Yesterday I blew my top – in a thoroughly ladylike manner.  Okay, in a lady who wears fishnet stockings manner (but I wear pearls, too, and everyone knows pearls mean you’re lady!) – about repetitive sex scenes that add nothing to the plot.  (Yes, I am the sort of person who will downgrade an erotic novel because of spelling mistakes.  And I totally will point out if your magic system doesn’t fit in with any magical system known to men.  And don’t get me started on your utopian version of communitarian pre-history.  No.  Just don’t.  And if you’re smart don’t bring it up at a panel with me.  No, just don’t.)

However, there’s something I long ago realized.  I need to repeat myself.  I say it again, I need to repeat myself.

To clarify – I realized sometime ago (Okay, a year or so.  I’m not that bright, and besides, this is pretty hard to believe) that I’m not the center of everyone’s universe.  Specifically, I’m not the center of the universe for everyone who reads either this blog or my books.

To put it bluntly – and shockingly.  I mean, who knew? – you people don’t sit there and wait with rapt attention for me to pronounce myself on something.  When you meet me at cons most of you don’t carry notebooks and pencils to jot down my every utterance.  (A few of you do, of course, for which I’m incredibly grateful.  Also, slightly creeped out.)

What this means, as incredible as it may seem is that I often have to repeat myself.  And by this I don’t mean I have to say exactly what I said before, as in “Get up.”  “Wipe your nose.”  “Learn some history!”  “Think for yourself.”  “Get off my lawn.”  But more subtle stuff.

I’ve long ago found out that not only I but every author must embed the same information at least three times in a novel, if the information is crucial and you want people to get it before you get to the plot point for which it is essential.  Because, you never know – shocking I know! – people might get distracted just as they’re about to read that one paragraph, then unintentionally skip a paragraph.  It might even happen twice.

So, say, if my character has a special psychic power that allows her to talk to bunnies, I might mention it once, then have another character talk about it and then hang a flag on it, by having her hold a conversation with a bunny in a verdant meadow.

If it’s a more shocking psychic power, say an ability to detect a soul in a politician, it might require a couple more repetitions.

This I’ve known and accepted for some time.

But more importantly, I’ve found in doing blog posts that just covering a theme once won’t do.  This is sometimes because, well, things change.  Like, it’s amazing how my view on self-publishing has changed in the last year.  But it’s also because, frankly, people aren’t going to search my blog archive back for four years, or even because their perspective is so different that the way I covered a theme before didn’t make sense, but a slightly different approach will.

This is very difficult for me, since normally I don’t like saying the same thing twice in non-fiction.  I used to think that if I explained things to people just ONCE they’d “get” it and then change their minds (or not.)

But I find that this isn’t true.  Just as with fiction, people need to hear it repeated a few times, before it sinks to the “oh, yeah, of course” level.  The more shocking the topic, the more it needs to be repeated.  And most people, of course, are more willing to die than to think.

So I find that like someone lost in a spiraling labyrinth, I need to repeat myself in a slightly different way each time, and each time the ensuing discussion will reveal people got it SLIGHTLY differently.  Which is fine.  And also the way they get it influences the way I think about it, setting myself up for the slightly different next post on the subject.

It’s a rather startling process.

Yes.  I’m serious.  No, I mean it.

I tell you three times.

As many of you know – because I’ve told you – I don’t have anything against sex. (Well, not at the moment. It would make writing awkward, and besides it would shock the cats.) I have been happily married for twenty six years and I have two sons, neither of which, despite their belief, is a virgin birth.

I am, however, getting sick and tired of sex in books. Oh, not sex as sex. I mean, most of you know I’m not a prude. I can read sex without much worries (except sometimes I wonder if people bend that way – in other planets, I know they don’t on Earth.) I’ll even admit there was a time when I was about 13 or 14 when I would read an entire book for the three paragraphs of sex. I suppose that was part of the age. You see, I’d never had sex, I assumed it would be an eon, give or take, before I had sex, and I wanted to know everything about it.

So, why am I getting sick of it? Because most of it doesn’t mean anything. Worse, it’s dreary to read.

It’s like there is some directive from above on “there must be sex here.” In fact, I know there is a directive out in Romance about x sex scenes at x places in the book. The number of xxx in which book depends on the line, but it’s carefully dictated. I can also say that in one of my series, I was told I MUST have sex scenes, even though I felt that sex didn’t belong in it.

So some sex in books is the result of pressure from what used to be the only means of getting books on the shelves. And on the part of the publishers, themselves, I think it was an effort to cater to what they perceived to be a universal taste.

Is it a universal taste? I don’t know. I can only tell you what I know and what I think.

I think a lot of the sex in books is boring. It makes no sense, it accomplishes nothing. If it doesn’t outright violate the character – really? A regency girl giving it up after one kiss? – it is at best oh um. They kiss they throb they flutter, they grind, they penetrate, there’s things that get hard and things that get moist, there’s how he’s never had it that good and she’s never felt this way before and zzzzzzzzzzz. What? Sorry. It’s just I’ve read so many of these.

Possibly there is some demographic out there whom this satisfies, who feels thrilled at the mere mention of sex. They’re probably thirteen. Or perhaps fourteen. But there are indications that it’s not the ticket to money and success (except insofar as marketing distorts things) that publishers believe it is. There is a certain hysteria of falling numbers and increasing sex under the belief that doing more of what’s failed is a sane business approach. (Do they teach this in the ivy leagues, or something?)

In my opinion, what sells is not explicit sex, but sexual tension (Something I doubt most publishers – jaded by books crossing their desk every day – might not be able to tell with two hands and a seeing eye dog) does sell. Sexual tension – as opposed to sex – makes the reader continue reading, makes us interested, makes us crave the moment when the two would-be-lovers, yearning for each other bur holding back, finally kiss or even touch.

For instance, Georgette Heyer’s Venetia or Silvester have enough sexual tension in it that at the end of the second, the phrase “Sparrow, Sparrow,” has more excitement in it than any of the multi-page anatomically correct sex scenes I ever read. And, FYI, Heyer is still selling very well indeed.

Not that sex is forbidden in this – I’ve read a few urban fantasies in which the sex builds the sexual tension, due to something the character can’t (or shouldn’t) overcome. Or must overcome. The point being the sex becomes part of the plot and entwines the plot and heightens everything else.

On the other hand, in a lot of urban fantasies and in 3/4 of the romances, you could take the sex scene out completely and no one would notice. Well, maybe the publishers looking for the x that marks the spot. And in many books it gets either clinical and dry, or silly and dreary. If you must describe a part of the female anatomy in such exaggeration that it sounds like a cabbage unfolding and unfolding and unfolding yet again, you’ve probably gone too far. Suggestion and indication – note not prudishness and playing keep away – are more… interesting than tons of ink spilled in the service of anatomic descriptions.

The best way to write sex is the best way to write anything else in a plot: irresistible force meets immovable object (again, and again, and again, harder, faster… er… get your mind out of the gutter. And then come back and toss a life preserver to my mind, would you?) Have your character want, crave, need and yet not be able to get for good and sufficient reason (and there must be a real reason, just as the need must be palpable not just “I want it bad.”) And then have all this serve the greater plot. And then, maybe, just maybe you’ll have something worth reading. (And if you’re writing erotica as such, I highly recommend How To Write Erotica by Valerie Kelly. Actually I highly recommend this book for the writing technique of “immediate writing.” She gives very useful hints on what to give in detail and what to shade in. Caution, it has graphic passages. Not for the squeamish or the faint of heart.) On the other hand, if you don’t want to write explicit sex, be brave and original and keep the graphic sex out.

I believe in the indie market place we’ll see more sex and more sexless books too. I can also easily predict that if the sex counts the book will do well, if the sex doesn’t count…. Yawn, who needs it?

*Crossposted at Mad Genius Club*

The care and feeding of a good critique group.

Now that my writers’ email lists are full of chatter about going at least partially indie, having a good writers’ group becomes essential.

The problem is finding a good group. And part of that is what the group is required to be.

In general, we want a writers group that will be:

Supportive during the downs of the writing career – and there will be a lot of downs.

Capable of celebrating the highs of the writing career – this happens too.

Like your writing enough that they don’t start every critique with “To begin with, this didn’t work for me.”

Be objective enough to tell you when your baby is ugly or at least needs to be potty trained

Like YOU enough to put up with you when you go neurotic –you will, if you’re not crazy when you start writing, you’ll get so.

REALLY like you enough to tell you “Okay, now you’re just jumping at shadows.”

This has all to be accomplished in an environment where, often, the only thing you have in common is the writing, you’re each other’s sole, regular social contact (who has time for a social life when you’re writing? Also, as I believe more people will be able to make a living from writing in the new model, more of us will not have day jobs), where you’re to a certain extent all rivals, pursuing the same goal, and where the normal response to your friend achieving a breakthrough in either technique or business is “Will I ever get one, too?” This is also an environment in which people who are incredibly frustrated in their would-be professional lives can feel like they have some sort of power. This often leads to people who become the tyrants of the writers group and exert their tyranny over crazy things like commas or words that don’t come from the same root.

Our group found we could maximize functionality with some hard and fast rules:

-Take the manuscripts home the week before. No reading aloud. Hearing something read is not the same as reading it yourself and someone who reads well and dramatically can paper over issues.

– Try to read them in the same environment you’d read a book.

-No discussing manuscripts in advance of meetings. (This leads to a false consensus. Only one person might have trouble with the schmerps, but by the time you sit down at meeting everyone will be convinced they hated the schmerps.)

– No nitts in spoken critique. I don’t care how many typos the manuscript has. Mark them and go on with life. If awfully typo-ey, then just say “You have an awful lot of typos, do a careful go over before anyone else sees it.”

– two minutes per critique, no extensions. That limits the amount of “think of something to say” and the horrible butchering if someone really hated something.

– if you don’t write, you can’t critique. You’ll be excused maybe a day off, but not more than that. If you haven’t written in two weeks, you can’t critique (this keeps the gods of workshops at bay)

– You’re not competing with each other. You will remember the goal is for ALL of you to be profitably published, and frankly it helps to break in as a group and help the others promote, too.

Things that will help:

If something bad happens, have chocolate. If something good happens, have chocolate. Reserve a bit of time after the critique session for decompression. This doesn’t need to be going out to eat (I had to drop out of a group when I was a young mother because I couldn’t afford dinner AND babysitter) – it can be a coffee in the kitchen of the member at whose house you meet. Learn to laugh together – you’ll need it. Because there will be moments you’ll want to cry.

Oh, and if someone is terrorizing the entire group and you can’t get rid of him any other way, tell him you’re disbanding, then change the time/place of meeting. (Yes, unfortunately we had to do that once. This will happen early on.)

Most importantly: enjoy the process.

 

A few days ago, in my conference, I asked for topic suggestions and one of the ones I got was to write about writers in the media, as compared to the real thing. (BTW, still open to topic suggestions, if any of you want to ping me with one.)

This is more difficult for me to write about than it sounds, because truly, the only time I watch movies is when I’m sick and/or doing something else so mindlessly boring that I need to distract myself. This including ironing or exercising when it’s too snowy for me to go out. So I watch maybe all of five movies a year, a lot of it re-watching old favorites. Yes, yes, I AM odd. As for TV, I watch it even more rarely. I’m NOW catching up with Stargate which is all new to me.

Most of what I know about TV is filtered to me through my husband who watches tv series while exercising, because it’s timed more perfectly to his schedule than movies.

My impression might or might not therefore be valid. However that has never really stopped me from shooting my mouth about stuff I don’t know anything about (I’m a fiction writer. I make crap up. Live with it.)

To begin with, when I was very young, my impression of a writers’ life came mostly through pulp novels, a lot of them pulp sf novels. In them, agents would send their writers off for weekends at borrowed country estates (I’m trying to remember the title. Simak. Tunnel from the future – mind is blank. I can remember the Portuguese title, but that’s the same as the American title for Clark’s Our Children’s Children, which in Portuguese was called “The Book of the Grand Seigneurs” Yeah, that – translation and titles, is probably another post, if anyone has the slightest interest) told them they were working too hard (or not at all), suggested cures (Martians Go Home, Fred Pohl) or came over to make sure their writer was working. Writers worked a lot, very hard. Publishers were shadowy figures, in the background and mostly published whatever they were given.

Of course, you know this is not PRECISELY true. And wasn’t even when I started out. It might have been true in the forties, for pulp authors. I honestly don’t know. When I came in agents were the first slush readers for houses – effectively, if not in name – so not only were they harder to get than (sometimes) a publisher (if you met one at a con, say) but they were often more impersonal than publishers. Very often during my career I had an easier time hearing from a publisher/editor than from an agent. And yeah, no matter how much your agent approved of what you did, publishers STILL culled further. Which, for once in this process, makes perfect sense. (Of course that’s all upended now with ebooks.)

Then I came to the US and started writing in earnest and had what I think is the normal impression – all writers are well off. Well, at least they make enough to be upper middle class, right? It seems logical, given the amount of work that goes into a book, and how few people can do it competently. The ones who aren’t very good don’t last, the ones who last are raking it in.

I was, of COURSE, going to be very good and therefore I would be supporting my husband by the time we hit thirty, and then he could work on his music. (Splort. Giggle. Yeah, that worked out for us.)

Ironically, if I had made a sale back when I was twenty something (I was saleable, mind, I just had clue zero how to go about SELLING. I wasn’t “good” but that’s something else. Tons of people aren’t, who sell. And tons of people are who don’t sell.) at the levels paid to mid list writers then, two books a year would have doubled our income and given us a significant help at the beginning. But I didn’t know how to even start selling, so… Nothing doing.

Little by little I learned better. Which is why now I roll my eyes when I read books (a lot) about some writer with no contacts and no special attributes who just shoots to the top of the charts because she/he’s so “brilliant.”

I see this in the mass media too – and of course, I wish it were true, even if I myself might not be as brilliant as I’d like to be, because as a reader, I’d get wonderful stuff – that if you’re really good you’ll make it big. Often the plot of books/movies, etc with a writer are that of the writer finally breaking through and writing better and enjoying enormous success. This makes for great plotting. It’s also, alas, not true. For the time I’ve been in the business, at least, the publishers have been under the impression that they were Hollywood and that the important thing was to ‘manufacture celebrity’ as a way of selling books. Many times the books themselves weren’t read (that’s how important the quality was) if the proposal met basic standards and the author was “nothing special” in the way of “something we can promote” and not having a “platform” – this meant the author was not particularly beautiful, cool, didn’t have an interesting personal story or (lately) a well-viewed blog, and didn’t know anyone in the business. These were in general relegated to the mid list no matter how brilliant the book might be. (This was responsible for making Sir Terry Pratchett largely unknown in the US while already a bestseller in the UK. Gave me great comfort to know he was selling about what I sell per book. You see, British guy, not particularly sightly, no “platform” – books were pure gold, but you had to FIND them to read them, and distribution in the US was a laydown of about 5k copies per book. [I got very lucky and found him early on because someone in town bought all the British editions, then sold them to my favorite used bookstore.] Their excuse for why he didn’t sell here was “British humor” – it took changing his agent and editor both for him to break out of that slot. I’m sure the numbers from GB helped with that break out. If he’d been an American and published only here, even the greatest writing genius of our time might still be selling 3 to 5k copies per title. If they hadn’t got rid of him yet.)

But sometimes the movies get it at least sort of right. The title of this post is from Sliding Doors (which you absolutely must see if you haven’t.) It is spoken by the main character’s no-good boyfriend and it captures an attitude I’ve often seen among “wanna bes” They want to be writers in the worst way. And they are. As in, they never finish anything, because it has to be a towering work of genius. Someone in their childhood convinced them they’re brilliant, and… well, poor things. From that movie too comes the splortch worthy line of “I know one day you’ll finish your book and we’ll be rich.” My friend Rebecca Lickiss and I laughed till we cried, because see, it is what every new writer – and their relations – thinks and… well, not true. Notably, the rest of the theater thought we were insane. At least no one else laughed, and some people stared. Which tells you how widespread that myth is.

As for Castle, I haven’t watched it. To some extent, the entire idea of his getting ATTACHED to a police unit is silly. Writers write. Yeah, we might go out on a police ride-along (I haven’t, but I don’t write procedurals) but the chance of being that involved just for research is close to nil. We’re more likely to cultivate a police officer buddy and then call them at the most outrageous hours with questions. Another thing my husband told me that made me grin was the idea of the poker game with all these big names. It’s cute. REALLY cute. And it’s not as if you all don’t know each other – bestsellers usually do. And heck, I know tons of bestsellers. It’s just that the chances of you all being in the same place at the same time, much less doing so weekly are zilch.

All the writers I do work like heck, even the bestsellers. And these days publicity/con, etc commitments are as big as contracts, which means chances of you being in the same town at the same time, even you all live there, are almost none. A bestseller friend of mine tries to get a bunch of us local writers together fairly often, and he succeeds about twice a year, if that. Divergent travel/delivery schedules keep us in conflicting “orbits.” The last get-together was one of the better attended. There were about ten of us, but some people were “missing”. There’s always people missing, because of scheduling conflicts. You know how you guys go to cons to see your favorite authors? You know how periodically all authors disappear from the con for hours? Yeah, that’s because what entices US to the con is the chance to socialize with our friends. Weirdly, I sometimes see my friends from here in town ONLY at worldcon, across the country.

However, one thing my husband told me Castle did is sort of true – at least has been true at times in my life and might be true again – I don’t remember the exact quote, but Castle was trying to spin a bunch of stuff about his process and his police partner snaps “You mean, wait till the last minute, then write the book in three days in a caffeine fueled haze?”

What it didn’t say and it’s sadly true (perhaps because like alcohol and drugs, which I advise against, btw, it’s a way of breaking through the conscious constraints which is good for self-doubting authors, like most of them) is that such work is often the best the author does. If it said that, it wouldn’t be a good story, so it doesn’t. But it is the truth, nonetheless.

*I promised a peek at my husband’s novel.  Okay fine I didn’t promise it but — eh eh eh eh eh — he left his computer unwatched (foolish man) and I — eh eh eh eh eh — took the first five pages or so off his drive.  Mwah ah ah ah ah.  Enjoy, because I’m going to be in SO MUCH trouble.*

Chapter 1

Meet Ninth Euclid

 

 

          When I was a skinny boy working on my daddy’s farm, I loved watching the sun rise over the fields.  There was a quiet just before the Oasis dawn that’s simply unparalleled on any other world in the Eternal Empire.  I’d sit in the hayloft in the south barn, whose single window faced the magnificent sunrise, close my eyes, bask in the blissful silence and pretend I was the only child of parents who didn’t talk much.

          It’s the kind of fantasy that could only be created by someone like me, the youngest in a family with ten children.  My surname is Ancel, but nobody remembers to use it, since there’s no other Ninth Euclid in memory. 

          My daddy, displaying a certain lack of imagination and not a little eccentricity, saw fit to name me and each of my eight brothers Euclid.  He said once that he had no idea what the name meant, but that he liked the way it sounded.  The first two boys were twins, and Daddy couldn’t figure which one should be Euclid, so, after two weeks of arguments with my mama, he gave them both the nonsense name.  Everyone called them First Euclid and Second Euclid, so when the next boy came around, he named him Euclid, too. 

          My one sister, Hannah, thought it was funny to call out, “Euclid-one-to-nine,” for family dinners.

          We Euclids all slept in a single room with three large beds, which made for a cacophony of snores keeping me awake most of the night and frequent bruised ribs whenever one of my bedmates decided to turn over.

          So I’d sneak out of bed under the cover of the dark  — easy enough, since with chocolate-colored skin and coal-black eyes and hair, I tended to fade into the background at night.  

          Later, after Lord Oswald hired me away from Daddy’s farm, I found my ability to blend in to be detrimental to dealing with the governors, who tended to assume from my size that I was just some hired muscle, so one day early on in Oswald’s employ, in a fit of utter insanity, I dyed my short, curly black hair bright blue, the predominant color of the skies over my Daddy’s farm.  Coincidentally, as I soon found out, it was also the color the ladies from a particularly discriminating pleasure palace dyed their hair.  After my Lord’s initial shock and a good laugh at my expense when we walked into The Hen’s Coop that very night, I found to my Lord’s delight that it had the unintended benefit of confusing the governors immensely, so I’ve kept my hair blue.

          But, as a child, my hair was still jet black, and I’d stagger unseen, half-asleep, half-awake, the quarter mile or so to the south barn, where I could get some sleep in the pre-dawn silence.  I’d be up with the first rays of ambient sunlight splashing across my eyes, which gave me a few minutes for my only-child fantasy.

          Eventually, one of the roosters — there were two of them sharing a coop, each one somehow believing he was the only rooster around for miles — would stagger out of his coop directly below me and shriek a wakeup alarm.  The other rooster would blurt out a short quip, apparently surprised that there was another rooster around.  He’d crow even louder than the first.  Naturally, the first rooster, amazed that another rooster had encroached on his territory, responded even louder.  Before long, there was a din equaling the crowd’s noise when old Emperor Seraphim VI deigned to visit one of the eighty three planets in his empire.  Well, at least the crowd’s noise when his new Empress, Jewel, stepped out of the space-to-ground transport, in one of her famous shimmering, is-it-transparent-or-isn’t-it gowns and her long, black hair both fluttering about her shapely curves with every step.

          No, on second thought, the roosters were louder.

          Those dueling roosters signaled the start of my day for many years before Lord Oswald happened upon me. 

          Lord Adrian Oswald is actually a prince, one of the many heirs to the emperor — His Grace’s first wife’s sister’s grandson, to be exact — but he prefers to use the title Lord instead.  He says it’s less pretentious.

          A humbler man I’ve never met, perfectly satisfied with his position, with never a thought about advancement beyond the planetary governing of my Oasis.  Although, judging from the way he looks at the Empress Jewel, he’d be more than happy to accept a promotion to emperor if it includes the lovely Jewel as well.

          For nearly a decade now, I’ve been his personal secretary, keeping his appointments, scheduling his entertainments and frequent travels, sometimes even helping with battle strategy when the need arises.  Lord Oswald claims I have a knack for killing people in interesting ways, even if it’s just vicariously through the legion, Prince Oswald’s personally-selected planetary-wide defense troops.

          That’s not to say that I couldn’t kill someone personally.  I stand more than a head taller than most people, almost two heads more than Lord Oswald — even that tall pretty-boy Prince Vere, the emperor’s favorite heir and, not incidentally, grand-nephew, shrinks beside me — and my arms are as big around as a forty-foot elm tree.  Working on a farm for most of my childhood, I developed the muscles to match my size, so killing a man isn’t beyond my abilities.  I’ve just never done it.

          For the last half hour or so, I’d been listening to Lord Oswald’s regional governors bicker among themselves about who was entitled to what taxes and what kind of trade limitations were appropriate and other boring government crap.  I was reminded of the roosters back home on the farm, and I kept drifting away from the arguments, trying to decide if the governors were louder than the roosters or not, even though I was supposed to be taking minutes for the interminable meeting.

          The sound swelled and ebbed cyclically, hypnotically, until at last the spell was broken by the slam of a door.  The echo bounced around the hall in the ensuing silence as every eye in the room instantly found Lady Redwing standing by the only exit.  I glanced at my Lord, who looked ready to admonish the Lady for her interruption before wisely checking his watch.  When he realized what time it was, he merely shut his eyes to the Lady and massaged his temples in a vain attempt to ward off the inevitable headache that accompanied Lady Redwing’s Thursday afternoon visits.

More on the author’s glamorous life…

What? You didn’t know I had one?

Yesterday I engaged in Extreme Ironing and today I need to clean the house before I go away on a professional trip for two weeks. I’m attending Fencon and then staying over to teach a workshop in Bedford, TX. In between I hope – away from kids and cats and assorted other interruptions – to finish several works that are hanging by at thread and perhaps to get some sleep.

I know half of you are going to think it’s weird that I am engaging in housekeeping before leaving and the more daring of you will accuse me of being a downtrodden woman. Very funny. The truth is that our entire family is what can be euphemistically described as “driven.”

My husband, very generously decided to forego the chance to pursue his own artistic ambitions, so I could – sixteen years before I published a novel – which meant if we still wanted to have a comparable lifestyle to our peers, I picked up a lot of the slack. This involved a lot of stuff like ironing and cooking from scratch (yes, I know, but I REALLY cook from scratch) which is considered female-like and exploitative. It also includes furniture refinishing, wall painting and a lot of the other stuff. As for my husband, in addition to his more than 9-5 job he maintains all the computers in this house (I think ten, at last count) and does the taxes which take an unreasonable amount of time because my business is neither easy nor straightforward. Now we’re also trying to phase in some time for his writing, because it’s been years (since the kids became old enough to take considerable time) since he’s been able to do anything with it, and he’s really very good.

As for the kids, they’re teens and prickly, so I won’t go into their lives, but I think Robert is engaged in three or four different “enterprises” as well as keeping a 4.0 in pre-med, and Marsh is doing two or three things in addition to half/college and senior year in highschol, which these days seems to involve a year of sending out applications to colleges, each with the administrative/bureaucratic work load normally associated with filing a brief before the supreme court.

Our lives slot together very precisely to allow us to spend time together and to keep up with our conflicting commitments. That means if one of us is going to be away or incapacitated, it can throw everyone off. Papers don’t get filed with schools, novels get delayed or – and this is usually what happens when I get really sick – the house becomes the sort of screaming mess that takes me months to unravel afterwards.

Since this is not unexpected, I’m leaving some stuff done in advance, and then leaving them with specific charges on what to do. (Because I’m the one at home most of the time, I’m, by default, the manager.) Yes, they can iron (though since I got da machine, they don’t know how to operate that!) and they can clean and they can cook, but not to MY standards without supervision. And I don’t want to come back, after a con, and have to spend a week cleaning. So, today, I set things in order for them.

… which means I really don’t feel like writing a blog post, though it looks like I have…

So, I’ll close off with some stuff about the workshop.

The workshop is to help the Bedford library. (They pay my plane ticket, the rest goes to them.) I’ve done this three times and it’s a lot of fun. I honestly don’t have any idea if it’s full up or not, but if you’re going to be in the area it’s September 30^th to October 1^st. I have no idea how enrollment is this year, but if you’re in the area, look at http://www.bedfordlibrary.org The info should be there somewhere, and if it’s not send them an email.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, I have catboxes to clean.

I know I’ve annoyed people who like it by saying that my first trilogy is really difficult to read. All I can say is that the people who like it have greater linguistic facility than 99.9% of the country and more than I have unless I’ve worked up to it.

I had been reading almost exclusively Elizabethan stuff for six months when I wrote this, and my younger son had memorized half of Shakespeare (at two. Because I played it constantly on TV and audio) so I think I went a little crazy on the style. OTOH it was the style I’d been ASKED to do and also, it has a certain charm of its own, if you are in the mood for that kind of language, or if you’re a die-hard Shakespeare freak.

Now, I know I’ve said at the time I couldn’t plot with two hands and a seeing eye dog, but the truth is that this is not a worry for these novels. I stole the plots fair and square, then changed them to suit me. So, they do have plots. Okay, they’re not connected to the level I can do now, but heck, neither is Darkship Thieves. Nor Darkship Renegades which I turned in a month ago. And probably in ten years, I’ll think me now couldn’t plot AT ALL. The novels are probably more tightly plotted than the average run of the mill fantasy. (Note the two ll. Run of the mil fantasy — hi Larry Correia! — tends to be very well plotted indeed.)

Anyway, all this is in name of Baen brought them out as an e-bundle in their webscriptions. If you click on the covers, it will take you to the place to purchase and you can buy it as a bundle or as individual books.

There’s bonus material with it. One of the extra books is my collection, Wings, which contains short stories published in Asimov’s, Analog, Weird Tales and other venues.

The other is a little harder to explain. You see, when I first finished All Night Awake and sent it to my agent he told me it was horrible, terrible, and I needed to rewrite it according to this… well… formula he had. Anyway — I was young and stupid. With my friend Rebecca Lickiss (I owe you one!) and my husband both screaming “nooooo. Don’t do it” I went ahead and did what he wanted, abandoned my book and wrote the book he wanted me to.

Was the first book better? I don’t know. I know All Night Awake, as published, sold the least of any of my books. I also know that though he gave me a useful pointer “have internal action mirrored by external action” so the first might be way more introspective, the first is also likely to be more in line with Ill Met. So those of you who didn’t like All Night Awake, after liking Ill Met will be glad to know that aggregated with the published All Night Awake, Baen brought out the “forbidden edition” too. It’s completely different except for about thirty pages. Of course, it doesn’t fit in with Any Man So Daring, but it might still be of interest to my die hard fans (Yes, yes, I know who the six of you are [grin].)

So, there it is, it’s now available in ebooks, without DRM and at a reasonable price and those of you who read my sf might get a chuckle at how “literary fantasy” I started out.

The secret, of course, is that I can still do this. It’s actually much easier than doing the action-packed stuff. So, I’ve traded up for a more challenging craft… much to the despair of all my agents and almost all my editors. But I feel less depressed doing it.

And for those who are link impaired as I am, here’s the links, again.

Bundle —     http://www.webscription.net/p-1506-sarah-hoyt-bundle.aspx

Ill Met By Moonlight —

http://www.webscription.net/p-1507-ill-met-by-moonlight.aspx

All Night Awake –

http://www.webscription.net/p-1508-all-night-awake.aspx

Any Man So Daring-

http://www.webscription.net/p-1509-any-man-so-daring.aspx

And Wings:

http://www.webscription.net/p-1510-wings.aspx

My outline said “Lucius wakes up” — that’s all my outline said. Then after that was the rather risky subversive group getting together. So, what came pouring out of my unsuspecting fingers?

I woke up with my curtains being opened, the light coming in to shine against my closed eyelids.

Before my eyes opened, before my conscious mind connected this with the events of the night before, my hand was under the pillow, grabbing the burner, and I’d brought it out, pointing it in the direction of the voice.

“Patrician!” the voice was outraged, rather than shocked, and there was a tinkle of glass, a noise of porcelain, and I opened my eyes to see a man I only very vaguely recognized pouring out coffee into a cup – I knew it was coffee because I could smell it – and setting out toast and who knew what else.

Then I realized the room was full of people. And by that, I mean exactly what I said. Full of people. People swarmed in every possible corner, doing things I only half understood. A team of three people, for instance, seemed to be removing all the suits from the closet, even the stuff that had been Max’s from the drawers.

I turned my attention and – mindlessly – my burner on them. “What are you doing?”

The nearest man, holding an armful of suits, dropped them on the floor. He might also have pissed himself. I don’t know. I didn’t look. But his face had that mortified look, and his eyes crossed slightly as he looked at the burner. I turned the burner safety on, and put it back under my pillow, then crossed my arms. “I said, what are you doing?”

“T-t-t-” the man said.

“Taking your suits, Patrician,” the man behind him said, looking somewhat doubtful. “I mean, your predecessor’s suits. I mean, Mr. Remy said–”

“Where in hell is Nathaniel Remy?” I asked, because I hadn’t seen him in the crowd, and realized only now that this seemed odd, since he’d fallen asleep in front of my door. I snorted. His master’s door indeed.

“Nat- Nat- Nat-” the man who’d dropped my suits said.

“Do you wish to speak to Nathaniel, Patrician?” Sam’s voice from near my bedside table. I turned to see him holding a bunch of those papers that could only be signed by the touch of the thumb with the right genetics, the kind of thing my father seemed to always be doing.

“I want to know why he’s interfering with my clothes!” I said, and then realized that I was yelling at a man who was twice my age, who looked incredibly tired, who’d spent half the night up helping defend the house, whose underlings had got wounded and possibly killed, and who had always been kind to me. I said immediately, “I’m sorry, Sam. I’m not a morning person.”

“Do you wish to keep those clothes?” he said. “Nathaniel didn’t make those decisions. I did. I noticed that the clothes you were wearing don’t fit you, and I presumed from the fact that you were wearing what the last Good Man wore before ascension that you didn’t like the more… vital suits he chose afterwards? We had some clothes made, though far from a complete wardrobe, and I thought–”

I waved my hand. “Sorry.” I looked at the terrified man, and waved at him, “Carry on, never mind me.” Then turned back to Sam. “Who are all these people? Why are they in my room this early in the morning?”

Sam cleared his throat, “Those people,” he pointed. “Are making sure that your windows are secured, and the balcony door too. Last night, they used a disrupting device that unlocked the back door. We must make sure–”

“Fine, fine.”

“Those people are making sure that any drinks in the drink table are replenished. Those people,” he pointed to five people by the window. “Are merchants of the seacity, whose business is disrupted by our present… situation, and they would like to talk to you. And those people,” he said, pointing to four men by the entrance to the bathroom. “Are waiting to help you bathe and dress.”

I opened my mouth. Then I closed it. I’d read about rulers in the middle ages and shortly after. I’d read about rituals called the levee, in which everyone who had business with the king came to see him rise, and talk to him while he went about the necessary wakening things. I remembered being highly amused by stories of how courtiers would loiter around while the king answered a call of nature, or turn a blind eye while the king’s latest fling slipped out of the king’s bed and through the door.

It wasn’t so amusing to be in the position of those poor kings, though I supposed, now that I thought about it, that the government of the seacity and its territories was much like the government of one of the medieval countries. Certainly I was the ultimate and absolute ruler. I didn’t know why I was surprised. But I knew why I was upset. I’d be damned if I’d wake to this every morning. Perhaps my fath– whatever the hell he’d been to me, had enjoyed it. Perhaps it made him feel how important he was. Maybe he liked that.

I wanted privacy to take a leak. I wanted a cup of coffee. And I’d be damned if I was going to have four men help me bathe.
Sigh. I need my head examined.

I have some experience with revolutions, partly because Portugal never believes a thing worth doing is worth doing only once. I get PTSD at the sound of Green Acres because Porto had one reel in its local broadcast station. Green Acres. When Lisbon got cut off, they played it back to back. This meant that someone had taken over the main broadcasting station in Lisbon.

(Okay, here I should explain that Portugal had two broadcast stations. Yes, I had a deprived childhood. [Yes. I spelled that right. I’m quite sure it’s an I.] Only one of them broadcast during the day at all, and that limited hours. So usually my experience was come home from school and watch something on lunch break and… ack… Green Acres. I wonder who is in now.)

For those who wonder why I’m “obsessive about my Portuguese background” – I’m not, but this kind of childhood experiences mark a person. I think this is why I’ve always been fascinated by revolutions. The ones that go right. The ones that go wrong. And the ones that go very wrong.

I read obsessively about the French revolution, the American revolution, the Russian revolution, and other, less obvious, revolutions. Like… The industrial revolution, or even the agricultural revolution.

Societies don’t change easily. People don’t change easily. Societies are worse than that. They’re slow to change like dinosaurs whose signal has to travel from head to tail and if it’s in full careen, it’s going to take a while to stop, let alone turn around.

One of the things I’ve noticed, in recent times, is that revolutions have another issue, particularly social revolutions of the non-bloody kind. Knowing you’ve won. Knowing it’s now, not thirty or fifty or seventy years ago.

Often when I’m talking to people, particularly people of an academic bend, I find myself wondering what world they’re talking about. It’s the silly little things, like “Oh, a woman would never dare say/do that,” when I saw women do it just that morning. Or “the neighborhood will get upset if there’s a non married couple” – what, like that one, that one and, oh, yeah, that one?

I will grant you that every once in a while, one comes across a person or persons who seem to be a blast from the stereotypical past, but my kids schools’ have more trouble with unwanted pregnancies than with girls being sent home to put on a longer skirt.

One of these effects of “delayed realization you won” keeps annoying me. Lately there have been any number of women writers complaining that they’re not proportionally represented as science fiction writers. They’re not being taken seriously and this is because they have vaginas. Etc. etc. etc.

Now, I’ve been this field for ten years as a published author. First of all let me get out of the way that there are some prejudices in this field, usually evinced by people you wouldn’t expect. For instance, I was pushed rather strongly fantasyward, in part because I had the v word. (Yes, verve.) And a friend of mine who is a physicist, was told that she should write fantasy, not science fiction, because she was a woman and therefore had the heart of a fantasy writer. (To which Rebecca Lickiss answered that yes, but it was in a locked drawer, and besides the statute of limitations had expired.)

There are other, more subtle prejudices. Some people told me they never read women writers, because they can’t write action. Weirdly, when they read me, they have no problems. I don’t worry about it. I just wait till they come around.

And btw, any male writing in romance or a romance-germane field, like certain forms of urban fantasy gets the opposite pressure, I’m sure. It’s all part of no one having a perfect life, and other people having certain expectations. My husband, for instance, had trouble placing his space opera (still hasn’t) because it’s character development oriented. (Yes, he actually got rejected by someone who told him it read too much like Bujold. No, I’m not joking.)

However, claims that women are discriminated against in fantasy always make me laugh. And claims that women as writers are discriminated against make me laugh even harder. And then there’s the post at MGC two days ago, and the comments – my Lord, the comments. Part of what got to me was seeing my friend Dave Freer getting attacked for making a perfectly reasonable and polite comment. Well, I was brought up to think part of my job was to give voice to those who didn’t have one, whether they be battered women in Portugal or silenced and demonized males in the US.

First let me establish there was a time I called myself a feminist. This is because I believed in the equality of women. I still do.

This doesn’t mean that women should be exactly the same as men. Or that they should behave exactly the same way. In fact, any such notions were pretty much dispelled by the time I came of age in the seventies. The average man and the average woman are very different creatures. And I strenuously object to such things as the fire fighters tests being rewritten so that you don’t need to do a fireman carry to pass. OTOH I heavily endorse any woman who is able to pass non “rewritten” tests being a fire fighter if she so wishes. And that’s because the median of anything is not the only person – there’s also the extremes. For instance, bad as I am at spacial reasoning (sad that) I am miles better than some males (okay, none that I’ve met, but I’m sure there are some. Maybe they were hit really hard on the head.) In fact I pretty much occupy the far outlier extremes of a bunch of categories (and I’m not saying which extreme.) As such, I am sympathetic with outliers. And I think letting people do what best suits them, without judgement, censure or barriers is best for everyone.

I believe in equality before the law not equality of results.

I still believe the same things, but I’m not calling myself a feminist, partly because the word has gotten corrupted. A lot of people seem to think the only way to elevate women is to degrade men. Others seem to be on a permanent hunt for offense, including attacking perfectly innocent words – no, history does NOT mean his-story. Please, study some linguistics.

This is many flavors of wrong, for many reasons, but the main reason is that it leads to a sort of permanent revolution. This reminds me of when the French revolution had got rid of every aristocrat either through beheading or immigration and had started attacking as aristos people who could read. Or people who dressed better than the others. Or people who used the word “roi.”

This is the sign of a revolution that has become its own reason to exist, and which will consume its own partisans, until it all ends in a sea of blood or until it’s stopped at last by a “strong man” of some sort, and suppressed for good. And at that point no one complains, because, frankly, it’s a relief.

Part of what disturbs me about this is that the justification for the “permanent revolution” is that we “could lose all the gains tomorrow.” You know, like if we don’t jump behind the latest harebrained “offense” campaign, next thing you know we’ll end woman suffrage (and good riddance, women have suffered enough! – Yes, yes, it’s a joke. And yes, I’m aware there is no joking in feminism. Another reason I no longer use that word.)

But the advances are fragile in another way. Much as I hate to say this, women’s gains rest on two things – one of them is safe contraceptives. The other is a stable western civilization. (No, I’m not even going to argue that. You want to live anywhere else in the world, be my guest. I wouldn’t, though.) And both of them can be lost more easily than you think.

Western civilization can be demoralized and subverted from within by a contingent of males who feel like women exist to punish them. Males who have been treated as criminals or morons or both from kindergarten on. Males whose education and employment figures, if reversed (i.e. if women had the same stats men have in the US today) would be a real offense and a call for investigations and remedies. Males who, btw, have never discriminated against anyone (most of them, at least) and whose fathers and, for that matter probably grandfathers, never discriminated against anyone.

These males can very easily see how women are treated in the rest of the world and, if pushed enough, form a concerted effort to subvert the current rules of behavior. (And no they haven’t done it yet. They haven’t even THOUGHT of doing it, yet. Again, don’t get me started. I lived in a country that is Western but only just. I know what discrimination is better than most people my age or even slightly older.)

I love the women who say it’s just the way the pendulum is swinging and that it’s right for it to go to far in the direction of privileging women. Let me enlighten you – if this is a pendulum, it’s one that has men as its favorites. Men are physically stronger and more aggressive. Any devolution from civilization to barbarism, or even any prolonged disruption in the economy that, oh, say, interrupts the production of contraceptives, and men will have to be very, very good not to be in charge. And if you’ve been pushing your little pendulum with glee and joy, don’t be surprised if they push it as far as they can the other way, till you’re in a world out of your worst nightmares.

You’ve won the revolution. Do you know what the mark of a GOOD revolutionary is? He knows when to put down his musket and go back to his farm. He knows when to shake hands with his neighbor who was on the other side. He knows when to make his rule so just, so fair that no one would contemplate returning to the former rule.

And he does not look for counter revolutionaries under ever bush and hallucinate that the war is still ongoing. Because then they just lock him up and beg the old regime to take over once more. Or start looking around for a Bonaparte.

Since I and my sons and my potential grandsons and maybe even granddaughters have to live in this world too, I beg you to come to your senses.

*http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdT9oq7VBDA

Years ago, when I was just starting to figure out the writing thing, I attended Kris Rusch’s and Dean Wesley Smith’s Master Class (which they no longer teach, though they teach other classes, useful in the current situation) in Oregon.

One of the things they told me which I didn’t fully believe was “You never outgrow problems, in writing. You just trade in for bigger problems.”

This seemed like duck speak. I mean, at some point you become a professional. That problem you have, on how to start a story? It goes away. And besides, you’re selling practically everything you write. What can you possibly worry about?

Perhaps my biggest fear at the time was that I wasn’t a real writer. No, please, don’t ask me to explain. It doesn’t make sense to me, even now. Perhaps it was that so many people at parties, so many arbiters of other people’s lives informed me “you’re not published, so you’re not a real writer.” Perhaps it was my mom’s more or less constant refrain of “when are you going to quit the writing non sense and concentrate on something real?” Perhaps it was that when I was little writers were some sort of heros. They lived in another country, and you know, everything was easier there.

It never occurred to me, to be honest, that any of the people I admired were once, themselves, unpublished and that some of them – Bradbury – wrote a lot before he could break into publishing. No. In my mind, the “real writers” always knew how good they were. Which left me as a fraud and a put-on. And so no one was ever going to buy me.

Nineteen years ago, when the older boy was little, I used to go for walks with him in his pram, and think about stories, but also day dream about the day that would never come, when I was published, and no longer had to worry about whether I really was a writer. I remember vivid wishing that myself from the future would just come back and tell me I was published. It would make everything so much easier, without the constant doubt.

Shortly after that workshop (actually at the workshop, in the editor-pitch-session) I sold my first book. So, did the heavens open? Did the angels sing?

No. I knew it was a mistake. Not mine. Theirs. They’d made a horrible mistake, I was a fraud, and soon they’d find out.

Weirdly what cured this was my first series collapsing. Here is was. The worst had happened. When, despite that, I kept selling, I coined the term Zombie Career TM and forged on.

But the fear was always – as has been for most midlisters for the last ten years – that I’d never sell again. The only way to keep writing involved not thinking about sales, but thinking instead about the things that mattered: how well written the book was; how much promo I did (I did a LOT for Darkship Thieves, for instance); cherishing the fan letters and the fans in my conference.
The fear of not selling again is gone. Or rather, it’s oddly twisted, sideways and backwards.

I think at this point, ten years in, and with some regular fans, what I should be worrying about is never making it to bestseller. Or perhaps that my particular brand of writing will stop. (Okay, guys, yeah, that’s silly for me, since I write so many different genres, but it is vital for many people. When Horror collapsed it left a lot of stranded writers.)

But instead, here are my fears right now and what I’m doing to counter them. (Is it enough? Who knows. I’ll do more as it occurs to me.)

1 – That I’ll never be a bestseller because there won’t be such a thing as a bestseller list.

Answer: Who cares? Some bestseller lists, done a certain way, are real measures of success. However a lot of bestseller lists are cooked and reflect either laydown or customer confidence. So, who needs them? The only real bestseller list is reflected in bank accounts. Which brings us to:

2- What if my name recognition/fan base/publicity efforts aren’t enough, and I end up not being able to make even the little living I’ve made at this for the last few years?

Answer: Other people are making a living, so there’s a way to. Promote more. Research the market more. Write more. Establish different sources of income. Subscriptions. Donation buttons. Non fiction. Anything else I can think of. Meanwhile cherish the publishers I mean to keep working with, and keep my fingers crossed behind my back. Finding a way not to sleep or to write while asleep would help, too.

3 – What if my favorite publisher goes under? What if my favorite novel-under-contract gets trapped in publishing h*ll due to bankruptcy or lawsuits? What if something horrible happens and I can’t possibly self-publish or go small press? What if traditional publishers somehow pull a double-reverse and they’re the only ones that survive, and we’re back to the state before all this, and I’ve blown it by firing my agent and going indie?

Answer – The unknowable is the unknowable. And right now no one KNOWS everything for sure. Yeah, we could all die tomorrow, buried in ash. Or publishing in all its forms could stop existing, which means I can default to cleaning houses for a living or something. Meanwhile, I do the best I can. I keep up with changes and try to second guess the best I can. And if it all goes wrong? Well, I’ve been at the bottom before. I’ll come around again.

And what would I tell my younger self, if I could go back? Would I tell her that I’m published, I’m a real writer? Would I tell her not to be afraid?

No. Who knows? Perhaps my/her fear was necessary to keep writing.

Would I give her specific advice that worked then? Like, “do more cons.” Or “participate in Genii boards online”? I don’t know. If I’d gone that route, I could have ended up in a different place career wise. Yes, yes, I could have been amazingly wealthy and successful. Or I could have been unpublishable and blacklisted years ago.

So, what would I tell my younger self? If I could, I would send back in time the print outs that I have pinned to the corkboard to the left of my desk. One of them says “If you must walk on thin ice, you might as well learn to dance.” The other has a General George s. Patton quote: “Success is how high you bounce when you hit the bottom.”