According To Hoyt

As writers, particularly writers dealing in the shady side of “literature” where we can employ magic or magical “future science” we are told over and over and over “there must be a price” and “there must be a cost.”

It is amazing to me, now and always, how many of us forget that in real life.  And how many of us forget it in books, too, when we’re not dealing with magic or magical future science.

I made a post thanking those who served for Memorial Day.  And of course, right on cue, like something rehearsed – which it is, since it’s the response drilled into most of us who attended any school system in Europe, the US or possibly most of the world – someone came in to say that war doesn’t secure peace.

I will confess this is true.  No war, as yet, has managed to secure ever lasting peace.  Fortunately or unfortunately, though, I live in the real world and I study real history.  Oh, yeah, also I’m human and I live among humans and know (and rather like) the breed.  The only way to secure lasting peace is to kill all of humanity.  We managed to avoid this during the cold war, and I hope will continue to avoid it in these our fraught times.

But we’ve been taught Word War I was the war to end all wars.  We’ve been taught it didn’t work and therefore all war is futile, all war should be avoided and also that because we can’t secure lasting peace from the smallest kindergarten to the largest nation state, we are a worthless species and should go voluntarily extinct and leave the Earth to the peaceful species who don’t kill each other, don’t kill their own members and don’t engage in cannibalism.

There might be a species or two that follow those rules.  Possibly leaf molds.  But it’s entirely possible we ONLY think that because we don’t know enough about leaf molds.  Desmond Morris made a lot of sales out of his thesis that only humans were “the killer ape” and that, in fact, that was our edge over other primates, let alone all other animals.  Turns out the thesis was beautiful, cogent, and what people wanted to hear.  (Waggles hand.)  It was also completely and thoroughly wrong.

War – and fighting – does not (and won’t if we’re lucky) bring about eternal peace.  But it does, for a time, secure peace in a part of the world, or a corner of kindergarten.  Do the right people always win?  Oh, please.  SOMEONE wins, and that is usually enough for peace to last a little while, and for humans to go about lawful occasions and improve their lot.  One thing is sure, though, if your tribe won’t fight; if your tribe won’t stand its ground; if your tribe won’t defend itself, you will not last.  It doesn’t take two sides to engage in a war, just as it doesn’t take two sides to get in a fight in kindergarten.  If you think that it’s because you’re delusional kindergarten teachers drilled it into you.  And they were wrong.  A war is still a war if it’s a massacre and one side kills the other.  And a fight is still a fight if one of the kids is beating the other or breaking the other’s stuff.  It’s still not peace.

Outside of sitcoms, certain – largely unbelievable – books and the more tendencious type of movies, the word for “pacifist” is “dead” and the word for “peaceful” is “leaves no descendants” and no one, no one EVER managed to secure their side by bathing the enemy in loving kindness.  The first person to mention Gandhi in this context will get kicked around the block until they can’t sit for a week.  Gandhi engaged in psychological warfare, turning British morals and beliefs about themselves ON themselves.  If he’d tried to use that on any other enemy, or even on the British of a hundred years earlier, he’d have been a smear on the pavement.  This is exemplified by his belief that the Jews should have marched into the ovens to “deprive the Nazis of his victory.”  This shows either he was a dirty anti-Semite, or a fool, completely unaware of what made his strategy work or that it wasn’t so much he’d chosen to be peaceful but that the British Empire had chosen to go quietly into that good night.  Which is what happens when a civilization chooses “peace”

World War I might have been the last huzzah of Western aggression – or not – and it might have been largely a waste of time and young men.  Or not.  These things take place in response to mechanisms we, as mere individuals aren’t fully conscious of.  WWI was as much a response to changing technology and upheavals in culture as to territorial aggression.  We don’t know the truth about WWI.  We won’t for centuries, if then.

Meanwhile, even if you accept it was the “war of the defeated” and that there was nothing good come of it, taking from it the absolute pacifist vision made WWII far more lethal than it should have been and the “War never solved anything” has blood on their hands from the many flares up in the cold war.  The Soviet Union used your guilt and your vision of peace to do as they would.  And if you think that is good, then you have not ever studied what happened under Soviet rule.

See, the thing is, we are in the end mammals, not archangels.  We evolved to be aggressive – to be the most aggressive, to survive.  But – you say – must it always be that way?  Will things not get better?

Things have got better.  I always laugh at the idiots who think taking us back to rural times will make us nicer, or that “noble savages” are noble and peaceful.  While the Nation State has made possible the large-scale abattoirs in the valley of the Somme, higher civilization (defined as more prosperous and less tribal and land-dependent) translates into less war for each individual in their locale.   In small rural and tribal societies, war was pervasive and “distributed”.  War was what happened when boys from a village went courting a girl from another village.  War was what happened when a village’s gods wanted victims.  War was what happened when you wanted the crop the other village just brought it.  And while it might involve only half a dozen men on either side, war could devastate both villages – and did.  Peace was by far the exception.  

It took big bad sons of b– babies with large weapons and the ability to quiet most of these little conflicts (not all.  In insular societies, some still goes on.  It did when I was little.)  There is a reason Pax Romana is part of the vocabulary.  Romans didn’t achieve that peace with aqueducts, law or schools – though they had all those – but because they had bigger lances and a better organized army.

And that is because we are animals, not archangels.  Even good people – genuinely good people, with the best intentions – can convince themselves it would be best for everyone if only that wheat field weren’t in the hands of bad people, but in the hands of good people.  To be human is to be flawed. To be human is to be able to lie to yourself.  To be human is to crave power, even when you tell yourself that it’s not power but what’s best for everyone, and that you’re doing it for the hungry, and really, you’re the good guy.

Will there come a time when we study war no more?  I don’t know.  My religion requires me to believe so, but it will take a miracle, and miracles are the prerogative of the divine and nothing the human mind can understand.

Until then we’re stuck in this here world, where the choice is NEVER between death or chocolate chips.  The choice is always between the least of two evils.  And sometimes, yes, you have to fight for the least of two evils.

There is no perfect state and no perfect peace short of heaven.  We humans must always fight – and often die – for the best we can get.  Fools think this makes us a terrible species.  I think it makes us admirable and it makes those who give their lives for their tribe and their homeland admirable – and it makes even more admirable those who put their lives on the line for principle: for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Because if that miracle is ever to occur and make war really rare, I”m sure those principles will be at the bottom or it.

Thank you again to all who risk their lives and their peace that we might enjoy peace.  And those who think that peace can be bought with pretty words and no effort, think shame on yourselves.  Those who are kind to the cruel always, inevitably, are cruel to the kind.  Those who aren’t willing to defend the ones being attacked always end up with blood on their hands.  And those who think that fighting isn’t worth it because no peace is eternal have consigned themselves to the moral nursery, where it’s possible to purchase something for nothing.

And those who write about the world that way are propagating lies and worsening suffering.  If there’s ever a choice between death or chocolate chips, of course I’ll pick chocolate chips.  Unfortunately that choice has yet to happen even once in the history of the world.  But maybe you’ll get lucky.  Maybe tomorrow it will rain ice cream.  In the meantime, keep your weapons sharp and stop telling lies to the young.

When I was a little girl, my best friend’s father had a company that sold fishing lures.  If we had to go to his office – he worked from home and the lures were sold mail-order – for anything (usually a pen or a stapler or something for homework) I would walk around, fascinated staring at the lures and reading the descriptions.

The lures had names like grasshopper or fly or other stuff, but here’s the thing: they didn’t look a thing like grasshoppers of flies.  Instead, they often had violently colored tendrils protruding from oddly shaped plastic “bodies.”

And I used to think fish were really stupid, which of course, was true… And false.  Fish are perfectly fine in their environment, but they are not human-like, nor is their perception the same.

But this is not a post about the relative intelligence of fish and men – this is a post about how editing warps the mind and damages the taste (yes, there, I said it) and makes a person unfit for the very gatekeeping they do.  And how, ultimately, when they can’t figure out how to attract the readers, they turn it all into lures which are about as realistic and logical as fishing lures, but which attract the fish… er… readers, in a way, because they lock into hereditary pathways which were never meant to act that way.

Sarah, are you saying all editors are damaged?  Well, no.  Some editors are very careful to limit how much slush they read in a day or a month.  Some also filter that slush in various ways.  And editors of micro presses, particularly those working with indie, where the idea is not “read everything and filter it” but “take everything that’s good enough to sell, even if not my cup of tea.  So not ALL editors are damaged.  But a lot of them are.

Let’s start with what an editor was supposed to be, under the old model.  Here I’m going to use what I was told by at least four editors.  “We are the filter.  We receive all the raw, unfiltered stuff from writers and would be writers, and we filter it down to good stuff.”

Now, if you’re wondering what good stuff is, that was what the editors brought to the fray.  Their own taste and thei own view of what was “good.”  This was a narrow gate for stuff to pass through (hence the term gatekeeper) because making a book, or printing a story as part of an anthology was endeavor that took money.  Okay, never as much money per individual paperback as they told you – not unless they were promoting the book heavily – but a few thousand dollars anyway.  Besides a cover and editing, they had to produce a paper book which then had to be distributed, which implied paying the salary of the book reps, as well as transporting it to the stores, laying it down, taking it back if it didn’t sell.  Either the editor or the house the editor worked for had a strict budget and a number of books they could publish in a year.  This was usually a completely ridiculous number in comparison to what they had to read to select them.  These are not real numbers, but they are in the right vicinity: an editor might have to read a thousand books for each book they accepted.

Here’s the problem: I’ve done editing for short periods of time, and I can tell you after a while you go a little insane.  (I highly recommend the experience, because it will teach you what you need to do to make your writing stand out more than about anything else, including workshops and courses.  On the other hand, I don’t recommend doing it for more than a few months at a time, and here’s why.)  You go a little insane because even if you ARE a reader (and a lot of junior editors in NYC never were, but that’s something else) it changes the mechanics of how you read.  You’re not reading for pleasure, anymore, you’re reading for a job.

Now, ninety percent of the books you’re reading to reject and you find reasons to reject within the first page.  “Doesn’t grab me” is a reason, as is “three misspelled words.”

I’m a bit more soft hearted than that, and I remember being on the other end.  I also know – from mentoring – that some writers for reasons known only to their psychiatrists MUST write five to fifty (depending on the size of the story) pages of crap before the real beginning of the book.  And that THEY can’t see it’s crap.  So I usually tried to read at least that, depending on length, but I confess I rejected 90% of stories within that time.

The problem is in the other 10%.  The other 10% you’ll read to the end and find yourself baffled on what to do with them.  Mind you, if you were working for a traditional publisher, you can probably eliminate half of that, because they simply are NOT what your house publishes.  No matter how good a story about a baby elephant learning to balance on a ball, or how great the illustrations accompanying it, the chances of its getting published by Baen are probably zero… or very close to it.  And yes, people will submit crazy stuff like that.

But you’re still left with say 50 stories – 49 more than you need – that are perfectly functional, decent, and COULD be published by your house.  This is when – yes, I did it too – you start finding reasons to reject because you can.  The first and most obvious, which people even convince themselves is valid, is “this cr*p promotes evil opinions.” … Which wouldn’t even be a problem if the entire publishing industry hadn’t been concentrated in one region and limited to one rather echoey echo-chamber.  We all have stuff we consider evil – yes, even I – like, in my case, anything that recommends 2/3 of the population be killed so we can go back to being peaceful cowherders in an idyllic landscape will fall down “evil bullsh*tting lies” and get into that return envelope so fast it will leave burn marks.  Not that I don’t think people have the right to think – or even say – that, but there is no reason on Earth or beyond it that I should promote this under MY imprimatur.

That will allow you to get rid of maybe 10 stories, 20 if like me your triggers are the exact opposite (or close to) of those drummed into hopeful college students for years.  You still have nineteen.  You then start rejecting for what can only be called “bullsh*t reasons” One of the most obvious of those is “it’s too much like other stuff.”

The thing is that what triggers those alarms for an editor is not necessarily even what triggers that alarm for other people.  Why not?  Well, because they see a lot of stuff that – to put it bluntly – no one else ever sees.

Some of it might be obviously plagiarized from stuff that’s out, but a lot of it will be… ODD to extremely odd.  There is something to Pratchett’s idea that some ideas fall from the sky onto all receptive heads.  Some of them can be explained by a movie, an interesting science article, or current events.  And some just make you go “WHAT?”  Like, in my brief stint of editing in the early nineties, we got a FLOOD of stories about mailboxes that ate people.  it got to the point you opened the envelope and you went “ARGH.  Killer mailbox.”  At that same time, I was reading the major mags, and none of them published a cannibal mailbox story.  So…  Would people have liked a cannibal mailbox story?  Who knows?  I know we – editors – couldn’t take it anymore.

More commonly, though, what burns you out on ideas is that you’re seeing so much of them.  Look, this is the reason why high-volume readers like me tend to rotate our reading material among genres.  Truly, I can read regencies for three months, and then the very mention of Miss so and so and the Duke of– will send me screaming into the night.  The same with cozies and, to a smaller extent (because there’s a broad subgenre range) with science fiction.

But imagine you have to keep reading that subgenre.  Year after year.  day after day.  More misses and Dukes, endlessly.  You go a little insane.  You start looking for the “different.”  And if you live in an echo chamber and can’t be different on anything substantive without getting disinvited to all the RIGHT cocktail parties, you start looking for the different that’s REALLY different.  And you don’t realize it’s a different that will put off ninety percent of your readers.

Because here’s the thing about subgenres of popular fiction: when I’m in the mood for a regency, I don’t want an alien to come through halfway through the book and kill everyone, including the hopeful couple.  We want different but not crazy-different.  Yeah, if you can put a new twist on boy meets girl, yay.  But if your twist is that the boy is really a disguised girl, tread carefully.  Your average romance reader – and you average Sarah, too, for that matter – will go “ew” and fling the book across the room.  Not that we’re homophobic or don’t have Lesbian friends, but because frankly this is bait and switch on our romance reading.

This is complicated by another bit, which is where the editors give up on finding different enough and instead find “Agrees with me politically as much as possible.”  And because the editors live in an echo chamber, most of the stuff you get is SO BORING it makes your eyes glaze.  It’s the same stuff most of us got back in school in the SEVENTIES for crying out loud, and it is by way of being a catechism.  Blah, blah, humans bad for environment; blah blah, evil polluting corporation vs. glorious challenging worker; blah, blah young smarter and wiser than the old (minority of your choice might replace young); blah, blah, blah, woman refuses marriage to live un-oppressed… blah, blah, blah.  Paint eyes on my eyelids and I’ll sleep through reading these books.  How bad did that get?  Well, for a while there, before competition from indie introduced one MODICUM of sanity, EVERY regency romance heroine was a suffragette or a modern-day feminist in period clothing.  This included the maids, and, possibly, the female horses.  To make things worse, all of these are package in a way you feel the editor thinks he’s pushing something particularly daring and important and “speaking truth to power.”  Reviewers who suffer from something like this disease for similar reasons go trolling through books for reasons to approve or disapprove of them and often fixate on “agrees with me on something no one will dispute.”  For instance, the big reasons someone found to love Any Man So Daring was that it was against racism.  (Which no, was not what I was writing it for.)  This of course made it daring and different from all the books out there that promote racism, right?

Unfortunately, what ends up emerging from the combination of “I want something that validates my opinions and I want something very different – but it must sell” is stuff that no one in their sane mind would want to read.

Which is where we get lures.  Faced with falling circulations, publishing houses have moved more and more towards using one of the primal lures: sex.

Now, I like sex as much as the next person, and I’ll confess when I was very young I was curious about what people did behind closed doors.  It was, after all, among the “secrets of adulthood” I couldn’t wait to er… penetrate.

As an adult, though, reading about sex makes me yawn.  Unless the sex is integral to the plot (and very little is) I tend to skip those scenes (it makes some romances very short.)

I know however that I’m not in the majority in this.  I realized this back in the late eighties, when a colleague was devouring the clan of the cave bear books because they had explicit sex scenes.  She was particularly thrilled with his scene where the guy devotes attention to the main character’s breasts.  (Yes, when I read the book at her insistence, I read like three paragraphs, sighed and skipped it.  Sex is just NOT a spectator sport for me.)  

Throughout the years I’ve met many women like her.  They will read anything that has sex in it, particularly if they can have another excuse for reading it.  “I read it for the story” or “I read it for the character.”  It’s as thin and transparent as “I read playboy for the articles” is for guys, but it works, partly because guys want to believe that women are naturally pure.

Publishers, faced with burnout and the need to attract people to books that they were picking increasingly on “odder and odder” and “politically correct” factors, started putting more and more sex in EVERYTHING.  You can trace the decline of the popular appeal of editorial gate keeping in how much sex books started having.  By the time regencies included full pre-marital anal sex, you were will within “the only reasons people are buying this is for the sex scenes.”

Look, I don’t even have anything against pornography.  I’m a libertarian.  If people want to screw their neighbor’s daughters on the front lawn, I’m cool with that, provided the daughters are within age of consent, the lawn isn’t mine and they don’t scare the cats.  And maybe reading about it will keep them from making a nuisance of themselves and others.

BUT this is not the reason most of us read.  Just like the reason most fish snap at stuff is for food, not for hard bits of plastic with a hook concealed within.  BUT you can make the fish snap at the plastic, and you can make people read for the sex, even when nothing else in the story is interesting.

Which is how you end up with such interesting concepts as “YA erotica” – an idea that makes me throw up a little in my mouth – and which Dave demolishes here.  Or my rejection from a fantasy-romance house, because my book is not sufficiently “female-centric” since it has a strong male hero.  Or…

Beyond the reason that it gives young people a very odd idea of what’s important in life and/or relationships, the infusion of sex into everything allows some truly repulsive ideas (like that all men are evil) to fly under the radar.

BUT it is a direct result of what gatekeeping IS.  And a good reason to celebrate being rid of it.  Because while sex makes a good lure, in the end Man doesn’t live from funny bits of bright colored hard plastic alone.  Or, indeed, at all.

– and now I’m off to enjoy Memorial Day.  To everyone who served, thank you for your service which makes it possible for people like me to enjoy freedom and peace.  Have a good Memorial Day.

As the last round of graduation parties the younger kid is invited to wears down in fizzle and sputter –  like a sparkler that’s almost spit out all fire, but still flashes and makes a subdued, menacing bang as you get near to pick up its remains – I find myself returning again and again to the matter of career choice.

It doesn’t help that this being graduation season there are articles everywhere about careers, how to pick careers and how to set the course for “the rest of your life.”

It also doesn’t help that I never picked my career, or rather, that my career choice went spectacularly, imaginatively – not to say astoundingly – awry, or that the main guiding principle leading me to pick what I picked makes me giggle now.  Of course, I am, to begin with, odd, and just like they say hard cases make bad law, so do strange people make bad patterns.

Still, I find myself increasingly discomfited with the way we’re advising people to pick careers, and all the more bothered by the fact that I don’t have any advice I can give people.  Not that it’s useful in my kids’ case.  The older boy wanted to be a doctor by the time he was ten, and, yes, has an almost as strong, backup pick if he doesn’t make it into med school.  The younger boy wants to build stuff that will go out to space and will be starting aerospace engineering this fall.  In both their cases, there is a clear interest, no secondary “pulling” interest, and the only issue is how to get to doing what they want to do for a living.  (Due to our rather stick in mud rules for training doctors – only partially tongue in cheek, though my concerns are not fit for this blog nor short enough to condense into it, and besides, they relate more to the doctors I’ve dealt with in recent years than to Robert’s future – Robert has only one path.  Marshall otoh seriously considered not getting a degree and just trying to find work in engineering, then working up from there.  Given who he is and what he wants to do, he finally decided on the degree, just before I pulled off all my hair at his blowing several application deadlines.)

However, for kids who need the advice, things must be puzzling.  At this point I’ve heard – on their behalf – the following advice: Don’t pick a safe career, because it’s safe; follow your passion; do something that comes easily to you; do something that challenges you for the rest of your life; don’t get a job just to have a job…  It goes on and on and on.

So, let’s start with the odd career path.  When faced with a choice of careers, I chose what was possibly the safest path in Portugal in the seventies.  Though my interest was – had always been – in engineering, I thought I couldn’t do it.  Part of this was because I was severely number dyslexic.  Given a teacher who understood the occasional transposing had nothing to do with my mental prowess or understanding of the matter, I could get high bs or low as.  Given one who went by “the result on the page” I struggled to get c.  Complicating things further was the fact that at the time the Portuguese universities only had space for about the top one percent of graduates.   Your entrance was determined by the combined results of an exam and your last two years in highschool.  If I had bad grades at Math, one of the core courses, I could never enter engineering.  So, that wasn’t really an option.  (And in an example of things changing, though my problem is still there – perhaps complicated by my being away from math for so long – it was manageable by the time I left highschool and I could do very well indeed in math, provided I made a little extra effort at concentration.  Apparently it’s a developmental issue.)

Also, against engineering, was the fact that both my brother and a cousin who had engineering degrees, had been unemployed forever, and were teaching in highschool (in Portugal you don’t need an education degree, though you still have to go through a “transfer” process.)

Well, I liked teaching.  In fact, in the “like the work” and “do something that’s easy” teaching was the obvious choice for me.  The only other thing I liked as much was writing and – duh – no one would ever pay me for that.  In fact, I was fairly sure it should remain in the drawer, where it belonged.

There were courses you could take that would prevent my having to go through the change over process to teaching which my relatives were enduring and so, sensibly, with my eyes open, I picked one of those alternatives.  As well, with the difficulty in getting into college in mind (many people had to wait and try the exams again two or three times) I picked something that came easy – English.  Of course, English came with a “mandatory” minor in German, which was nearly as much of a bete noir as math.  However, the alternatives: a minor in French or even in Portuguese both had the feel of failure and inability to cut it – something I have trouble with because of my inner teen boy – and wasn’t in that privileged path to teaching.  Which truly, in the horrible job market of the seventies, in Portugal, looked like my best chance at supporting myself before thirty.

So I went with the safest of the safest possible options, took English and German, and it worked perfectly.  I got into college at first try, the grades weren’t too bad (though German drove me nuts and literature was way too easy.)  The path to a secure career, hired straight out of college and working a safe job till retiring with great benefits was open before me.  Other than mom’s insistence that – since I had great grades in the languages – I should take up the diplomatic option, I was in fact in no trepidation for the future.

The thing about the future, though, is that it’s a total unknown.

In my sketchy imagining fo the future, I had left the option of coming to the states, possibly as a graduate assistant (something I, in fact, had an offer for from an ivy league school back east, when I decided to throw it all over for marriage and domestic bliss.)  However I knew in the end I wouldn’t want to leave forever, because it would break my parents’ hearts.  As much as I loved the US, I felt I had an obligation to my family.  So I figured with longer or shorter sojourns here, I would end up going back to my oh-so-predictable career, teaching languages to high school students.

They say the devil is in the details, but one thing you can say for me.  When I’m blown off a planned course, I don’t do it subtly.

Just before I finished my degree, I started talking to Dan, who proposed to me three months later (without us having seen each other in four years, yeah.)  We married that summer.  

While Dan understood the “security” thing that had led me to pick my career path and offered to move to Portugal, I thought that made no sense.  First, he spoke no Portuguese, so finding a job there would be extraordinarily difficult.  Second, even after he learned Portuguese, the job market there sucked.  And third and more importantly, I wanted to raise my kids in the States if and when we had kids.

So I came to the states, with my degree (almost, but that’s too complex to explain) a box of books and 20 lbs of personal effects.  And rendered my safe, secure, career path totally useless.  Not only does the US not accept Portuguese teaching degrees, but my secondary translation abilities are even more useless, since my major is in English, which is of course the easy, cop-out degree in the US.

I won’t say my degree has been completely useless.  It (or the other language courses I took while taking it) has provided support at times when things got desperate enough for me to go that way.  I’ve done technical translation, and I’ve taught at times when we really, really, really needed the money.  But it has provided neither security nor a clear career path.  

Mostly, though, and due to things like babies and moving, I found myself working at writing.  While the payoff hasn’t been what we expected – and that probably because the field was already sick onto the death – it also hasn’t been totally horrible.  In fact, within the field, money wise, I’ve done exceptionally well.  And though at this point I’m pegged at “underpaid secretary” I’ve also been able to be home to raise the kids something that it’s hard to put a price on.  Also with Indie and all, if I can find an extra day a week to do the publishing, there is a good chance I’ll be able to retire comfortably (maybe even very comfortably) on the writing.  Since my husband has made enough to support us so far, that’s not a bad option at all.

Yesterday while discussing choices of career, my husband said that I can’t really tell people not to follow their passion, because I have.  Which I suppose is true… backwards, sideways and  oddly.  He also asked me whether or not I like what I do.  I told him of course I do.  I can pull a book over me like a security blanket.  Writing a novel, seeing the character become real, is still my very favorite activity in life.  I just hate my career.  

Dan says that’s not something to influence the choice.  You can’t control the career.  BUT you should do something you can’t wait to get up and do every day – and that I do have.

So, what advice do I give kids?  What do I tell people wondering what to choose?

Part of me still hankers for security.  In fact, part of what has made my career path so difficult, is that I can’t have any.

If I had a kid stuck where I was, I’d say “do get a degree in something you can fall back on.”  For one, writing degrees are useless, and if you have another specialty, you can do that on the side while you bring the writing up to speed.  Of course, these days with Indie being available, if you’re an aspiring writing, you SHOULD be finishing stories and posting them, as early and as much as you can.  Given the long tail, you’re adding to your future income.

The point though is that despite all the “don’t get a job just to get a job” if you don’t have another support system you don’t mind using (I’d have minded sponging off my parents.  As was the only way I could justify to myself letting Dan support me, was to work my tail off at things like furniture refinishing, cooking from scratch, etc, and keeping our expenses really low) you still need to pay for the peanut butter and – occasionally – the jam.  So you should have a paying specialty that keeps you in food and roof.

The “follow your passion” thing makes me curl my lip – that inner teen boy again – and go “pfui.”  BUT there is something in it.  Something about doing what you can’t wait to do, anyway. Except I’d modify it “look at what your passion can be used to do.”  If I’d grown up in the states I would probably have taken the courses needed to be a tech writer. And I’d have been okay with that.  (In the early eighties I was too short on the “tech” courses for companies to hire me for this, though I tried.  It’s also entirely possible my accent freaked them out.)  Or say your passion is art… art teaching might not be a bad idea.  You sort of get to use it, and you have three months in the summer to work on your own stuff.  Or say you’re mad about computers.  Pure programmer seems to be passing from this Earth as a profession, but how about you take one of the hard sciences and a strong concentration on computers.  Look at the end result in terms of “what I’d do” and make sure it’s not something that makes you want to slit your wrists.  Yes, some research is encouraged.

However, more importantly and in a way that’s both a curse and a blessing, remember the MOST important thing is that you never know.  You never know how you’ll do.  You never know what you’ll do.  This future you’re charting for yourself can become completely different, if you fall in love with someone from another country; if your country goes to war; if a global crisis hits really hard; if you change enough you discover what you loved now bores you to tears; if technology changes and puts your chosen career out of existence.

Crystal ball is all broken, but given the level of change going on around us (catastrophic change, they call it) AND the careers of my friends and colleagues around my age – most of them taking place in times of slower change, mind – I’d almost guarantee one of these things – at least – will happen to every kid graduating high school this year.

So the best advice I can given them is what’s kept me working in the writing field through some of the most horrible times in the industry: Stay flexible.

To use my own career as an example, while your love might be space opera with a secondary interest in cozy mysteries, be prepared to do anything else, including historical, literary romance.  Be willing to work for or without the glory (in my field, be prepared to do write for hire, if needed.)  Work hard (who needs weekends, anyway?)  Be – sorry, I know it’s a slogan, but it’s true, too – the best you can be.  The future is not for slackers.  Work – always work – at getting better.  Keep your eyes open for opportunity and cast to the future, so when change comes you can grab it and let it carry you to a good or at least safe place.
You can’t predict the future.  Picking now for the next eighty years in a world you can’t even imagine, is foolhardy.  Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow till bring all of us more surprises than sure things, before dusty death which is the only certainty in the end.

To all the grads of 12 and of the next few years:
Pick the best you can, for what will give you a steady perch now.  And when the storms of change start shaking those branches, be ready to jump and maybe even grow wings.

May you live long and fly far.

When I was little, I wasn’t allowed to wear red.  My mom actually seems to have convinced herself red looked/looks bad on me.  (Look, I have tan olive skin.  No, it doesn’t.)  No one in the house could wear red.  Or buy anything red.  Or pain anything red.  Or sew anything red.  Or…

Now you’re going to think growing up during the cold war there was a reason for this ban.  Uh.  You’re going to think it and you’re going to be wrong.

The ban on red had absolutely nothing to do with politics.  It had to do with soccer.  You see, being from Porto my parents supported Porto, which you can find somewhere under my facebook likes – the colors are blue and white and (sensibly, I thought) the symbol is a dragon.  Porto’s Main rivals are the clubs from Lisbon, which are Benfica (red) and Sporting (Green.)  This is why I will never ever be friends with Mr. Kratman’s sister in law.  Her family supports Benfica.  what would the relatives say?  (In case you wonder this is, yes, heavily tongue in cheek.  I can totally make friends with people who support Benfica.  As long as my parents don’t find out, of course.)

Growing up in Portugal, in a time when there was only really one party, I saw people more split over soccer than over politics.  Marriages (and other promising relationships) could end because they supported opposite teams.

Yes, of course that wasn’t all it was about.  the support of soccer clubs tends to be regional, which bespeaks deeper, tribal rifts.  (For a tiny country, Portugal is an ethnically divided one.  Though all Portuguese are er… composites, because Portugal is one vast strip by the sea and a lot of different peoples came in throughout history, there is still a somewhat sharp divide between North – Greek, Celtic, Roman, Swabian, a little bit of Arab but not much (as it tended to be mostly an overseer placed there) and a lot of French Crusader and English remmitance man – and the South –  Carthaginian, Celtic, Roman, Visigoth, a lot of Arab.  Now, this is of course a broad brush as people could and did intermarry…  But not as much as you’d expect, because of cultural/tribal barriers.

Do you remember that Far Side cartoon that had the door to squid bathrooms, with the two drawings of squids and underneath “Only they can tell the difference?”  I’ve been harassed in Lisbon for being from the North.  This might be less so now, with the highway and all, but it used to be the difference was visible, quite sharp and certainly audible.

I always laugh when I’m reading something in the States and it says something about “European styling” or “European fashion” because, well… WHERE in Europe?  (It’s like the phrase African-American, where someone REALLY needs a hammer to the side of the head for thinking up that one.  Do they want something other than black, and Negro is too close to the bad term?  Fine.  Make up new words for ALL the races.  But using the name of a continent is stupid.  What in heaven’s sweet name do Berbers have to do with Zulus?  And besides, in the ultimate analysis, didn’t we all come from Africa?)  Yes, it’s a point of contention – partly because of the times people tell me “I thought you wouldn’t have problems with nudism.  You’re European.”  WHAT?  (Beyond the fact I’m over forty and pudgy and my last wish in the world is to have strangers see my bod.)  As if all of Europe is Sweden?  I bet you (though I wouldn’t know) not even all of Sweden is Sweden (Pickled fish, naked people and strong liquor – at least as far as I can determine what people think defines Sweden.)

Then there’s European Styling which for Southern European countries would of course mean “dark wood, heavy carving with religious symbolism and a bit of whitewash on the walls” – right?  Yeah.

Europeans are still FAR more tribal than Americans.  That Americans can think entire countries or entire continents are a mono-culture means we’ve got very far to overcome the ancient evil of tribalism.

Why do I call it an ancient evil?  Didn’t removing it encourage the even worse evil of the nation state?  Don’t know.  Ask me again in a thousand years.  Right now, sure, the nation state has piled the dead as high as tribal warfare, but it has also allowed a freer of way of life and more movement and creativity, which in turn has given us a lifestyle that’s not short, brutish and nasty.  (At last for some portion of us.)

Will the good in the long run outweigh the bad?  I don’t know.  Time will tell.  As CACS said in the comments on creativity, we still feel the pull towards tribes.  It’s very possible we’ll go back to tribalism.  There is the possibility of a future in which we ensconce ourselves in professional tribes, or worse, genetic tribes.  And then there’s the possibility that future will be very bad.  Or, if we remember we’re all human, it might be the best of both worlds (depending on how much mobility between “tribes” is allowed.)

Europe is tribal to a level Americans can’t imagine.  My mom hated the way we looked, since we’re a very “mixed” people, and though at the time the comment annoyed me, I’ve come to believe she didn’t even mean in the RACIAL sense.  It’s just that in Portugal you can tell upper class by the way people look.  (No, you couldn’t.  I probably can’t anymore.  Again, it’s bathrooms for squids level.)  Losing those markers, for her, was as annoying as when she tried to organize my canned goods, going solely on color and sometimes drawings, since she doesn’t speak Portuguese English (It is I who barely speak Portuguese anymore ;) ).

And yet, as tribal as Europe is, it is not that tribal.  In the end, they do stand with each other in larger units – countries, areas of the continent, even the continent – as proven by their fatal attraction to the horrible idea of unification.  They might not have anything in common but their wish to have something in common, but that’s (almost) enough.

I suspect even Africa nowadays is nowhere as tribal as it was when Europeans first landed.  This is not to say it is not tribal, but they can think of people as human, even if some humans are more humans than others (of course.  That’s how humans work.)

Yes, of course a lot of the way we’ve managed to overcome tribalism is by finding bigger units of people to fight.  “Me and my brother against my cousins, me and my cousins against the tribe, me and the tribe against the stranger” is not just an Arab thing – it’s a human thing.

The best – possibly the only way – to have a united and at peace humanity is to have an alien land tomorrow and start killing and enslaving us.

It is a flaw in the design.  We have many.  Comes from not being just minds, but also bodies.  With all that, and despite the many who died getting here, we haven’t done that badly for ourselves.  I mean, we ARE the dominant species, after al, and with very few natural assets to get us here.  The moral squeamishness on what we did to get here is human too.  It doesn’t mean we’re a bad species.  Look…  Bad, by whose standards?  Despite the books in the seventies calling us uniquely aggressive, most of our worst characteristics are shared with all mammals.  We just feel bad about it.  It’s a start.

As the overcoming of tribalism, limited and confined as it is makes a start too.  It seems to be a better way to run things.  Certainly cultures that have overcome it have the advantage over those who don’t.

Will it be an advantage going forward?  Time will tell.  It depends on what the future is.

Later.  But right now I’m marinading pineapple in Port Wine.  So, there.

*This is really very short.  In my defense, I’ve been sick this week.  No, nothing serious, just whatsgoingaround which is viral and comes back until it gets so weak it stops coming back.  Unfortunately enough to stop work for two days and as we’re having a get-together this weekend, I MUST clean today, so I can’t continue writing.  I don’t think this is the natural chapter break, and I’ll try to add to to it tonight.  But it should be enough to get you puzzling some things out. ;) *

*This is the Fantasy novel I’m posting here for free, one chapter every Friday.   If your conscience troubles you getting something for free, do hit the donate button on the right side.  Anyone donating more than $6 will get a non-drm electronic copy of Witchfinder in its final version, when it’s published.
There is a compilation of previous chapters here  all in one big lump, which makes it easier to read and I will compile each new chapter there, a week after I post.  When the novel is completed and about to be edited the compilation page will probably be deleted.

Oh, this is in pre-arc format, meaning you’ll find the occasional spelling mistake and sentence that makes no sense.  It’s not exactly first draft, but it’s not at the level I’d send to a publisher, yet. *

A Pure Mind
Caroline reeled at the sight of the caged centaur, the bloodied unicorns.  A couple of unicorns, at the edge of the clearing made passes at her with her bloodied horns, and she stepped back.

She thought she would be safe, and that’s why the centaurs had called her.  After all, virgins were supposed to be safe from unicorns, weren’t they?  And a virgin she was.  But there was something else operating here, something that didn’t seem to fit in with that idea.

For one, while she was willing to believe perhaps the caged centaur, Akakios, despite his name, was no more than her age – perhaps younger, it was hard to tell – he might very well not be a virgin.  She had an idea that centaurs were more sensuous creatures than humans, and she was very willing to doubt that he was a virgin.  But all the same.  She bit her lip.  All the same it wasn’t possible that among all the centaurs – and where were their females? – there wouldn’t be at least one who retained his or her virginity.  Why would they have let Akakios go anywhere near the unicorns, if he weren’t safe?  And if the trap had been laid for Akakios unaware and he didn’t know there were centaurs about, surely they would have another member of their tribe who could free him?

So why Caroline?  Other than that she was a stranger and they didn’t care if she lived or died?  But no, that couldn’t be it either.  She could see the boy centaur was bleeding.  They might not care for her, but they cared for their friend.  If Caroline didn’t succeed, she wouldn’t save him.

She turned rounding on the male centaur who had spoken to her.  “You said he is your son.  But who are you?”

The centaur, still kneeling, threw back his head, “I am Nomiki, King of Centaurs.”  He somehow managed to look besieging and regal all in one.  “And I ask you as a boon to my whole tribe that you save my son.”

Caroline took a deep breath.  Then she disciplined her face, as she had learned in preparation for her season, when in truth the stakes would have been much smaller, even if not according to the lady her mother.  She showed no doubt, no emotion, and conveyed the impression of being somehow above all these creatures, as she said, “Not until you tell me why you chose me and what you want.”

She expected anger, or perhaps surprise.  She didn’t get it.  Instead the man – the centaur, got up from his knees, and tossed his head in a way that made her think of a horse.  “It is fair and proper,” he said.  “That we tell the champion what her weapons are before she goes into battle.”

Had Caroline been less trained in the social graces, she would have asked him what he meant and if he were mocking her.  But her understanding of social etiquette stayed her tongue and what she said, when she’d had time to take a breath and recover her composure, was, “I presume it is not just for my virginity you sought me.  Surely some of your people have that virtue too.”

He made a sound.  It might have been a chuckle, but it sounded like the sound a horse makes to clear its nostrils.  “Akakios has that virtue,” he said.  “And you see how much good it has been to him.”

Caroline looked at the boy centaur in his cage out the corner of her eye.  “Yes,” she said.  “I see.  So, what makes you think I can avoid the like fate.”

The king of centaurs shuffled his hooves on the ground, and Caroline had to exert all restraint to keep herself from rummaging in her pockets for a sugar cube, as she did when her pony was impatient or restless.  She had a feeling it would not be well received.

“It is like this, you see, we’ve heard tell, as you have, and as everyone has, from time immemorial, that the virtue of the virgin can stop the murderous unicorn.  So when we needed…  That is… When we wanted to rescue the–” He paused.

“When you wanted to rescue the?” Caroline said, implacably.

“The duke your father.”

“My what?” Caroline said, and on that, her composure broke, and her appearance of calm.

“Your father, Lady,” Nomiki said, and frowned slightly.

“But my father is dead!”

Nomiki looked puzzled and opened his mouth, then shrugged.  “It is not that simple, and I do not have time to explain it, though I promise to, once Akakios is safe and his wounds bound.  But the unicorns guard your father, to whom we owe a debt of honor, and Akakios, brave and pure, made a vow to free him…”

“It did not go according to his intent,” Caroline said, her composure returning.

Nomiki shook his head.  “No.  And we cast leaves into the fire and asked of the Pythoness–”

“Who?”

“It matters not.  We asked of the oracle and received an answer for our confusion.  Akakios is pure enough in his body and mind but not in his magic.  His mother, you see, she is a stranger, and from her he gets another type of magic.  He lacks the strength and the intent to…  It is not the purity of body that counts…. Though that does too, with the uncounted possibilities of a future unset, but it is the purity of the mind, forged and ready, steel and fire.  The way to keep the unicorn from tearing you to pieces is to keep him from piercing you by controlling his mind.  And he’ll take only the most clear, bright directions.  Among our band, we have many who are pure in body, but none so pure in spirit.”

“And you think I am?” Caroline asked.

“We know you are.  It was the clear fiery precision of your mind that attracted us.”  The King started to kneel again.  “Lady, daughter of the duke, save my son.”

It was crazy, foolhardy, full of unwarranted pride on her part.  In her mind she could hear both Seraphim and Gabriel screaming at her that she couldn’t risk her life in this way.  The trouble of having older brothers is that after a while they started living in your back brain.  But Caroline also knew what her duty was, and beyond all that, she’d come to fairyland to save Michael and she had to help three other people on the way.  Even if the people were dragons and centaurs.

She reached out.  She held the centaurs shoulders, pulling him up.  “I will, but get me a sword.”

The king of centaurs hesitated.  Caroline sighed.  “If I’m going in there, I will not go unarmed.  The sword might be pitiful, but at least it will make me feel safer.  Your son has hooves and is stronger than I and look at him.  I must have something besides my supposedly strong mind.”

Nomiki shouted something that sounded Greek, and a galloping centaur with a roan body brought forth a sword on his extended arms.  It was iron, and almost as long as Caroline.  She thought to herself that if all else failed, she could whirl around while holding it, because surely she couldn’t wield it in any meaningful fashion.  One more question, she had, as she lifted the heavy sword.  “Why are the unicorns there, in that clearing, and do not attack us here?”

“That is their sacred territory.  They cannot survive outside it.”

“So if I get hold of their minds and send them to you…” she said, thinking of a plan.

But Nomiki was shaking his head.  “No.  You must not hurt them or kill them. Their force is part of what keeps elfland in balance.  If you destroy them, it will unravel and all the magical worlds with it.  He knew that who set them as guards.  We dare not kill them with our magical arrows, or we kill ourselves and all the worlds with us.”

“He who set them as guards?”

“The king of fairy.”

Back when I was in school, one of the things that used to astonish me was most people’s lack of originality.  By which I don’t mean that they didn’t have enough piercings or tattoos (I have a culturally inherited phobia of making permanent alterations to my body, which is why my parents refused to pierce my ears and I got teased about it.  I then pierced my ears myself at eighteen, but I wear earrings so rarely I’ve had to re-pierce them twice.)

What I mean is that when teachers gave writing (or drawing, but we’ll go with writing) assignments most people would echo our last reading assignment.  Worse, most of them didn’t seem to be aware they’d done it, or to what extent they’d done it.  And EVEN WORSE most teachers didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with it.

Okay, to give a concrete example: sixth grade – we spent four months reading a book about a poor kid who finds a stray dog and nurses him to health.  (Okay, the class spent four months.)  I read it that evening, then I hid SF books under the book and kept an ear on the discussion while I read my way through the golden age.  (Hell is a language and literature class that moves at the pace of a normal 11 year old.)

At the end, we were told to write an essay or story that involved friendship with a dog.  Ninety percent of the class wrote back a summary of the book, even though that was NOT the assignment.  I mean, they didn’t even try to write say about how we make dogs and dogs make us, which is what I would have done, had I written an essay.  The rest of the class – except me, of course! – wrote “stories” which were in fact reworded scenes from the book.  They ranged from “barely reworded” to “completely rewarded” to “Might have extended the scene” but they were still IN FACT part of someone else’s work, using their characters.  No, calling the boy Mike instead of Michael did NOT make him a different boy.

Me, well, I wrote a story of a magical dog and three wishes.  Okay, not stunningly creative.  Look, kid, I was 11 and it was an in-class essay, unannounced.

That same year, when asked to make up a legend, I got my story downgraded and got penalized because one of my classmates said he’d read it in “a book somewhere” (No, he effing well hadn’t, though I daresay he’d read a dozen like it.  It was an enchanted maiden story [per instructions] and that has limits) and the teacher agreed that word choice, coherence and detail were beyond an 11 year old.  SO I MUST have copied it.

Yes, I am still steamed about that thirty eight years later, why do you ask?  The fact my parents were of the school that the teacher is always right meant no one would fight for me, and that was one of the grossest injustices I’ve had to deal with.  (And part of the reason I fight for my boys in similar circumstances.)

Taken in their totality, and added to the rest of my career, I’ve come to the scary conclusion most of the human race can’t create at all.  They can’t even create in the limited amounts that require you to mash together two forms/thoughts/stories.

Worse, most people can’t tell when you’re being creative or not.  It’s not a put on, they HONESTLY can’t.  They don’t even know WHAT creative is.  I’ve had “stunningly creative” applied to some of my work where I was phoning it in – and it clearly wasn’t – and I’ve heard “stunningly creative” applied to other people’s work that makes me want to scream “no, taking twilight but making her fall in love with the werewolf instead, is NOT creative.”

Of course, if you ARE capable of creating you tend to underrate how creative you are.  You know who you stole from – even if heavily disguised.  Of course, sometimes you don’t.  I didn’t realize to what extent Darkship Thieves was Heinlein fanfic, for instance because the things I hit the same way are incidental to the story.  Stuff like “Fresher” for bathroom – and that’s because I grew up reading Heinlein and it has become, in a way, interwoven in the fibers of my being.  My consolation is that he did the same, to an extent, to Mark Twain, and hey, if you’re going to steal, steal from the best.  (My future history, etc. is actually my own and differs from Heinleinian future history in marked degrees, though both follow TANSTAAFL and such, logically.)  But in re-reading Darkship before I wrote the sequel I kept going “Oh, G-d.  I could have made up another word!” (The different is before the read I’d re-read Heinlein.  Before writing it I hadn’t.  Hence the “fibers of my being” thing.)

Anyway, this was a shock when I entered school because my family WAS creative.  Someone trying to just re-write a scene from a book would get laughed at at the dinner table.  So.  Now every time I venture out into the world, in the middle of people not engaged in writing for a living, I’m shocked by this creative inability anew.  The family my husband and I married is creative, the boys wildly so.  So.

So we come up against a problem that has bedeviled Academy the last several years, and which will hit indie hard.

When I taught college English comp I was given a packet of what I was expected to do in grading papers.  I’d done this before, in the late eighties.  I didn’t realize since then the requirement to be omniscient had entered the profession.  Because, you see, the packet instructed me to give zero for ANY plagiarized paper copied from online, or any paper from an essay service.  The thing is – do you KNOW how many papers there are on line?  I can’t read all of them!

What I did was to take random sentences from suspiciously well written (compared to that student) papers and run them through search engines.  I never caught anyone red-handed, but then I KNOW a lot of these papers are behind pay walls or subscription walls.

For my money, if I had to plagiarize a paper in school, I’d go and find an OLD book of essays, or a thesis, the kind of thing no one reads, something not digitized and copy THAT.  Of course, beyond the moral wrongness of such act, my pride would never allow me to do that.  And beyond all that, the type of person who isn’t creative enough to write his/her own essay is also not creative about where he/she finds it.

Since I quit teaching for the fabulously well paid career of author (Snort, giggle) I’ve kept in touch with kids one way or another.  Sometimes they invade my blog – er… okay, that only happened once years ago, but it lasted for a month.  And yes, I also still resent that.  Did I EVER say I was a good person? – and sometimes friends’ kids, or kids’ friends ask me to review something for them.

I will point out both sets of young people are among what we would class as the best and brightest of their class.

Houston, we have a problem.

Creativity hasn’t got any better in the younger generation.  Heinlein maintained the percentage of people in a population who could truly create was fixed.  It might be.  We keep discovering this sort of ratio, though we’re not sure how it holds.  BUT the problem is that on top of that, these people  – BRIGHT young people who can speak just fine – can’t carry a sentence from beginning to end and make sense.  It’s not just logic that’s tortured.  It’s grammar and syntax.

Yes, yes, I know, these blog posts lock grammar, syntax and punctuation in a dungeon room and do kinky stuff to them.  BUT I write them while half asleep one way or another and I do no more than a cursory (and fast) typo hunt.  The essays I see from those kids are… proofread, worked on.

And yes, I KNOW I do this for a living.  Is it possible I’m judging them too harshly?  Well… maybe, but I don’t think so.  I used to teach, remember, ten years ago.  And even from ten years ago, the level of writing has gone way down.

I could hazard guesses as to why, including what they did with my older son’s class, where they let them learn spelling “free form” and “from reading.”  Which means as smart and articulate as he is, I still need to yell at him over egregious spelling mistakes.

When he was in third grade, I realized they weren’t teaching him ANYTHING relating to expression, writing and word usage.  NOTHING.  His essays read incomprehensible to me.  This is when – according to him – I started a reign of terror.  If you hear him tell it, he was an innocent happy child and I scarred him for life.

Maybe.  I’m pleading the fifth.  What I did was make him read – at first aloud, because he was pretending to read and/or skipping whole paragraphs – great essays.  I checked out of the library books of famous essays and I had him read them aloud.  Then I had him write essays.  And I deployed the sarcasm for every glopped sentence and every thought that led nowhere.

I’m happy to report within three weeks the boy could write essays upside down, sideways and possibly underwater.  And then I did it again with my second child at a somewhat older age.

What this means to me is that the kids CAN be taught.  They just aren’t being.  Heaven knows why.  That’s not even the point of this blog.  (Just let me tell you if you have a child in K-12 MAKE SURE THEY CAN READ AND WRITE.  Also, buy them a Strunk and White and make them read it aloud to you.)

The point of this blog is that now even the small minority born with (well, you explain it!) the ability to create and the verbal fluency that leads to story telling will have issues expressing themselves.  And that they might not even have any idea when they’re committing plagiarism by stealing others’ words.

I’m not worried about their getting stuck, btw – the kids, by and large, are always all right.  These poor children just have a much steeper slope to competency.  They’ll get there, once they realize there’s a problem.

Here’s what I’m worried about, though: when you couple how little even creative people create, unconscious leaning on someone else’s work which all of us do (Heinlein: They all steal from each other) because DUH we’re social monkeys, and not even being aware of what good writing is… we have a massive problem.

I said before the least creative people can’t even seem to understand what CREATIVE is.  They’ll commit plagiarism without noticing.

Now, most of them, thank heavens, don’t aspire to being novelists.  But there might be half a dozen delusional enough to try it, considering how sad our education is right now.

We could end up with a bunch of inadvertent plagiarists who’ve never been informed writing a scene from someone else’s novel and changing the names is NOT a short story.  And here’s the thing, they can put it right up there for sale.

Now, look, let’s not be dramatic.  This has ALWAYS happened, even with traditional publishing.  I can’t remember the name, but not so long ago, they found that some “literary” darling had copied almost in whole books from a “hack” romance writer.  Different character names, different titles.  And yep, this went through a major house.

So… what can be done about it?  Well…  NOT legislate it.  Any law passed on it will simply be used by would-be gatekeepers to go after anything they don’t like.  (Say, accuse me of plagiarism because I use the word “Fresher” for bathroom.)

It is a problem, but there is no problem so bad a law can’t make it worse.

Here’s my suggestion:

First, police yourself.  I do.  Obsessively.  Yeah, I let certain words get through.  I tell people I grew up in Heinlein books, they’re part of who I am and you write from who you are.  Deal.  I disagree with my literary daddy enough on matters of future history, (well, I grew up in different countries and generations) that we don’t overlap enough to repeat the same stories.  Yes, you could say Darkship is my answer to Friday – and to an extent A Few Good Men is my answer to TMIAHM, (which remains my favorite book) but the actuation of the same “principles” in very differently built worlds makes ALL the difference.  And “Yes but” is a valid reason to write a science fiction novel.

Where you need to police yourself is in the things you don’t/wouldn’t think of stealing.  They’re not part of you.  You don’t read them for fun.  There is a reason most of us – unless editing or working with half a dozen VERY close friends/mentees – don’t read other people’s stuff.  I’ve had newbies ping me on facebook begging me to read their novel and tell them if they’re aiming in the right direction.  Beyond the fact that I just don’t have TIME, it terrifies me.  The things I’ve found getting under my radar (never more than a paragraph or a character name) are usually from stuff I read from my kids, or a sentence in a news blog.

You’re only human.  You’ll “lift” minor stuff.  But do try to prevent yourself from doing it.

Second – police others.  NOT obsessively, and for the love of heaven, don’t go and report someone to Amazon because you “think you read it somewhere” like that boneheaded boy in my sixth grade comp class.  (He’s so lucky I’ve forgotten his name, isn’t he?)  BUT if you come across a passage and remember it from another book, go and check.  Apparently there is the charming habit of lifting wholesale and reselling under another name/cover.  So, if you find one of those, yeah, that’s reason to report it.  (No, I don’t mean same plot.  If you read Romance, or some fantasy, you’d NEVER do anything else.  I mean, if it’s word per word the same book.  Report it.  DO.)

If it’s not word per word, but you find a few pages (let’s not try to go to the level of a sentence or two.  That’s just … what it is.  Sometimes a sentence is just right, and you don’t remember reading it before, and if you’re head is a word-cement-mixer it can happen.) that are the same, it might be appropriate to tell the author.  Politely and under “Well, sorry.  I don’t think you realize you did that.”  And then of course that author bears watching.  VERY carefully.  And if you get one of those emails and they are right, DO watch yourself.  (No, it’s never happened to me.  NO, I don’t think it could happen.  Not pages, word per word.  BUT I’ve been very ill while writing some books, and I wrote one – Draw One In The Dark – while so concussed I was experiencing “lost time”.  Could I have done it then?  Gah.  At the time I was terrified I was killing people during the hours I’d lost. [As far as I can tell, mostly I went shopping.  Which is just weird.])

I’m firmly convinced no more plagiarism is taking place than ever has.  It’s just that now it’s our responsibility and we don’t want it to give indie a bad name.  The big guys only need an excuse to regulate us out the whazoo.

So…

Third and most importantly: if you have kids, if you mentor kids, if you teach – teach them what true creativity is, and what plagiarism is.  Teach them plagiarism is illegal.  Explain that intellectual property IS still property.  And that writing the same story but calling the kid Mike is not wildly creative.  Explain to them that data might be free, but the compilation of data isn’t.  Story forms might be free, but the expression of the story ISN’T.

Kids aren’t stupid.  They will learn.  It’s just that no one is teaching them.

Yes, this is a variation on a theme.  Having told you how happy I am with Avengers’ heroes and with the idea of it as Human Wave, I must confess I find its villain… well…

Now before you throw things at me, kindly remember I didn’t see any of the setup movies.  My commenters have informed me there’s material I should see in the Thor movie, particularly the deleted scenes.  I believe them.

Also, as further excuse, I do realize that Avengers is a comic book based movie.  We’re lucky to get heroes that make – at least some – sense.  A villain who wants to rule the world is just par for the course.  Particularly a villain who wants to rule the world and is open about it.

Let’s make it clear right now that I much – MUCH – prefer this to the “tortured” villains of the seventies, victims of society or whatever it was they were, who really were the true victims and to be mourned.

Not that I blame the seventies for ruining villains in American storytelling (this, like the rare occasions in which I do prefer something Portugal does to something in the US is one of those times you should make a note.  It’s pretty rare.  Having turned eight in 1970, I hold the seventies responsible for most pathologies of literature, fashion and movie making.  Yes, I do have proof.  An age that enshrined bell bottoms was clearly a nexus of evil.  PARTICULARLY elephant bells – a style known as “looks good on none.”)

No, I think what makes most villains of American – not Loki, who, at least is genuinely villainous, if somewhat simplistic as presented in the movie – storytelling a lot of “fail” is two fold.  First, we are a nation of rejects.  Either us or our ancestors came here because we were either not wanted, not successful, or hated wherever we were.  Add to that that we are – by necessity – a society with no uniform outer (or even cultural – to the extent cookery and dress are cultural) characteristics, it’s no wonder we developed a pash for the under dog.  And it’s impossible to start telling a story with a twisty villain without starting to wonder if he’s an underdog.  What made him that way?  How come he has such a need to hurt and/or dominate?

The second reason is sitcoms.  Or perhaps pop psychology to the extent that it permeated television writing at the time Americans got a TV in every home.  Within the confines of the sitcom, which had to come back every week, with more or less the same cast, it was impossible to have a Loki who just wants to enslave humans.  Your evils had to be smaller and even your villains had to be somewhat sympathetic, so people would continue tuning in.  To this day I’m completely flabbergasted by how easily sitcom disputes are settled, by having everyone “see” why the “villain” is “doing wrong” out of misconceptions or some justifiable sense of victimhood.  As pop psychology has become discredited, the solution seems to be to make every sitcom character unbearably stupid or completely insane.  (I loved Friends which I discovered just before 9/11 and was the first sitcom I watched in decades – mostly in reruns.  Perhaps love is too strong a word.  I spent weeks after 9/11 dumbly sitting in front of the TV, alternating between the news, reruns of friends, and Buffy.  I didn’t want to think and reading was to much like thinking.  But perhaps because of that I STILL have a soft spot for the series.  However, fair is fair.  If those people existed, ALL of them should be heavily medicated, if not actually in a padded cell.)

The problem is that we tend to translate things we see regularly as “truth” in our back brain, and I think most Americans in generations – three? – that grew up with sitcoms don’t even realize that they’ve been tricked into thinking there is a definable pop-psychology reason at the back of every horrible action and nasty villain.

I’ll say this for Americans – in this case, Americans by upbringing and heritage and therefore somewhat excluding me (to the extent I wasn’t raised here.  Including me to the extent I had enough American TV and movies to have a veneer of it.) – Despite the barrage of “poor him” villains, they prefer really honest-to-goodness bad guys.  Movies in the seventies did better abroad than in the US (possibly because pop psychology and also the idea they’re victims – mostly in their own minds of the US, but I don’t have the time to go into that – are really popular over there.) and there is a reason “make my day” entered the vernacular.

Also, Heinlein, with honest to goodness villains – no?  Did you read the psychoanalysis and cure within three pages of Wormface? – was way moer popular than the “psychologically deep” stories of the present.  (There were other reasons.  I’m not saying that’s the only one.)

The thing is that we know what good villains are.  Shakespeare had a lot of good villains.  Except for Hamlet, where we’re never absolutely sure WHO the villain is and which, yes, is “deep” and possible to analyze back to front and front to back in about ten different ways, (I suspect that Shakespeare had just been given Prozac, or possibly Freud by a time-traveler.  Shud up you.  I’m an SF writer.  I can come up with this cr*p if I want to.  And yeah, Hamlet is WORTH IT in a way, but it is not [unless severely cut to eliminate ambiguity] a “popular entertainment” template.  And if ALL of Shakespeare’s plays had followed that model, we’d now be going as we do about Marlowe “Uh, I guess people really liked blood on stage.” [A lot of Marlowe’s plays follow that template, and both sides are equally unpleasant so you just want them all dead.  Something I note Shakespeare ended up giving in to in Hamlet.])

I mean, think about it… The Scottish play?  Love of power, until he is “in blood steeped so far”; do you really care what Regan and Goneril’s reasons were?  While I agree with Agatha Christie’s character in the moving finger that “they must have been twisted inside by their crazy old father” in the end, they chose their bed and MUST lie in it.

Heinlein too does not give in to the temptation to rehabilitate his villains or make their actions completely explicable.  We might understand what drives Bella Darkin, but though she’s rendered rather pathetic in the end, she’s not rehabilitated, much less made into a kind of Worthy Victim.  (For those who do not have their Heinlein at their fingertips, this is The Door Into Summer.  Yes, there are other examples.  It’s too early and I am insufficiently caffeinated.  You’ll just have to deal.)

I’ll add that using a cliched villain like Loki (well, we know he’s bad, because we know Norse Myth) is not only infinitely preferable to “everyone has his reasons” villainy because it allows you to cheer for the good guys and throw orange peels at the villain – it is preferable, also, because it saves us from that ultimate bane of inept storytelling villainy when “suddenly” an otherwise good character “goes insane” and starts being evil.  This might have receded in popularity or I might have stopped seeing so much of it because I’ve learned to pick my books better.  But there was a time I almost gave up reading mysteries because of its sister/cousin plot of “the murderer is a mass murderer who is insane.”  Usually, mind, because his childhood was so bad, creating a more sinned against than sinner thing.

But, Sarah, you say – you use the “the villain has reasons and can be rehabilitated thing” with Red Dragon in the shifters’ series and partially the horrible childhood with the Mules in the Darkship series.  Yeah, okay – Sarah drums fingers on the desk.  You, readers who exist only in my head, are entirely too mouthy, you know that? – but look, Red Dragon has been established as not the sharpest knife in the drawer in DOITD – er… well… he’s not actually so much dumb as young and terrified – I DO kill the other two guys.  And the Great Sky Dragon remains a villain throughout, if a complex villain because much of what he does is cultural.  but cultural is not the same as excusable, only explainable.  The same goes for the Mules and their lousy childhood.  While they ALL have a lousy childhood, some go on to be admirable, or close to it, and some are the scum of the Earth.  I don’t mind presenting (at least partial) explanation for villainy.  I think that makes it more satisfying, frankly.  BUT it’s never a complete explanation.  The complete explanation MUST in the end ALWAYS be volition.  The character has CHOSEN to do evil, and therefore no matter how many explanations, punishment (in various degrees) is always in order.

The opposite type of villain is ENTIRELY anti-human wave because it trivializes evil, and by doing so taints us all with its brush.  It sounds profound to say “in their circumstances, you’d have done the same” but again it is one of those false-profound pronouncements, like saying that poverty causes crime.  Many criminals are poor and MIGHT have been pushed into their path by poverty, (I maintain this is very hard to tell, because ultimately criminals lie.  And if they spy a way to make themselves sound like victims and turn moral judgement away, they WILL.  Look, I grew up in a village that was dirt poor by American standards, and where most people didn’t have keys to their doors.  My grandmother’s kitchen door was open summer and winter, and if she were out this could only be ascertained by my going in and calling her.  Now the village is infinitely richer and people have iron bars on every window.  If I had to pick a reason I’d say it was because in the sixties we didn’t KNOW we were poor. [We were better off than past generations and no one was starving.] Now they know they’re ‘poor’ in comparison to what they see in movies – particularly the glitzy movie-millionaires’ lives.  This makes the root cause of crime ENVY, not poverty.  Yes, this is my opinion.  Again, deal.)  On the other hand there must be millions of people in the world who are poor – even dirt poor – and are scrupulously honest and trustworthy.  To view poverty as the root cause of crime is to make every one of these poor but decent human beings into a villain in potentia, and, thereby, to splatter every human with evil.  To justify the villains to the extent of making them entirely understandable and “I’d be the same in the same circumstances” makes all of humanity loathsome.

So, what would be my rules for villains properly done?

1- Your villains must be evil.  I don’t mean they should come on stage twirling their moustaches (though this is effective if they are female!) and stating how evil they are, but this (a villain like Loki or Richard III in Shakespeare) is by far preferable to the softly wounded villain who can be fixed with sudden insight and who is more sinned against than sinner.  (If you find yourself thinking “root causes” drop it.)  And BOTH are preferable to the “And then the good guy went insane” villain. (If you think this is a clever, never before seen twist, you HAVE to read more.)

2- Your villains must be powerful.  Again, unless you’re doing comic books or something that echoes of it, or a send up of that type of storytelling, please stay away from “You must give me a billion dollars or I’ll destroy the world.”  If your villain doesn’t have a piranha tank, you can’t pull this off.  Remember that.  (An exception here is that it’s perfectly allowable for the villains’ henchemen to be STUPID – because, if the guy is really, openly evil – or evil enough – WHO would work for him?  Which brings us to point three.)

3- Evil is seductive.  Look, kids, the only way that Avengers could resolve the “if this guy is truly so evil, openly evil, why would good people work for him?” conundrum is the “heart shot” thing.  Mind control, in other words.  This is okay for a certain type of book, in a certain type of circumstance.  It can’t – however – be used everywhere.  And “he’s a mesmerizing speaker” is ONLY part of the explanation.  Yes, I’m going to make an argument ad Hitlerium.  Sorry.  But there it is – as memorable a speaker as he might have been or as his contemporaries convinced themselves he was (this is always hard to judge. Social pressure CAN convince people of this stuff) – he got honorable people to do what was patently evil.  He did this by SEDUCING them via their envy, their respect of authority/military authority (which was insanely well developed in Germans of the time), their resentment over WWI, and the economic instability.  He seems openly evil to us, but he didn’t to his contemporaries because he SEDUCED them.  He was one of them, and he knew where to push.  Yes, the evil has to be obvious to your readers – but your characters CAN be justifiably blinded.  If you find yourself thinking “he was mesmerized” see if you can do something better with it.  We should be able to feel the attraction of the villain.  (Again depending on the type and size of the story.)

4 – Your villain should always be as strong as your main character, then a bit more.  If your main character is good with swords, your villain should be good with swords, and knives, and have a concealed firearm somewhere about his person.  Bambi versus Godzilla is a great movie, if Bambi has gotten squished flat the first time, had some armor designed, has sharpened his teeth into points, and is back this time for Bambi Versus Godzilla, This Time It’s Serious.

5 – If your villain has serious enough problems to cause him to become a satisfyingly evil SOB, they can’t be solved by his realizing he’s done wrong.  You can – with a long series, and increments – bring him there in maybe ten, twenty – fifty? – books.  BUT then you have to ask yourself “how could he live with himself after that?” and “What form of crazy atonement must he undertake?”  And THOSE are satisfying plots.  BUT if you just pat your villain on the back and he breaks into tears and confesses his misdeeds, he’d best be two years old… or a minor henchman tool (even if he seemed to be the main villain up till then.  This is doable.)

6- Death before rehabilitation is something to put over your desk, to look at when dealing with villains, but if you MUST rehabilitate, kindly – PLEASE – remember that barring divine intervention (I’m not arguing that one) people don’t change in the space of a breath.  And even with divine intervention, (again, so not arguing) the changed villain will still have the characteristics that led him to the dark side.  If he was an intransigent enforcer for the villain, he’ll become the same for the hero – not necessarily a bad thing, mind, but he’ll be stiff and a bit doctrinaire.  This also means he can be led into temptation again, by the right villain-disguised-as-hero.

6 a) If you wish to give depth to your villain, remember most of us have the vices of our virtues.  Take me.  I’m driven (mostly insane.)  While this means I can work a lot, it means I can… work a lot, which means I’m not the best at my personal life and must be very grateful my husband and sons understand this particular insanity.  I can see someone whose virtue is, say, his moral rectitude deciding to eliminate a population that falls short of perfect.  And remember THAT while being true can serve as a screen to hide a lust for power.

7 – There MUST be a choice.  At some point, the villain decides to do what should have been patently evil to him FOR A REASON.  His reason doesn’t matter as much as his choice does.  HE/SHE CHOOSES TO BE EVIL.  (And hence, there must be punishment.  Which fits the crime.   If the crime is stealing cookies, killing the villain is probably over the top.)   For hereditary evil – say hereditary evil rulers – at some point they have to choose to CONTINUE evil.  Again, it should be obvious they chose it, they can’t just drift.  EVEN if the villain lies to himself about having a choice, there is always a choice, and it must be clear to the reader.

(As usual, of course there are SOME exceptions to these rules, and some are even good.  They just take exceptional ability to pull off and might only apply in one cave.  Also, your mileage may vary.  These are my beliefs on villains and evil.  You might prefer soft fuzzy evil that purrs, in which case you should meet my cat D’Artagnan.)

crossposted at Mad Genius Club

1- I am sure I walked across a similar stage once. 1981, Stow, Ohio.  I have the (my name misspelled) diploma.  How come I remember cold nothing of it, except the changing of the tassels at the end and that we threw the hats in the air in strict defiance of rules?

2- Why did none of the kids today throw hats in the air?

3- While I understand the point of making the kids feel like something important just happened – and it did, since those who were socially promoted are now not required to be babysat by the state, and those who were in actual challenging programs achieved something – MUST we have speeches on the theme of “the first day of your life” and “Some final remarks”?  Dude, if you didn’t teach the kids what they need to know for life in 12 years, let it go.  They’re not going to listen to you now.

4- Since when did my kid’s class include a large number of vampire immigrants from Terry Practchett’s Uberwald?  While none of the kids – to my chagrin – appeared to be named Margolotta Amaya Katerina Assumpta Crassina Von Uberwald or even Maledicta, there were students with FIVE given names.  What gives?

5- Thank G-d the sheer silliness of made-up names seems to be receding.  There were only half a dozen of them on the roll.  Look guys, if the way your kid will distinguish him/herself is because you gave him/her a dissonant collection of syllables never used for a name in any language, congratulations.  I believe it’s called the tyranny of low expectations.  Odd names with a base in history, mythology or something else is completely different of course.  (Says the woman who ALMOST got named Naiad Euridice except for her dad being a stick in the mud.)

6 – WHY are all the hats one size fits none, so that the girls look like they’re trying to hide in their hat, and the boys look like Goofy in Disney comics?  Is this to prepare them for the humiliations and inadequacies of adulthood?

7 – Is it wise to tell the kids to follow their passion?  Yes, yes, this is the fairly useless novelist asking, but for the love of heaven, can’t you see Rome is burning?  Or perhaps that the job market is?  Telling them it’s terrible to get up every morning to go to a job they hate is not a good idea.  I’ve done that off and on for months/years when the alternative was starving or the dole.  How about something about the dignity of working and feeding yourself, no matter how humble the occupation?  I mean their passion is fine, if they have a passion for engineering (thank you, G-d, thank you!) But what if their passion is for drawing in chalk on sidewalks, or studying the poetry of tooth paste advertising?  Following your heart into a ditch is… not the best advice.

8 – Supposing they listen to ANYTHING you say, how about telling them that life and great stuff is what happens while you’re busy with something else.  So, be busy, be good to those who depend on you, support yourself, don’t be a mooch, keep your head clear and keep working.  If you see a chance to strike for your passion, do so.  If you have a passion for an artistic endeavor, keep working at it.  BUT do so on the side.  Above all be independent, honest and responsible.  If you can also be a great artist, that’s gravy.

9 – The difference between having a boy and having a girl graduate – parents of girls were all holding bouquets of flowers.  Parents of boys wondered “If I gave him flowers, how puzzled would he look?” then giggled uncontrollably.  COOL parents of boys had cheeseburgers at the ready.

10 – AND way to make me feel old, kids, as I pick my son up and we walk away from his group, I realize they’re shouting … Hashtags at each other.  As in “Hey, Bob, Hashtag flat-cat.”  Kids these days, what will they come up with next?  On the good side the only afros were natural, and none of them were sporting bell bottoms, so the major errors of my own year have been corrected.  The future looks bright.

Update — Hey!  Get off my lawn ;)

I should write a profound post today.  You see, my younger child is graduating from high school today.

I could talk about how it was only yesterday — swear to bog — I called from the hospital to tell Robert he had a little brother and Robert wanted to know why we had Pixel-cat with us.  That’s because for the first three months of his life, Marshall sounded just like the cat.

I could talk about the amazing signs of genius he showed as a toddler (doesn’t every mother have these stories?) or whatever the heck it was he mixed at three from household chemicals, which left a crater in our backyard at our last house.  (Also a sign of genius, but the kind that, well, doesn’t end well.  First thing I knew was the fountain of dirt at second floor height.)

We could talk about his special challenges, only he’d prefer me not to and I might be dependent on him in my old age.

We could talk about annus horriblis, aka sixth grade when we eventually had to bring him home to homeschool for a year.  Or we could talk about what a joy that year was, and how if I could have found a tutor for math, I’d have continued doing it, because he’s so much fun to run along with in an intellectual race.

But it’s late, I’m tired, I was writing till late, then getting his clothes ready, because tonight he could misplace his own head.  And tomorrow, after the ceremony, I’m finishing a story (which pretty much encapsulates the last seventeen years too.)

So, I’ll write another — better — blog post if I can find time halfway through tomorrow.

For now suffice it to say that I find it rather impossible that the YOUNGER kid is leaving high school, and that I’m SURE I’m nowhere near that old.  Must be some time compression device or… something.

Congratulations to E. Marshall Hoyt and to the rest of you — catch you on the flip side.