well in her DarkShip books and the mysteries she’s written as Elise Hyatt, so go buy those as well and study them. It’s for a good cause.

*As everyone knows I don’t write aliens.  Okay, I’m not saying I never will, because the minute I do that, an entire alien civilization will start dancing in chorus line across my mind, and then I’ll have to write it.  But so far I’ve been too intensely interested by humans to write aliens.  Also, my concept of alien is really alien — things we can’t GET and therefore remain completely outside our perception or are perceived as random forces.  Alternately they’re things like in Puppet Masters, where they might be sentient or not, but the meeting is still disastrous.  That’s a personal thing.  Maybe I was bitten by an alien as a child. In the absence of my going on and on about aliens, Mike Weatherford has been thinking about them on his own, and he very kindly offered to do a post for me, while I’m pushing to finish Noah’s Boy.  (So if I’m relatively quiet in comments, I’m not dead, I’m writing.  The two conditions are eerily similar, actually.  The moving fingers on the keyboard are all that stops my husband holding a mirror to my lips, sometimes.)  Mike writes science fiction.  You should maybe check his work.  (Ignore James Michael Weatherford, he’s clearly an impostor trying to steal Mike’s thunder.)  It’s reasonably priced.  REALLY reasonably priced which means sometime soon I need to meet Mike and talk sternly at him.  He blogs at Old Patriot’s Blog.*

 

Science fiction is the fiction of the future — almost exclusively the future of humanity.  It almost always shows descendants of today’s human population in futuristic settings, doing things that few even consider possible today.  Much of it shows ONLY humans.  A few stories include non-humans, ranging from semi-intelligent to super-intelligent aliens, allied with, indifferent to, or in direct conflict with humanity.  Sometimes aliens are the bad guys, sometimes the good guys, and frequently mostly for scenery or a plot device.

 

How realistic are these depictions?  We’ll never know if/until we meet them.  The one thing that’s certain, however, is that IF you’re writing Science Fiction, and you use alien creatures in your work, how realistic are your characters to your readers?

 

Past depiction of aliens run from human or almost-human to so bizarre they’re almost impossible to relate to.  Some of them work, some of them don’t.  Let’s look at what a realistic alien needs to possess in order to “work” — to appear realistic to readers.

 

One of the major considerations for creating aliens is to construct a realistic social structure.  Individuals, regardless of the type of creature you create, cannot extend beyond its own ability, and no individual can do everything it takes to build civilizations.  To expand beyond the individual requires a social structure, whether it’s the family, tribe, nation-state, planet, or greater.  The more complex the alien civilization, the more complex the social structure needs to be.  This doesn’t mean you have to create that social structure in your book, but you MUST create it in your mind, and remember it when writing your words.  This is THE major blunder writers make when working with aliens.

 

Social structures need advances in individual capability to develop and mature.  That means language, probably art, and definitely science.  It doesn’t mean it has to be anything LIKE human language, art, and science, but that the alien society has developed something similar.

 

No alien is going to get beyond the early hunter/gatherer stage without the ability to create and use tools.  While a multiple-armed tentacled creature could develop the ability to use tools, its society would be definitely more constrained than something like humans with opposable thumbs (it takes a tremendously greater amount of mental activity to control twelve limbs than it does to control two limbs, two hands, and ten fingers.  Intelligence isn’t likely to expand beyond basic tool usage, because too much brain activity is being concentrated in manipulating appendages — or otherwise brains are so huge they don’t fit in confined spaces).

 

Our alien has to have sense organs in order to perceive its environment.  Another strike against our tentacled creature above would be the probable necessity of having a unique sense organ for each of its manipulative appendages.  Coordinating that much information would again require such a huge amount of brain space that there would be little room left for intellectual pursuits.

 

That doesn’t necessarily mean that our alien’s sense organs need to be the same ones we use.  There may be an alternative to the five senses we employ (sight, touch, hearing, taste, etc.).  There may be a telepathic sense that provides all the external evaluation sensors we employ, or an all-inclusive sense of touch that lets the individual interact with its world.  It isn’t as important what they are as that they exist, and have understandable parameters that establish what they can — and cannot — rely upon their sensors to provide.

 

Those sensors also have to relate directly to the world where they developed.  For instance, let’s say that our aliens developed on the planet around a red dwarf.  Red dwarfs don’t give off enough light for the human eye to function well.  The alien’s eye would have to compensate for that dimness in some way — by a better vision transfer means than our rods and cones, of larger eyes/vision organs, or by the ability to significantly manipulate the vision organ to provide a greater range of operating, such as down into extremely low frequencies.  At the same time, a creature that has developed around an F-type primary needs the ability to restrict the amount of light that enters the sense organ, or they’ll end up with eyestrain.

 

We need to back up just a minute, and inject a little hard science.  When we talk of red dwarfs and F-type stars, we’re talking about stars of different brightness — and also, of different evolutionary development rates.  The best source of information for this is the Hertzsprung-Russell (Hertzberg-Russell) diagram (do a Google search).  ANYONE who wants to write science fiction and wants to get out of the Earth’s solar system should know this information implicitly.

 

The Hertzsprung-Russell diagram plots stars according to their size/surface temperature.  There are three basic groups of stars:  the MAIN SEQUENCE, the WHITE DWARFS, and the GIANTS.  The main sequence stars are divided into CLASSES based on their surface temperature, from the hottest to the coolest.  These solar classes are O, B, A, F, G, K, and M, with a half-dozen other classes to classify the non-main-sequence stars.  An easy way to remember this is the mnemonic “Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me.”  Stellar main sequence evolution also relates to size/surface temperature, with the largest stars being the shortest-lived, while the coolest stars live the longest.  This is because of the star’s energy budget:  an O-class star must burn massively more hydrogen than an F-class star, and an F-class star burns significantly more hydrogen than an M-class dwarf.

 

All of this has meaning for your alien civilization.  An O-class super-giant would never exist long enough for a civilization to form before exploding into a supernova, destroying any planets that might exist around it, and any developing civilization that might have existed.  On the other hand, an M-class dwarf would probably not provide enough energy for something akin to plants to develop, much less a civilized society.

 

This doesn’t mean that M-class dwarfs don’t have planets — we’ve already discovered some that do.  They just aren’t a very good choice to find an advanced civilization.  The best, most logical choice would be around the suns that can provide enough energy for a civilization to come into existance, enough longevity for the long, slow evolutionary process to take place, and sufficient energy to keep the process moving.  This pretty much leaves with F-, G-, and K-class stars.  Luckily for us, these groups make up the second-largest number of stars in our galaxy (and any other, for that matter), behind M-class dwarfs.

 

All of this leads us to our next biggest area of consideration:  the environment in which your civilization develops.  That depends on two things:  the output of the source of energy, and the distance from that source where your planets are located — the so-called “inhabitable zone”.

 

What this actually defines is the zone where water can exist as a solid, liquid, and gas, at least during part of its stellar cycle.  This more or less defines the “inhabitable zone” for humans and aliens similar to them.  That DOESN’T mean that some weird form of life can’t exist in other areas, such as the clouds of Jupiter-type planets, the surface of Titan and similar environments, or other areas, just that it’s less likely.  The energy budget for such creatures would be so small their movements would have to be measured over decades, or the source of energy would have to come from other sources, such as gravitational forces that heat Jupiter’s upper atmosphere to temperatures similar to those found from central Europe to the tropics  (Robert L. Forward’s novel “Saturn Rukh” handles this very well, and very intelligibly).

 

So, our alien has to fit his environment, which has to fit his world, which has to fit his sun.  That means his development through stages to intelligence, then up the ladder to where he can at least contemplate life elsewhere, to where he can physically search for that life among the different stars.

 

One other thing needs to be discussed, then I’ll shut up:  sex.  How do you handle alien sex?  You cannot ignore it — just as it’s a main driver of human development, it will most likely be a main driver of alien development.  The drive to reproduce is what keeps the numbers climbing, and civilization being forced to come up with more and more ways to accommodate the higher numbers.  Civilizations that don’t have a population growth don’t have any other kind of growth, and soon die.

 

Alien sex can be anything from asexual (very unlikely, but possible, especially on a planet with surface conditions similar to Titan) to requiring up to a dozen individuals to succeed (very possible, especially on a planet around a very active sun, where multiple copies of the genetic record are needed to keep mutations from destroying the society).  Sex, like the other characteristics of your alien, are shaped by its environment, not our wishful thinking.

 

The following is just a personal evaluation of aliens, and only shows how I have developed and depicted the aliens I have used in my stories.

 

I believe that there are far more planets in our galaxy than most scientists are willing to admit.  I also think that much of the identification of large, close-in gas giants is actually the detection of multiple planets, instead of one.  I can’t see gas giants being viable around F-type and hotter suns.  The solar wind would strip any atmosphere they may have from them, leaving a rocky core which would be significantly smaller than what’s being measured.

 

I also believe life is far more pernicious than most people think.  Life is found everywhere on the planet Earth that it can exist, from the permanent snow line to the deepest depths of the oceans.  I would expect life to develop wherever there was the possibility for it, which would include an energy budget to allow it to exist, the raw materials for that type of life, and the time for it to have evolved.  (I also believe that when God created life, He created the OPPORTUNITY for life to develop – a viable energy budget, the raw materials, and a gentle nudge based upon the laws that govern the universe [created by God, so they’re God’s Laws].

 

With life, Intelligence should also have developed.  That does NOT mean it’s “our” kind of intelligence, or even something we can understand — just that intelligence will develop anywhere there’s the possibility for it.  All in all, I think we have a lot of friends – and enemies – awaiting us once we learn how to get to them.