According To Hoyt

Greetings, ladies, gentlemen, dragons, pterodactyls and assorted creatures of nameless dread. Alas — for me at least — it’s that time of year again, the second annual blog fundraiser. (The first is here)

This is the one post in which I explain it all. From here on out, to the 16th of the month, I will just put a note at the end of the post and a link to this post for those curious.

If you’re rolling your eyes and don’t want to read the explanation, here are the short, (snorts “short”) instructions:

1- If you wish to donate by the simplest, fastest method, the give send go from last year is still up: Here.
2- If you want to encourage my fiction writing as well as fund the blog, through subscribing to my fiction substack, Chapter House, go Here.
3- And if you want to subscribe to my other substack, Schrodinger Path, go Here. That second was supposed to be just my newsletter, but people started giving me money there, and so I excerpt stuff there too.
4- I also have a patreon and those who are paid members really should bitch at me about it, because I treat it worse than substack, but … BUT I try, truly. (and explanation of what went wrong will come later. It’s all one piece.) There will be more posts about cats, I promise. Anyway, go here to do that, if you’re comfortable with Patreon.
5- If you want to donate via pay pal, please ping me in email and I’ll send you the address. (I don’t have it on the site, so as not to invite shut down due to unapproved political opinions, but I still have one, because some publishing houses pay that way.)
6- And if you want to donate by mail, please send to Sarah A. Hoyt, 304 S Jones Blvd #6771, Las Vegas, NV  89107. Note on the last we’re also okay with you keeping it for Christmas cards (We’re just really bad at sending responses) or catnip mice (not live ones!) for Indy or whatever. Those aren’t donations, just friends keeping in touch.

AND if you still want to skip my analysis of what went right and wrong the previous years and why I’m doing this, what it means, and why yes I actually do need it, even though it’s NOT a rescue blog and you shouldn’t hurt yourself to donate, search for the words “I HAVE A QUESTION FOR EVERYONE NOW” capitalized, at the end of this blog, if you want to weigh in on that.

Now, for those of you who stayed around and don’t mind my extensive bloviating: As you all know I hate doing this. Always have, always will.

Thing is I’m I’m still being threatened or at least nagged by people who care about me if I don’t give them the chance to throw money at me for playing hostess for this very Odd living room we’re all chatting in. And also, frankly, I still feel guilty for all the 15 or so years I refused to do this and took the family through some very tight times because I did the work but never got paid for it.

My main reason not to fund raise all those years was that I was afraid people would give too much and hurt themselves. I still am a little afraid of this, so for the record: THIS IS NOT AN EMERGENCY, DON’T HURT YOURSELF AND MAKE ME USE A CARP, OR WORSE THE CHANCLA ON YOU. You know I hate to live down to stereotypes.

So, because , I still feel guilty about it, and like I must explain the fundraiser, in its various forms, first be aware that even those forms of funding that encourage fiction writing are ultimately for the blog.

The blog, you see, is a harsh mistress. I can’t remember the last time I took a break from it, though the posting gets really flaky at times. I think my last intentional vacation from the blog was ten years ago, when I used the time to paint and redecorate a bathroom.

Other than that, I wake up every morning and do the blog. Even on vacation. Or at cons. I tried to do it five years ago from Portugal, (with mixed success) and I did it while working on the house in Colorado to sell.

Even the minor things, like the meme posts, I know there are people waiting for them because they tell me it makes their weekend, and if I don’t get to them late at night (It’s been strange lately and I maybe can explain why) I do them in the morning while Dan waits impatiently, because Saturday is errand running day.

Remember to send me you book promos for Sunday (email to bookpimping at outlook dot com.) And don’t sweat the wording. ALL I need from you is a link. I like doing that. I feel like it’s some good I do in the world to give good people a chance to tell others their book is out.

The rest of the blog… Look, I realize no one is forcing me to do it. And I’m the worst of fundraisers, because I’m not going to pretend that I am going to stop the blogging if you don’t donate. I probably should. I mean, it might be the sane thing to do. To stop blogging, I mean, not to threaten you.

But as I told a friend last weekend who asked me why I did it and what difference it made: What I do is analyze things and get the thoughts out there. I’m under no illusions that I’m making a big difference in the world. And I’m certainly not saving the world. (There isn’t a trapper-keeper that big.) However we’re in a time of vast and catastrophically rapid change. Those of us with a tendency to think (perhaps as everyone accuses us of, “too much.”) need to know what’s going on and how to mitigate the worst. And all the lies (so many lies) we’ve been told… well, our whole lives, really. And while it doesn’t make a big, instant difference, I believe my thinking through issues in public is like throwing a pebble in a big lake. Sure, most of the pebbles will vanish with only little ripples, but sometimes — maybe — the ripples might go all the way to the shore, and raise other ripples (look, the metaphor breaks a little, okay) which might be the difference between a really bad road and a less bad one. One that allows a chance for human freedom and sanity in the future.

And maybe I’m lying to myself. Maybe this is the part where the blog also serves to keep me what passes for sane around these parts. But I hope not. I hope those ripples count for something.

I personally have long felt the truth is part of whatever it is that we are on earth to do.

While on that, and in the sense that at least to me the blog is a machine for understanding our rapidly, catastrophically changing world, I want to thank everyone who sent me guest posts in their specialties the last year. Not only did it allow me to run fewer blasts from the past when I’m sick or really exhausted, but it also added knowledge I don’t have and therefore can’t share.

Now, if I’m not going to stop blogging, why should you donate? Well, I’ll be honest: at this point mostly so I can write more, particularly more fiction. And so I don’t accidentally drive myself into the ground.

Let me explain: I’m sixty one. That seems like a thoroughly unlikely thing to write, much less to be true. Which I suspect is part of my problem.

My mind still thinks I’m at most 30 and I try to do the same level of work I always did. Which means … well, that I end up doing things much slower, because what used to take me a day now takes me a week (not the writing but any physical work) and then I spend a week recovering. Which is very annoying of my body.

But the problem with that is not by body as such, but Dan’s. Until he can have knee replacement, I must do pretty much all the work of house maintenance and yard care as well as my normal housekeeping, cooking, laundry, and other normal stuff. And the problem is that things like painting the porch, which should take me three hours and then I’m fine, is taking me 2 days and I’m a wreck after. (The other problem being we moved three years ago and I’m still unpacking/setting up, which also take forever and are exhausting.)

Anyway, none of this would matter, except that it takes away time that should be spent writing. That I want to spend writing. At Liberty Con last week, people asked for the second of Rhodes or Deep Pink, for the next Dyce, the next DST, the next Shifters. And all of them are started and in some measure of finishing, except…. well, except we suddenly need to clean or setup something (say, so we can put the car in the garage because there’s hail coming, so we must unpack everything that has been crammed in the garage for two years) and there go two weeks. Some of you who are on various groups with me have seen this happening. Even with No Man’s Land, the book that MAKES me write it, the last two weeks sometimes I only get a sentence done, because I have maybe ten minutes at night to write.

Look, I need to pay people to paint, to tuckpoint, and maybe get a couple of helpers (to be fair, probably younger son and younger DIL, but still. They are good kids and help all the time, but he has a more-than-full-time job and she’s started a business and I don’t feel I can steal their time without at least some payment.) to help me move stuff around so I can unpack my library and have A living room without killing myself.

It’s been borne upon me — by one of you yelling at me this weekend (in a very nice way) — that I’m not a skilled laborer for tuckpointing and painting or yard care, including weeding the thrice d*mned flowerbeds and that I’m foregoing the opportunity to write books and make money to do this, which isn’t a rational economic decision.

And that’s true, but the thing is before I hire someone I need to have money in hand. So I need money to make money. Which is the big point of the fundraiser this year. (In addition to being money for work done.)

And this segues neatly into what went wrong the other years. And why the updating on even Chapter House is sporadic.

It’s mostly time. I’m supposed to be doing my blog posts in the evening while Dan watches TV (Look, he works a more than full time job and that’s how he rests. By blanking the mind.) Sometimes it even works. But if I’ve been running around, weeding and shredding fallen branches or tuckpointing, painting — and here I admit I’ve never got on the roof to figure out how we get a damp patch on my bathroom ceiling. Need to, but I’m terrified of heights. — of a dozen other things, I might manage a chapter or two paragraphs of NML but I can’t write a blog. And so here I am at almost 3pm writing my blog. And I just realized I forgot to update the substacks and patreon last night. I meant to.

Now, there are other things that went wrong in the other years, because this fundraising thing is a process of figuring out the best way to do it, I think.

I figured out after the first year that there are problems with emailing things out (mostly anti-piracy stuff) and also that I suck at mailing out physical books. I will try again to send the USAian shorts collection out soon (I did not forget) and now that we’ve ALMOST unpacked the boxes of books formerly in the garage, I need to send out the physical books before the end of summer. I just suck at this, because I run out of time and forget. I also haven’t tuckerized of mass-killed (or math killed) people due to running out of time and energy. All I can say is my assistant is compiling lists, and I will get to it, I promise.

As for Chapter house, I had someone upbraid me here for not having done as much in that as I meant to. I confess that I launched the Chapter House, with the idea that it would give me a deadline to force myself to write consistently. I had high goals of finishing two novels there, in a year.

Instead it turned out to be a window into my writing process, complete with discovering several chapters in that one of the books I was struggling with was from the wrong point of view and has to be completely rewritten, dry spells for various health crisis, and a very pushy novel has decided now, after decades, that it must be written or I am not allowed to write anything else. So I have been putting No Man’s Land up there.

To be fair that thing has to be done soon (If I can do a chapter a day again, as I was doing through May, about 10 days from now, I think.) And then I can finish Witch’s daughter which is hanging by a thread, and then go back to Winter Prince and make it make sense. If you subscribe to Chapter House (or Schrodinger Path) you’ll get basically unedited e-arcs at the end of this. “What the writer turned in.” And maybe a chance to buy an edited/etc. copy before it goes on Amazon. (Mostly because I know a few of you don’t do Amazon. And that’s fine.) I just wish I were faster, etc.

As for what I did with the fundraiser from last year. Well. I did do some stuff, even if we didn’t hire someone to tuckpoint and paint. Besides allowing me to take care of the end-of-life cats, including boarding them when we travel, to make sure they get meds, and helping friends and family with some urgent needs….

Last year’s fund raiser allowed me to pay a… sort of office manager. You know her as Holly Frost.

Younger son was sort of doing this the last 3 years in Colorado (as well as helping with cleaning, house repairs, etc.) But… well, he got a job, moved out and got married. And since I hope for grandkids, that’s a good thing. So with the fundraiser money, I hired Holly Frost, who is why fewer of the guest posts have gone missing, why more of the comments get fished out of the delende of wordpress, and who organized hiring and project management to get Mad Genius and ATH fixed up on the back end so they run better, even with WordPress’s updates. And also have my most recent books on the side, and not the ones from 10 years ago.

She’s currently trying to get a web designer to do my writers’ site which has been empty for years. Yes, I guess that will cost more money.

Her insane work also involves reminding me to take the cats in to the vet and reminding me that I am not, in fact, twenty years old, and I cannot, in fact, work for 18 hours moving heavy boxes and bounce back with four hours of sleep. My “bounce back” is closer to a week, and is needed after only eight hours, or driving for a weekend, or someone attacking a voodoo doll in Peru and giving me another autoimmune outbreak. Getting old is not for the weak.

So, she also nags me to eat and “drink some water already” and “have you SEEN a vegetable this last week.” (Sigh. I just realized I’m paying someone twenty years younger than me to be my mom.)

In addition money went for professional copy-editing, and this year I’d like to get structural editing as well. It’s not something I often need but NML (Aka the d*mned book) is driving me bonkers.) I’m not paying for copy editing for the blog because you guys told me not to. Let me know if you change your minds.

We should have got new computers last year at close of year, because well, it’s cheaper on the taxes and it was getting to that time. But between my getting sick and our being really busy, we didn’t. Which is why I’m writing this with a keyboard atop the laptop keyboard. And why a new laptop is on the docket soonest.

To reiterate, same as last year, there will be three main routes for fund raising.

GiveSendGo, for which I make no promises; Chapterhouse, for which I will give you my fiction that is in process, yes there will be typos; and Patreon, for which I give you cat pspsps posts. For the more exotic reasons: email me for paypal address or email address. The book promo email at will do: bookpimping at outlook dot com.

I HAVE A QUESTION FOR EVERYONE NOW: WordPress is obviously jealous of substack and now gives me the option of having paid subscribers posts.

I haven’t done anything with it, because, well…. I haven’t. It’s one more thing, right? But one thing that has disappointed me about substack (which I do not intend to abandon!) is that while admirable as a newsletter because it is emailed out there is far less engagement than when I excerpted Witchfinder here. And I like the engagement and the back and forth. So, should I enable the paid posts, and would some of you like to follow fiction here that way? (Advantage of using it for fiction is that if they track the paid posts they really will have trouble finding anything political/objectionable in them.)

What say you, assorted creatures of mystery?

And now, with apologies for this overlong and very late post, I’m going to try to write a chapter.

NOTE: The illustration, like others on this blog, are released under creative commons. Yes, they are AI but long story they are, yes, copyrighteable. And not public except here. So feel free to take if you want it. Or ask me for adjustments, if it’s for a cover.

BOOK PROMO

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM JERRY BOYD: Steamed Punks

A truly strange derelict leads the crew to a planet that doesn’t quite make sense. Figuring it out takes time, and hard work. Fixing it takes even more. Come see how BSR deals with their latest adventure.

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Certified Public Assassin

Working as a Certified Public Assassin was, after all, the fastest way to pay down millions of dollars of medical debt. Between that payment and the student loans from getting her associates’ degree, she’s barely making enough to keep body and soul together, but the debt’s almost gone.

Except…she’s paid her student loans. Many times over. There’s something going on, and her handler can’t figure out what. Hiring a hacker to track whatever’s glitching in the student loans database and programming seemed to be a logical next step; however, it isn’t just a glitch. Somebody’s got it in for Molly…and for everyone that has a license to kill.

This has barreled from circumstance through happenstance, and straight into enemy action. But who’s the enemy?

FROM JOHN-RICHARD THOMPSON: Ramses Faro and The Labyrinth of the Crocodiles: Mysteries and Adventures of a Feline Egyptologist

Egypt, 1927. The Feline Egyptologist, Ramses Faro, and his two young companions Felicity and Sharrif, have stumbled upon a key to an ancient treasure of the pharaohs. Pursued by the; wicked cobra, Countess Serpentina von Hyss, their quest takes them from the hidden chambers beneath the Temple of Kom Ombo, to the pirate-infested waters of the Nile, and dep within a lethal maze hidden beneath the desert sands – all in the hope of unlocking the secrets of The Labyrinth of the Crocodiles.

Thrilling, furry fun for ages 8 – 99+ who are fans of Adventure, Egyptology (and cats!), with a story and setting that is both educational and engaging. Curiosity, danger, and mystery collide in a fast-paced tale that propels Ramses Faro and his friends into places unseen by the world for over two thousand years.

FROM TIM GILLILAND: Secret Agent To The Stars: Book Two of Lawyer To The Stars

Honor. Integrity. Brains.

Damien Durne, former Genetics researcher and occasional attorney has been recruited by the Protectorate Intelligence Service to be a field agent – much to his own surprise. But the threat to human kind from an enemy civilization is real, and The Protectorate is on the brink of war – one that they will certainly lose. His mission to discover the foe and prevent the annihilation of all mankind takes him from mountainous summits, to the edge of the abyss, and into the arms of the woman no man can resist.

JON LAFORCE: Hell’s Belles: Love and War Downrange

Two souls collide in the middle of a deadly war.

Sylvie Lyons, of Her Majesties’ Royal Engineers, had joined the Army to follow in the footsteps of her granddad, despite everything the old man had warned her about. Now a Sergeant, she promised herself as she sat in her truck and sweated in the heat of an Afghanistan summer, she would pay more attention to his advice. Being in some politicians’ bright idea of an experimental unit didn’t mean a bloody thing when an IED went off or an RPG decided that it had your number.

Sergeant Hondo Cassidy, United States Marine Corps, loved his job as an artilleryman. Nothing in life is better than throwing hate at the Taliban, along with anybody else who wants to buy in for a whipping. He was, however, looking forward to heading out of the sandbox, as the Marines called anything in the Middle East, shortly. When the word came down that Cassidy’s platoon was being kept in Afghanistan to provide security for Lyons’ engineers, he was more than a bit ticked off, but orders were orders.

FROM OLEG SAPPHIRE AND ALEXEY KOVTUNOV: The Healer’s Way (Book 1): A Portal Progression Fantasy Series

I was the most powerful healer in my world — the best, having devoted my entire life to mastering the art of healing. And yet, for whatever reason, my brother feared that I sought to claim his throne, and he marshaled his forces against me.

Anyway, it doesn’t matter, all the same I’d been planning on trying out a certain ritual and now…

I’m in another world altogether!? And this body I’m inhabiting, well, it’s not mine, but some young guy’s! And what’s it mean that in this world the gift of the healer is downright pathetic?

Apparently, they simply don’t know how to handle power.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Fair Trade: An Alien Invasion Story

Most of my writing is in a series people seem to enjoy but there is a constant small crowd who say: I’d really like your take on an alien invasion story. Well this is for them. The bulk of the aliens come to Earth stories assume their vast superiority, sometimes invincibility. Sometimes they suddenly appear on the white house lawn dictating terms. I have yet to see one with them appearing at the Kremlin or Canberra which seems rather parochial. Other times they are so advanced they quarantine the Earth or Solar System without discussion because we are such barbarian slime-balls. They may alternately be impossible to talk to and attack without mercy. All these assume they come with a plan and the means to carry it out. Our own age of exploration showed things happen much less orderly. Islands and natives were happened upon while seeking someplace else or even because a storm or miscalculation left the ship lost. In that case there is no plan but survival with the assets at hand. As with any game remember that turnabout is fair play.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Under the Earthline: A Science Fiction Lost Colony Adventure (Martha’s Sons Book 3)

He’s a pawn between a politician’s vengeance and his family’s safety. In a space settlement on the verge of turmoil, he’ll play to win… or die trying.

With only a slender hold on their alien world, human settlers from a marooned starship inhabit a single terraformed valley. As technology frays, as the second generation of settlers cannibalizes its past, and as the governor cancels elections again, tension grows between the city and the western farms.

One Dawe son dead, one in exile, and Thaddeus Dawe now slated to serve as a hostage for his younger brother’s crimes, Thaddeus has a task. He must locate the colony’s last terraseeder for the secret enclave another brother works to carve from the northern wilderness. But with the governor’s men harboring no love for Dawes, and First Landing’s bureaucracy and its preeminent practitioner having other plans, Thaddeus is not the only one whose life is at risk.

Pick up Under the Earthline now for a tale of adventure, loyalty, and love!

FROM MARY CATELLI: Queen Shulamith’s Ball

A ball, a ball, Queen Shulamith would hold a ball. . . .In the magical city that all kingdoms can reach, and none can conquer, filled with kings and queens, intrigues and wonders, that the reclusive queen would stage a ball was a marvel among marvels.It will mean much to many: a young woman newly arrived in the city; a woman and a bear who dance on the street; two small orphans sent to the house of their great-great-grandfather; soldiers staging an invasion; and a queen securing her position.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: Rockin’ the USA

It’s not easy being married to the leader of the band, even in the best of times. When everything becomes political, you’ve got a nightmare on your hands.

Laurel had her doubts when her husband signed on to headline Governor Thorne’s Independence Day concert in Candlestick Park. Now that the band’s committed to the appearance, the Flannigan Administration has decided to shut the show down, with prejudice.

Laurel knows she has to fight this attempt to stop the signal. But doing so may put her in more danger than she could ever have anticipated, and risk those she loves.

A story of the Grissom timeline, originally published in Liberty Island Magazine.

This edition also includes a bonus essay on the era of dictatorship in Grissom-timeline America.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: STATUESQUE

Why yes, we have entered the portion of this blog where I tackle all the controversial topics back to back. And just before the fundraiser too. I always manage to offend ten or twenty people with this stuff, too. But–

But the muse wants what it wants, and this is the blog muse, so deal.

I came at this one topic via a pro-abortion (sorry, only possible characterization) tweet which blamed a mother for carrying a “defective” child to term, classifying it as “Selfishness” since the child would never have “A normal life.”

I have no idea what the child’s defect was honestly, but considering abortion has been recommended for everything from small-ish and overcome-able physical defects to presumed mental issues, it could be anything really.

I think everyone knows my opinion on this. Or at least my “lived opinion.” As in, while I wouldn’t at the time — I was not even thirty — have disputed the “quality of life” thing, when they assured me older son would be retarded and I needed to abort now, I told them to put it up their jumper, because after six years of infertility I was going to have whatever was in there, even if it turned out to be a cat. Because when push came to shove, his being alive trumped everything else. Now, mind, this might not be a great endorsement, since I’m famously incapable of killing even defective quail.

But when I was following the discussion about the tweet in one of my groups, the whole “Quality of life” hit me wrong.

And I’m the first person to admit it’s a very difficult topic, and the shades of grey are deep enough that you don’t know where plain black and white ends. But I also think the truth should be told.

Had my child turned out to be, as they said he’d be, completely non-functional and unable to live alone (Turns out they might have been right. I mean, he IS married.) would I have regretted bringing him into the world? Undoubtedly. I have had friends with children who would never be able to function independently and who, besides that, had extensive requirements merely to stay alive. It’s the sort of thing that eats a good parent alive. You don’t want to let the kid go to an institution that might abuse him/her. But on the other hand, your life is over the moment the child is born.

Cases like that, and your being absolutely sure early on — and there’s the rub — I might still be unable to have an abortion, but I would not judge anyone who did. After all, particularly if there are other children involved, something like that can destroy not just a parent, but an entire family. I’d still consider it wrong, but there are wrongs you can forgive, if only because you imagine how tempted you might be, and that you might in fact succumb.

But it’s not the quality of life of the child, even in those cases. Oh, it might be. The child might be miserable. But here’s the thing: as someone who was a very sickly child, in and out of hospitals, and with her whole body turning into open sores on the regular for no reason anyone could determine, if you’d asked about my quality of life, I’d have been confused. Oh, not because I didn’t understand the question, but because…. well? It was fine. I mean, sure, it sucked if you compared it to other kids. But I’d always been sickly. Spending enormous amount of time in bed alone (because antibiotics were new enough isolation was still common even for “just” colds) in a room without a window was just how 50% of my time was spent. I learned to have a rich life of the imagination, building lego towns and imagining people or aliens living in them and creating entire (very odd. Think of a 3 or 4 year old’s understanding of the world) soap operas for such beings. Or later reading comics and day dreaming. I mean, I did enjoy those. I had a happy childhood despite the frequent illnesses. Quality of life sucked, but only compared to normal kids. I’d never been a normal kid, so how could I know?

Again what that discomfort about “Quality of life” hit me, I had to do a deep dive, because I’m notoriously reluctant to kill anything that’s not attacking/hurting me. And even then, I’ve been known to carefully relocate biting bugs, to avoid killing them. Not a Buddhist, just cracked.

While we take pets on the final sad trip to the vet, we don’t do it lightly, and probably should do it much earlier. But in their case, I actually don’t do it because I’m careful to distinguish MY quality of life and theirs. I’ve seen too many pets killed for their owners’ convenience, and while yeah, pets, not humans, it’s still a life with some level of sentience, and since I can’t create it, I’m careful about destroying it. Take Euclid: he was mostly incontinent and a pain to live with for the last five years of his life, but he seemed perfectly happy toddling around in a diaper and getting pets and sleeping on the sofa. It wasn’t until I saw him pee in his water then drink that I realized things were really really far gone. (And even now I wonder if I just had him killed for my ew.)

But when it comes to people…. Well, it’s different. Because when it comes to people, who are you to judge their quality of life? And where does that slippery slope end.

I watched a pro-euthanasia movie once, and I can’t remember the name which is probably good. It had the most deceptive description which made it sound like a rom com, so Dan started watching it, and the situation was interesting enough that I started watching.

It was a woman hired to care for a young man who is paraplegic after an accident, and they fall in love. Fine. He’s also a multi millionaire, so his disability is really mitigated. Money cannot give him back the ability to walk and move, but it can mitigate discomfort, hire people to help him move/fetch/carry and give him a “nurse” who really is supposed to amuse him and read to him and such.

The not at all subtle message, carried in the end, is that he chooses to die because he can’t be normal, and that’s the highest, most moral choice he can make.

It left me baffled and vaguely disgusted. In the way of such things, it had been established he could function as a male, and could in fact feel it. And also that the girl wanted children.

But he chooses — note these are words put in the character’s mouth by oh so compassionate writers — death instead because he can never go to Paris and walk around as he once did. Why, people will stare at him being in a wheel chair! It’s unbearable!

Watching it, and while the movie used all the soft lighting and the girl “understanding” to justify the choice, I kept getting furious.

Why is his life unendurable? Because people might stare and pity him? So he’s dying for pride? Seems dumb to me.

We have someone who is wealthy beyond the dreams of most of us, who, while confined in some ways, has the means to counter his disability. He could have an adoring wife to whom he could give a very good life. He could have a passel of kids and watch them grow up and have good lives. But the movie tells us none of this is worth it because he can’t be perfect, and therefore his quality of life is not worth living.

Which is always the way these things go, and Canada’s MAID is set on proving it.

Look, at least the movie had the point that this was a young man who had lost what he used to have. Now in my opinion the proper treatment for that is to have psychological counseling so he sees what is still worth it about his life, but at least you can understand the shock and the outrage. Now imagine someone who’s been “like that” their whole life. Sure, their “quality of life” might be bad to an outsider. But from the inside, what else have they ever known?

And that’s exactly the problem. The merchants of death and despair who posit “just kill him/her/it” as fixing every ill and who claim to do it out of compassion for other’s “quality of life” are not qualified to classify anyone’s quality of life FROM THE OUTSIDE.

If you judge it by achievements, I’ve known people who were profoundly handicapped who had better and more “worthy” lives than a lot of completely “whole” people. The best student in my university graduating class (Fortunately in another major/minor, or I’d be wholly eclipsed) was a Thalidomide baby. He didn’t let it slow him down, and I suspect he’s now a professor or retired professor of French or Latin. Judging by the bevy of girls who helped him with everything from pushing his wheel chair to lighting his cigarette, he’s also probably married and with children. These are speculation, of course, but if they didn’t come true, it was by his choice. In our early twenties, he was doing very well indeed.

One of the kids’ playfriends had a mother who appeared perfectly normal. Mother of 3, and a painter. I didn’t even realize until we’d had a lot of contact that she had a prosthetic arm. And it wasn’t until I saw her in shorts and a tiny t-shirt that I realized she also had a prosthetic leg. One of those weird things? Apparently the umbilical cord had wrapped around the limbs and effectively killed them? Or at least that’s what I remember from what I was told. If that’s impossible, it’s still close to what I was told. Normal genes, just didn’t develop right. She was close to fifteen years younger than I, so there’s a good chance the mother knew in advance, but chose not to abort. Or maybe it was too early to know. But in the end, does it matter? Yes, she had the problem of getting, maintaining, using prosthetics. But she was a happy woman, leading a full life.

And all of us know dozens of these examples. Including people who made significant contributions to science and tech.

Should they never have existed, or have been killed early? Who are we to say? Sure, their lives look difficult to us, but hear me out here: They’re the only lives they had and will ever have. And some of them are demonstrably quite happy and productive.

Meanwhile how many people with all limbs and tested high IQs do absolutely nothing with their lives or, worse, are drains on everyone else’s resources, because they’re always depressed, or broke, or simply unable to get themselves to some sort of semblance of functioning, let alone happiness?

Which frankly is why pre-birth or after birth euthanasia, while it might start from the highest principles or at least a justifiable sense of compassion (most often for the parents and family, not the person, but still justifiable) always ends in eugenics. EVERY SINGLE TIME.

It might start with “This person will suffer their entire lives and die young” but it always ends in “Lives unworthy of living.”

And the reasons the lives are unworthy always ends up more and more tenuous, until in the end you’re killing people for being goofy, or depressed, or having no financial sense.

In its most poisonous version, it convinces the person themselves of it. It convinces them to compare themselves to a platonic ideal of themselves, and feel unhappy with everything they are and have achieved, because they don’t have this one thing.

So we get to: “I am sometimes sad, therefore I should die, because that’s terrible.” Or “I am poor and can’t enjoy the good things in life, therefore it’s best I should die.”

It might sound like I’m exaggerating wildly, but I’ve seen similar cases reported for Canada and — I think — Holland (Though it might be Belgium.)

What it amounts to, even when it’s “assisted suicide” (Let’s talk about the influence of doctors over those who are sick or even “merely” depressed, shall we?) and much more so when it’s euthanasia, is people looking from the outside and deciding that if they were the other person they’d be unhappy, so the other person should die.

Following the reasoning of euthanasia, I should be put out of my misery, because at almost 40 books, I still haven’t had a world-shattering bestseller. Even if I rather enjoy my writing, as do other people, at least occasionally.

The problem with judging if your life is “worthy of living” is that it always ends up being judging what you have and what you are against some imaginary “Perfect.”

The perfect is the enemy of the good, and even the most hale, fit and brilliant among us, always fall far short of perfect (being human.)

Which means seen and judged from the outside, the perfect is the enemy of all life.

And in the end the perfection the merchants of death would achieve is the clean perfection of a rock, scrubbed clean of all life, rolling through the loneliness of space forever.

World without end.

When I was six I discovered what was involved in sex-change operations, and decided they weren’t really sex-change, but cosmetic surgeries designed to make you appear as the other sex, which wasn’t what I wanted at all.

I might not have been six, by the way, though I remember it as six. I was probably closer to ten. There was time involved between hearing these could be done and figuring out what all happened/could be done. You see, this was pre-history, we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t even have a library system where I grew up, and tracking down the right (or very wrong) books took time. I found information a bit at a time, in history books, in old medical manuals, and in the occasional throw away paragraph in a novel.

I very much doubt I could have tracked all that information down by six, particularly considering that at four or so I mostly read — haltingly and painfully — comic books.

Though my sources of information at the time were unreliable and hard to track down; though my knowledge of biology has increased exponentially, though medical science has advanced a lot since the middle of the last century (though not as much as we like to pretend, when it comes to hormones and such) I stand by the conclusion I reached when I first finished my research.

You are born into a body you can’t change. The best you can do is pretend to change it. For some people at some times that might be the best solution, but it’s bought at a very high price, or a series of them, not all of them obvious, particularly for the young. And — mostly for political reasons of divide and conquer — the whole issue has been weaponized so that the truth is obscured from the people making the decisions, so they have to make them in the dark and in confusion.

Because of my history, I’ve meant for a long time to talk about it. I haven’t done it, because it is a difficult, fraught — and yeah — weaponized subject.

So, let’s grapple with it anyway, shall we?

First, on the above, please note that the notion that I was all wrong and should have been a boy was not arrived at by contact with anyone who told me that. And that my parents were entirely unaware of my struggles. For all I know, they still are.

So while the trans thing — particularly the belief that you can somehow automagically change your body — is indeed a social contagion, saying “My son/daughter was a perfectly contented boy/girl“ is not proof of anything. When you feel something is that wrong, on that fundamental a level, you don’t tell your parents. Or at least some of us don’t. And that was before the weaponization. Mostly? I was terrified my parents would laugh at me. And even more terrified they wouldn’t. Because if they said they always thought I was wrong, that was worse.

For those wondering, yeah, I had the stigmata. Smart kid, very lonely, in a society that highly favored — and gave more freedom — to boys, (in a way Americans can’t even really process much less understand) and with mom having preferred me to be a boy. On top of which, I was convinced I was ugly, which was a problem for a girl, but not for a boy.

Having realized that there was no way to actually change didn’t completely quell the matter. I continued feeling wrong, like a terrible mistake had been made. It just meant it couldn’t be changed and therefore I must make the best of it. But up until about fourteen, while combing my hair in front of the mirror, I had wishful thoughts that I’d not be a half-bad looking boy. I also felt I looked wrong, walked wrong, couldn’t fit in with groups of girls/women, and was generally off in some indescribable way.

Realizing at about 16 or 17 that I very much liked boys and that it was stupid to be a boy while chasing boys (Not that I chased. What I did was more debate them into the ground in the hope they’d like that (it worked, once)) helped some, but let’s be bluntly honest, I still feel — often — divorced from my body. Not in terms of I should be a boy. Older and more experienced me realizes the problem is more basic that than, but in terms of I forget I have a body, or that the body has a sex. Honestly, its getting worse as I get older, can’t get pregnant, and the whole cyclic dance of womanhood is done. As the body malfunctions more, it’s easier to retreat into a life of the mind. This led to the famous panel in which I was a moderator, and faced with a panel of all women (on women in sf, I think?) I announced that everyone but me was female. I wasn’t thinking I was male. I’d forgotten I had a body at all.

You can add in there on my risk factors on the spectrum, maybe. I don’t read as being such and it’s hard to tell for sure. I grew up in an hyper-connected and social environment that masked the fact I was a raging introvert. Masking being on the spectrum is not out of the question, and I have a bunch of the secondary sensory issues.

Some degree of generalized discomfort with your body seems to contribute to the idea that you should change, and that will solve everything.

In fact, and again, from the beginning, it solves nothing. It just gifts you with a completely different set of problems.

So let me lay out those problems.

As it exists right now, the whole you can transition is a pretty lie. You can’t. And while medical professionals are very fond of saying that we will for sure solve that and make it possible to fully become the other in the next ten or twenty years, that’s not even a gross exaggeration, that’s a piece of insanity.

What we’re dealing with is not cosmetics, or hormones. It’s the basic components of the human genome, which dictate whether you are male or female. Or intersex, but that’s honestly more of a defect. That is woven into you at a level that cannot be altered or changed sort of regrowing you an entire other body. Consider we can’t even clone people in the normal way without running into issues with premature aging.

Might there be a way to change people at that level? Or to somehow defeat chromosomes and make them do different things? Maybe. There is one — note ONE — case of an xy developing as a normal woman and becoming a mother. IF the report wasn’t vitiated, which given the time and place it might have been. If that’s real, we might be able to change people, but even then it will probably have to be done before birth and we’re talking true science fiction. Look, guys, cold fusion is on the menu well before that. At best it can be done with a “genius breakthrough“ but that is left to chance and random reshuffling of genes and life experience. Which sure, could happen in the next… 50 years. Or 500. Or never.

Almost for sure, though, given the current state of science, it won’t happen before we’re all dust in the dust. And those people lying to the young and telling young men they’ll be fully functional women, able to bear live young should be hanged, cut down while still living and have their entrails burned before their eyes.

What we can do, better than in the mid-20th century which relied on crude surgery, is more sophisticated plastic surgery to make things appear to be other things. And we can pump you full of hormones for a — relatively — more credible transition.

It will surprise no one I’ve retained an interest in reading about the field. The problem is two-fold. One: You will never fully pass. To date, I’ve met exactly one person who passes, and even then my back brain kept trying to reset. I’ll get into why that happens, and why its a problem, later. Two: hormones have a price. Hormones have an horrific price. If you take the hormones necessary to change your appearance and behavior, you’re very likely to get cancer early. Like forties early. But atop of it, the dosage is hard, so you’re also likely to have a whole slew of issues of hormones too high and too low, including brittle bones and things malfunctioning in ways most women don’t experience till menopause — and that’s regardless of the way in which you change.

If you’re a young woman transitioning to male and there’s the slightest possibility you’ll ever want to have children — permit me to tell you that at even 20 you might not know. Heck, at 30 you might not know how much you want them — be aware transitioning hormones might make it impossible.

There are other prices, more subtle, and here we have to get into why transitioners rarely pass and almost never pass completely: the part of the human brain that tells male from female is very old, and not very easy to hack. You see, I figure in our long evolution as apes and hominins and hominids telling male from female was absolutely necessary to any child. Because males will kill you, females might not. I figure its coded in the part of our brain, way back, that infants to go through a phase they are scared of everyone but mom. And more or less for the same reasons.

This means no matter how good a job anyone does at passing, other people will see through it. And at best they’ll behave oddly. I think this is part of the reason so many trans people are convinced everyone hates them. Because there is oddness in every interaction and if you were Odd or on the spectrum or something to begin with, you already interpret awkwardness towards you as hatred.

This is also, and for real what is driving trans to supporting younger and younger transitions. Because if you transition as a child, you probably CAN pass as the other sex. While this is true, there is the problem of no one before puberty having any idea of the true costs and penalties of transitioning. And also of giving a disproportionate vote to parents, some of whom will be insane. But that is the main reason driving the child transitioning movement. It’s in a sense baked in.

It’s also in a sense futile. You can’t change completely even if you do it to toddlers. They will not be functional adults of the other sex, even if they pass better. Which means you’re robbing them of a fully functional future. But even without that they’ll never fully be the other. You are what you are due to hormone baths in utero, long before you were aware there was a you.

There are other costs, social ones, beyond the fact you’ll look odd to others.

Look, I changed my name at citizenship. First, middle and last. I hated my name pretty much since I was aware of having a name. Worse, my parents didn’t even like it, it was imposed on them through family circumstances. So I changed it to a name I’d often used as a pen name.

My parents still haven’t fully forgiven me. And it makes it awkward, not just for them but for me to tell stories of childhood, etc.

I do know people who have transitioned and who have good relationships with their parents. They’re very rare. Normally transitioning means severing relationships with all family: parents, children, extended family. And often with your entire group of friends up till them. Sure you can say it shouldn’t be that way. But it is. And as one of the friends in one of those cases, it happens even if you don’t mean to. There is a natural awkwardness of not knowing how to relate to someone who frankly is no longer your friend but is also not a stranger. The effort required to remain friends becomes very high. It’s easier to drift away.

Now, sure, if only everyone decided…. but never in the history of ever has that ever happened. In human history there is no such thing as everyone doing something all at once, without dissidents or protest. Even things easier than this.

So, true change is impossible. Does this mean people shouldn’t be allowed to live as the other sex, or even take hormones if they are full adults who so decide? (I honestly think that it should be held until the brain stops developing at 26 or whatever. Our legal age being 18 is ridiculously high for some things and biologically low for others.)

Meh. You do you. If you honestly think it makes you feel better to present a credible pretense of being the other sex, who am I to interfere? There are certainly worse hobbies. If you find peace and contentment in it, good for you.

If you were someone I cared for I’d strenuously and loudly plead that you not take hormones and not have surgery (except perhaps for softening the face and hair removal — that being honestly your choice. I think it might be weird if you decide to go back to male — if you’re a male hoping to pass as a female) for a good long while, if ever. There are no risks, other than social to being a male who passes as female or a female who passes as male. And while the passing won’t be as full as with hormones, etc, it will be far less risky for you.

Look, hormones affect everything including your thinking. Women transitioning to male are not equipped either by raising or by the rest of our — already hormone shaped — nervous system to cope with testosterone influx and its associated mental and emotional effects. There is a reason most of the trans-killers have been female to male transitioners.

Which brings us to the other thing: part of the reason I imagined I was really a male, as a young female, was that I imagined males as cool and collected. They didn’t have to go through the cyclical thing and have their moods affected. Would you believe I was in my thirties before a male told me otherwise? Being a male is to be at that point where you’d gladly shiv your best friend for looking at you funny that some of us women achieve on the first day of our period, but forever. And you have to learn to control it, if you hope to live a normal life.

I’m sure there are things. I don’t know. I’m not a male. No matter what I thought as a kid, I’m not even an unusual female. I’m an unusual human, mostly due to auto-immune, etc. oh, and to what I’m sure you too have been told is Thinking Too Much.

Am I a stereotypical woman?

Oh, please. No one is. I have friends who are all social oriented and like fashion and all the girly things (I tend to be friends with them in small doses, because we are so different) and even they aren’t stereotypical females. The stereotypes ARE social constructs.

Sex is real. It comes with certain inclinations and interests because our brains were shaped differently during gestation. But all statements made about men and women are made about the aggregate. I.e. statistically women are more people-oriented and men more thing-oriented. Some of us…. fail at that. And that’s okay. It doesn’t affect the aggregate if one or many individuals are different.

My most stereotypical female characteristic is an inability to reason spatially, but that seems to be a brain-damage thing, so it’s hard to tell. Oh, and I have an unclean love for pretty shoes. Though frankly, my hips have negated my wearing them, so that’s not immediately visible. Other than that… I’m passionately interested in economics, world affairs, space exploration, etc. etc.

It also turns out I like cats and infants (And some — usually very odd — children.)

Now that I’m on the other end of life from pre-teen and all the worry about being pretty…

No one is pretty as they age. Some people manage to do it with dignity to a point at least. Last time I saw dad, he looked like he’d not so much aged as hardened in place, turning into some material stronger than mere human flesh. But having seen others age…. the ugly will come. If you live long enough, or die of a bad enough disease, you too will be ugly at the end. Male, female or otherwise.

And as you age too, you stop caring if you’re acting male or female or if what you do will be thought of as x or y. For women, at least, there is a great empowering that comes over you at about forty, particularly if you have had kids. It seems to be when you decide you’re going to be yourself, no matter what.

That is the thing to aim for. So…. you’re weird, and you don’t feel as if your body fits. Big whoop. Welcome to the human race. Here is your accordion. Yes, I know you’d prefer a piano, but you have an accordion. Make the best of it you can.

My body has disappointed me in so many ways if I start to list them I’ll forget something. Take the tendency to gain weight because of autoimmune attacks. The autoimmune itself, and the sudden illnesses that trace to that and which rob me of months or years. And then there’s the things that seemed white-hot important as a kid, such as my inability to coordinate enough for most sports. (Who am I kidding, I tripped over my feet while standing still until 18.) Or the fact my fine motor coordination was enough of a disaster my handwriting was incomprehensible.

It turns out I didn’t want a career as a professional cyclist. Or if I did, I never even started, so who cares? In what I do every day, my issues don’t matter much. (And the fine motor coordination got better with time and practice.)

Turns out for what I wanted to do and be, my body was okay. I mean, I still would like another three or four kids. And I won’t lie to anyone and say being pregnant or nursing were my favorite things. Very Strange is the best I can say for them. But I got the boys. And the boys are totally worth it. And while I thought I was ugly and strange, my husband seems to like me, and that too is completely worth it.

Even if you could change your body to the other sex, for most people it is likely to be the least of the things you’d like to change about yourself.

At least at this point, if given the opportunity, I’d turn it down in exchange for a normal metabolism, or naturally curly hair, and I’d turn it down double quick in exchange for getting rid of the auto immune.

It’s not that I’m any less of an atypical woman. I’ve just learned that being typical male or female or whatever is a construct of mass media and narrative. No one is typical. And even if I’m more atypical than most, so what?

Now some people — I’m looking at you — will read this and say all this is my coping with being gender queer or whatever the current designation is.

Perhaps. I mean if gender queer means an extremely atypical woman, you’re probably right. But so what? Would my quality of life have been improved by pumping myself full of hormones that themselves altered my thinking? Having surgery to pass as the other? Or even by pasting a label on myself and marching up and down demanding that everyone respect mah identity? Why?

To satisfy a bunch of strangers who sneer at me for not being true to myself in the way they specify? Why would I care?

In everyday life what a bunch of strangers think about me makes not a whit of difference. And my family and friends are used to my weirdness such as it is. Plus, I’ve maximized the advantages of my unfeminine ability to get stuff done and not worry if it’s pretty and to ignore the opinions of the group, or the back-biting and gossip of women-associations. I’ve also back-engineered the advantages of being a woman, the same way most of us have had to back-engineer social interaction because it’s not there naturally. I’ve learned how to be cute little thing, or these days, hapless confused grandma, when it gets me immediate help from bystanders. (Yes, I know, terribly unfeminist of me. But you see, one of the many things I’ve learned is that I don’t owe anything to any cause anyone thinks I should enlist in simply by being born female, or Mediterranean, or whatever.) I can tell you men don’t get to do that (except in highly specialized situations.) They have their own advantages, and I enjoin them to use them to the full.

If you absolutely must change, I’m not judging you. Only wait till you’ve lived long enough to know yourself. And don’t mess yourself up more than you need to physically or physiologically. But you know, if you’re an adult, it’s your lookout and there are worse things you could do to yourself.

For me? In the end, I’ve come to believe Terry Pratchett was right. Success comes when you learn to be yourself as hard as you can.

And your SELF is both body and soul, and those weird quirks of personality that really annoy you.

Minimize your downsides. Lean into your advantages, and make the best of what you are and what you can be.

All those beautiful happy people who look like they were just born that way? Have you considered you only think that because you’re not them?

It never occurred to me, back when, but it turns out everyone of those effortlessly perfect people I met are so. And some are far bigger messes than I am even.

Being human is difficult. I think everyone struggles with it.

The good news is humans were born to struggle.

I wish you joy in the battle, even if the battle is against your own body. And I hope the solution you find allows you to be yourself as hard as you can.

I’m happy as I am. Mind and body.

Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?

In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.

So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.

But you see, I am so very tired of all the genuflecting and bowing to the doom du jour, as well as the market distortions, worsening of problems and outright damage to people and deaths or grievous arm (not to mention not being born) while trying to avoid largely imaginary dangers and issues.

What do I mean? Well, how many people had no children because they were pounded about the face and head with the impending doom of “overpopulation”? How many of those people, now nearing their last decades, bitterly regret the childlessness? Worse, how many people in how many third world countries were encouraged to be sterilized due to both the “coming doom” of overpopulation, and the horrific mid-century misapprehension that children caused poverty? How many women in China were forcibly aborted? How many toddlers confined to dying rooms? How many women in India were strongly persuaded to abort female children, or expose unwanted ones newly born? (Yes, I know it might have happened anyway, but the westerners were encouraging people to have fewer and fewer children, which only fed that nonsense.)

Other dooms? So many dooms, so little time to catalogue them. When I was little, I knew I’d probably starve or die of thirst due to overpopulation. What was worse, it was overpopulation far away, since most people near me couldn’t afford more than one or two kids, if they ever hoped to live a middle class life. (Spoiler: it was taxes, requiring work from both parents that caused poverty, not an excess of children.) I also expected to freeze in the coming ice age, caused by all the pollution, from people making things in factories, having cars, and using electrical light. Also, as it happened, in the seventies we were told fossil fuels were running out, so while we were freezing, we wouldn’t even be able to take a flight somewhere warmer, to escape the advancing glaciers. But that was all right, because we were all going to die in a nuclear exchange that would happen any day now, in a conflagration between the USSR and the US, whom we were assured were absolutely equal in morality, and both just wanted supremacy for…. no reason really.

Of course, the things urged to stop all of this ranged from criminal — the aforementioned forced abortions and killing of children — to the merely dangerous — urging the nuclear disarmament of the West (mostly propaganda from the Soviet Union, mind) which we were assured would bring about peace and not world communism (which in the way of such things would shortly after be followed by world famine and world depopulation.)

By the time the Gaia cultists flipped from a fear of freezing to a fear of boiling, I only half went along, and only until I realized once more it made no sense whatsoever.

Fossilized bits of these nonsensical panics — Ehrlich the anti-prophet claiming wed run out of potable water in the…. late seventies? eighties — stay around, because of the cultist needs to be seen to be doing something, even if the something is utterly silly. Hence all the reduction in flushing capacity, the energy saving, low water dishwashers and washers, and the endless genuflecting about not washing towels. (I’d maybe be less salty if eczema flare ups didn’t require me to use freshly laundered towels every day, even at home, lest they get much worse) which granted aren’t killing us but are swelling our water bills, and making us smelly.

What do I mean by that? Well, our current low flush toilet does a passable job, but previous ones, over the last twenty years introduced me to a new hobby, called Flushing Your Toilet for half an hour. The minimum flushes for anything beyond liquid ranged from five to ten, plus waiting for refills in between. This was compounded by our living in Victorians, which, of course, have smaller pipes and are more likely to clog, but still. Low water washers? Well, until we bought the current one, which has a button that defeats that setting, I was stuck washing my clothes as much as four times over. (Even in the current one, I wash twice. Its not low water, but its not the water quantities of the seventies, and I have ridiculous skin.) Which meant my entire life — MY ENTIRE LIFE — was devoted to wash, whatever else I was doing at the same time. It got to the point we were running the washer whenever I was awake. Which, oh, yes, btw, also added to electrical bills. And btw, I have an eighties dishwasher in this house. When we moved in, it broke, and we’d bought one of those home warranty things, which meant someone came out. He was somewhat frustrated by very old parts, so he decided to order all of them, basically building me a brand new dishwasher in the shell of the old. I can’t begin to tell you how happy with it I am. It’s not just that it actually washes. I don’t have to wash the dishes before they’re washed. And it’s not just that it heat dries, instead of popping open to let the dishes air dry — a thing that in a house as blessed with cats as we are makes the mind run cold. How much cat hair do I want wet dishes coated in, exactly — but I’d forgotten how much SPACE there was in these old dishwashers. Nowadays, because of requirements for lower electrical use, there’s so much insulation that there’s hardly room left for dishes. In our last house in Colorado, after both kids were on their own, even with just the two of us, I found I often couldn’t fit all the prep and eating dishes in the dishwasher, and as an alternative to running the dishwasher all the time found myself doing dishes by hand. Here, even when we have younger son and his spice (Long story, but its my new name for their spouses) over for dinner, and even if I made something complicated AND baked dessert, I can fit it all in one load, or at most two. The difference really is that dramatic, and again nothing is saved in the “energy saving”. When a load becomes two, becomes three, becomes ten, you’re actually using more. More water, more energy, and certainly more human time and frustration. But, ah, it passes new government tests, installed to appease the cult members.

Then there is the stinky part of our program. While I have in fact escaped this by buying a machine where I can turn the water-saving features off, the multiplication of deodorizing this that and the other for your clothes hasn’t escaped the keenness of my int elect which — I don’t say this to brag — can read print when its in letters of fire, six feet tall, and right in front of me.

The point is, right now our doom is likely to come through a multiplying of doomsayers, rather than through anything else.

None of the dooms were actually dooms, and the attempts to avert this imaginary doom are the actual harmful actions.

So, please, before you preach doom by AI (rolls eyes) or excessive computer use, or the heartbreak of vitamin abuse, or whatever silly thing they’ll come up with next, do consider what horrors the mitigation of such imagined doom might bring upon us. And how little necessary all of it is unlikely to be, in light of previous panics.

And anyone saying anything about plastic in the ocean shall be hit with a carp, because frankly those “islands of plastic” only seem to exist after tsunamis (and the photos are carefully cropped.) So you might enjoy sipping your drink from soggy paper straws, but leave the rest of us alone.

Yes, sure, human actions have consequences, and sometimes course corrections are needed. The amazing thing is that we — as clever apes — tend to make those course corrections as soon as a superior solution is viable.

Unless you scare us with doom and gloom, and cause us to embed in our normal life things to avert this imaginary doom. Things that themselves cause problems and suffering. I mean, do you see any other reason we aren’t using nuclear energy more widely? Or that places like Germany and France should be DISMANTLING their nuclear plants and …. burning wood?

Proclamations of doom seem to do nothing but cause people to do stupid things while patting themselves on the back.

Little known fact, Atlantis sank beneath the waves because their doomsayers were convinced it was at risk of bringing about an ice age if it didn’t dynamite its seawalls and destroy its flood control devices.

What? It is far more plausible than the others.

Next time you see a raving lunatic telling you the world is going to end due to some innocuous or pleasant human activity, chase them down the street, hitting them on the head with their The End Is Near sign. (In minecraft.) It will relieve your frustrations, and maybe it will rearrange his ideas enough to make them somewhat useful.

Doom will come. Eventually. Probably not through anything you — and unlikely through anything we, in aggregate — did or failed to do.

Stop saving the Earth. Where would you keep it? Who would dust it?

Sorry for the very weird and spacey posting, but as you’ve probably gathered we’ve been at Liberty con in Chattanooga TN.

This year was very weird for us, because we didn’t know if we’d be able to go at all. We had a big family thing in the second week of June, which took about a week, came home for five days and I found I needed to rest, a lot. And then we went to LC.

However, until late May we didn’t know when the family thing in June was. So, we kept the liberty con people up in the air, as we juggled potential engagements. Props to Rich Groller who came through beautiful, even though we’ll have to talk later about his using me as an aimable weapon.

There were some very odd panels, which I think came from confusing me and Dan, so at the same time we were in “What is happening now in space science”, where I was the only person who didn’t work in aerospace, while he was in starting a low tech colony, which was definitely more my area. Or to make this more clear yet, you see my current book is about a colony that rapidly rebarbarizes, while Dan has the degree and expertise to talk space science. As is, I wasn’t totally useless, because I could pour a bucket of cold water on “China is way better than us and is going to lap us in space and reeeeeeeeeeeeeee.” (Yeah, I do get some of their points, but to ignore both the loosy goosy nature of Chinese “science” which extends to this, the inherent inefficiency of totalitarian regimes.)

I’m very glad we had “Virtual Younger Son” for the comics panel, since his knowledge of the field was invaluable. To explain, he was hoping to go, but he couldn’t do it, so he facetimed in. Again, his expertise was invaluable and the panel was interesting because of how much he contributed. I really didn’t have a lot to say since for now I’m benched on comics, don’t know if I’ll get back in, and am not doing much to get back in since I have a ton of books to write.

Other panels…. the other two were round tables for anthos I was in.

I was again on the panel on Dystopia. This always upsets me mildly, because while I have written dystopias I don’t write — or read — the dystopian subgenre. I find it annoying, more unbelievable than fairy tales and also attracting the sort of mind who thinks that that humans are widgets.

Note I said DYSTOPIAN SUBGENRE, not dystopias like Black Tide, or for that matter the reign of the Good Men in Darkships. Dystopias of that type is fun, because people are not only fighting, they’re on the way up.

The Dystopain subgenre, OTOH at least to my eye rejoices in the likes of Brave New World or 1984 where there’s no way out and no way up. Note both of those were written by red pilled convinced leftists. They might have realized communism was evil, but their concept of humans was still as widgets. And therefore they believed that type of command and control top down dystopia COULD work and it could go on forever.

While recognizing dangers on liberty and even now classifying myself as an apocalyotimist — I think everything is going to shit, but it will end up all right — I am deeply aware of the limits of tyrannical authority. This can be summed up as: Even the PRC, which has no soft western notions, cannot control their internal opposition (and in fact can’t tell how bad it is because the information problem is killer in dictatorships) and therefore 1984 or Brave New World, let alone the less skillfully written johnny come latelies of Apocallypsia are invalid.

Write them and read them if you wish, but don’t try to act all big and bad and like you’re telling truth to power. The setup is unrealistic. The whole thing can’t work with human beings. Human beings are infinitely adaptable, and poke holes in everything including systems of oppression. If it seems to you like China completely controls its people, or Russia does, or whatever, I say onto you that’s because they control the information that gets out and we foreigners are GULLIBLE. And if you think oppression works and can work infinitely, you not only have no experience of it, you are as wishful thinking as those who wish to apply it.

Why am I going into this? So, I was put in as moderator of the dystopia panel. And there was a mild kerfuffle. I would like to say it wasn’t my fault, but perhaps it was, I don’t know.

You see, the topic annoys me and last year voices were raised with a gentleman who calmed down markedly when I was given three axes by the Minotaur.

THIS year, I was put as moderator on the same panel, and one of the gentlemen not only had no sense of humor at all, but went into a spittle-flecked rage, apparently because I was doubting his expertise.

I started by pointing out that while I read — and write, though I might have forgotten to say that — dystopias, I don’t read — or write — the dystopian subgenre. I’m a depressive. Under no circumstances do I need to feed that with unrealistic doom and gloom tales. I further added I didn’t want to hear any arguments about how we’re all “in reality” doomed, because that is only comforting to those who wish to give up and not fight anymore.

This… person…. took it to mean I never READ things like 1984 — I am in awe of the type of mind who’d think you could grow up in the 21st century as a person of the written word and never have come across that — and was very upset that I don’t think the computer-collected data plus AI means game over, man, game over.

If I need to explain the computer collected data includes a never-end stream of chaff. Take the fact that I’ve never bought anything from Temu, ever. And don’t want to. But last week my mouse had issues, and every time I clicked on a page, it also brought up the first ad on that page, which was Temu once, probably accidentally and then was always Temu because of the accidental double-click. At one point I had 40 temu tabs up. For what? I don’t actually know. Greenhouses, I think? I didn’t look super-close as I ARGHED and closed it. The number of such occurrences is NOT trivial. In fact, I’ve never opened an ad directly from a page, but my browser has. Add to that the “They know when you stop on or hover over something” which usually means “Where I happened to be when my husband came into the room and I remembered to ask him about the laundry.” Or “where my cursor was sitting when I had to jump up to go fix a falling gate.”

Is there real data in what they collect? Oh, undoubtedly. But mostly? Because my life is chaos layered on insanity that’s what they’ll collect. And in this I don’t think I’m that unusual. It’s mostly how that works. A good movie to watch to understand the more data the more chaff is The Lives of Others. “But AI” fails because AI isn’t. AI is even more likely to be confused by chaff than a human being and will take “preponderance” which is usually chaff.

Anyway, since that gentlemen also referred to the Feds using cell phone data to catch the perpetrators of the “atrocities” of January 6, I think our clash was inevitable. And while I’m by no means innocent, in that I went into the panel primed for a fight from my previous experiments, I was also — I think — half joking in everything I said, while he had no sense of humor at all and was HIGHLY pissed off at me. Which is his choice, but I don’t think it sold him any books.

Anyway, I’d like to sigh, because when I told Rich, while saying goodbye that if he kept putting me on that panel, sooner or later I was going to shiv someone, he got this happy smile and said “You are so good in that panel.”

So, apparently I’ll be on that panel again next year? And if you’re attending you might want to come and perhaps hold me back? Or help me, whatever your inclination.

As usual the best part of Liberty con was seeing fans and friends, groups that increasingly blend and bleed together. I know a lot of your names, your kids, your jobs, your idiosyncrasies, and yes, I do love most of you. Or at least like you very much. It’s why I go to cons at all (particularly Liberty con) in the age of indie. And why I’ll keep going.

My only complaint is that Liberty con is now huge, so I ran into some friends rarely — I think I saw Jonna Hayden for maybe 15 minutes — and others — Old NFO — not at all. But that’s the price of success.

Two other complaints over the last few days. My laptop keyboard started dying on the trip so I couldn’t finish my book while being a passenger in the car. AND when I got home, I touched the six foot tall baby gate into the living room and it FELL on me, because engineer cat, Indy, had used his large and freakishly agile paws to undo the pressure adjustment on the side. Dan fixed it. Indy never got into the living room. But he was THIS CLOSE. If we’d been even an hour later, he’d have been in, and trying to get at the quail who is in there recovering from expelling all her guts. (Long story.)

So, now that I’m home, I’m going to write my book and keep an eye on engineer cat.

Wish me luck.

If you wish to send us books for next week’s promo, please email to bookpimping at outlook dot com. If you feel a need to re-promo the same book do so no more than once every six months (unless you’re me or my relative. Deal.) One book per author per week. Amazon links only. Oh, yeah, by clicking through and buying (anything, actually) through one of the links below, you will at no cost to you be giving a portion of your purchase to support ATH through our associates number. A COMMISSION IS EARNED FROM EACH PURCHASE.*Note that I haven’t read most of these books (my reading is eclectic and “craving led”,) and apply the usual cautions to buying. I reserve the right not to run any submission, if cover, blurb or anything else made me decide not to, at my sole discretion.– SAH

FROM PAM UPHOFF: Origin Stories (Chronicles of the Fall Book 11)

Six stories in the Troystvennyy Soyuz on the run up to and during the Fall of the Alliance.

Young people with problems with the brutal society, and all too often their own families. Young men and women reaching for a better future, as everything changes around them.

FROM ROBERT HANLON AND SCOTT MCCREA: Timber: U.S. Marshal: Strike Flint: A Western Adventure (A U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint Western Book 2)

Timber: U.S. Marshal and U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint are working together in this exciting new adventure from Robert Hanlon and Scott McCrea!

U.S. Marshal Ezra Flint is called in by William Burroughs of the Burroughs Bank, located in Misery, Kansas. A fellow banker in Texas has been embezzled by an employee; the bank needs an infusion of gold to remain solvent and the entire matter hushed up. For that reason, no military escort can be involved. Flint is hired to safeguard the shipment of gold to Texas.

Flint wires Jake Timber, legendary lawman, and asks if he would join him when he reaches Texas. He is delighted when Timber agrees to meet him on the trail.

Leaving Misery, Flint engages a retired gunman, Seth Thyne, to help out, and with a mission to complete, no holds will be barred to bring criminality in Texas to justice.

FROM LEIGH KIMMEL: A Hymn for Those Who Fall Forever

Endings always hurt, but Vitali Grigorenko never expected a nightmare in orbit.

Assigned to command the last flight of the orbiter Baikal, Vitali had started the mission in a nostalgic mood. That went out the airlock when he saw the body tumbling through space just beyond the flight deck windows. A body in NASA blue, not Russian tan.

Now he’s trying to get to the bottom of a murder in space, and his own country’s space program as much a hindrance as a help. It’s becoming clear that politics is involved, on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain, and he’s going to need to go clear to the top.

A short story of the Grissom timeline.

FROM MARY CATELLI: The Lion and the Library

The library holds many marvels. Lena and her betrothed Erion had found things that helped the beleaguered Celestians of the city.

But when the king’s caprice decides to sacrifice Erion to protect himself, Lena can only hope a legend can help her. A legend of just kings. And lions.

FROM BECKY R. JONES: Night Mage (Academic Magic Book 2)

After fighting a demon in the middle of Philadelphia, Zoe O’Brien wants nothing more than to return to her normal, if stress-filled, life as an assistant professor of history at Summerfield College. But she’s an Elemental mage and that means when there’s potential magical trouble on campus, the squirrels come to her. Who or what is the dark presence moving around campus? Why is it here and what does it want? Zoe struggles to come to terms with her mage powers and the leadership role her colleagues have given her. Complicating everything are all the papers that have to be graded, classes that need to be prepped, and most importantly, cats that require attention. Oh, yeah. She might actually have a boyfriend as well.

FROM LAURA MONTGOMERY: Transport and Deliver: A Martha’s Sons Short Story

When escape on a boat jeopardizes all a family has worked for, can an errant son risk his life to save their future?

The Luwenthals—second generation settlers on the lost planet Not What We Were Looking For—confront the destruction of their past life, and are forced to flee. As the boat containing the family’s prized linotype crosses a river lit by the flames of the printshop they had to abandon, fifteen-year-old Tobias Luwenthal must face his father’s ire over what he sees as his son’s betrayal. Disaster strikes, but will Tobias seize the chance to redeem himself at the cost of his own life? Will his father learn from his son as Tobias has learned from him?

A short story that picks up right at the end of The Gear Engages.

If you’ve enjoyed the Martha’s Sons series, start reading now for a glimpse into what happens next in this dystopian lost world!

FROM HOLLY CHISM: Universal Donor (Modern Gods)

Same liver, different vulture…

When you know you can regenerate any organ, fast…why not donate your kidneys?

Prometheus has been a teacher all of his life, nearly. Sometimes, like with teaching Man to harness fire, it got him in trouble. Sometimes, he’s able to make an even bigger difference for his students. Especially when they need a kidney as much as they need knowledge.

FROM MACKEY CHANDLER: Neither Here nor There

This is a stand alone story unrelated to any of my other books or shorts.
So many scientific discoveries have been serendipity rather than a goal to which someone worked as a logical progression. Instead, it was a spill or a misplaced item.
An ingredient measured out in error or from the wrong bottle. Often, a mistake over which someone was bright enough or curious enough to say: “Oops, but that’s interesting, isn’t it?” Uranium ore left next to photo plates, adhesive that wasn’t as permanent as hoped for, but still usefully tacky, or foreign growths in a Petri dish acting strangely…
A major revelation could be a blessing indeed, or if it was big enough to be a life changing development, one might have a tiger by the tail. Wouldn’t that be interesting?

FROM KAREN MYERS: The Ways of Winter – A Virginian in Elfland (The Hounds of Annwn Book 2)

TRAPPED BEHIND ENEMY LINES, CAN HE FIND THE STRENGTH TO DEFEND ALL THAT HE VALUES MOST, OR EVEN JUST TO SURVIVE?

It’s the dead of winter and George Talbot Traherne, the new human huntsman for the Wild Hunt, is in trouble. The damage in Gwyn ap Nudd’s domain reveals the deadly powers of a dangerous foe who has mastered an unstoppable weapon and threatens the fae dominions in both the new and the old worlds.

Secure in his unbreachable stronghold, the enemy holds hostages and has no compunction about using them in deadly experiments with newly discovered way-technology. Only George has a chance to reach him in time to prevent the loss of thousands of lives, even if it costs him everything.

Vignettes by Luke, Mary Catelli and ‘Nother Mike.

So what’s a vignette? You might know them as flash fiction, or even just sketches. We will provide a prompt each Sunday that you can use directly (including it in your work) or just as an inspiration. You, in turn, will write about 50 words (yes, we are going for short shorts! Not even a Drabble 100 words, just half that!). Then post it! For an additional challenge, you can aim to make it exactly 50 words, if you like.

We recommend that if you have an original vignette, you post that as a new reply. If you are commenting on someone’s vignette, then post that as a reply to the vignette. Comments — this is writing practice, so comments should be aimed at helping someone be a better writer, not at crushing them. And since these are likely to be drafts, don’t jump up and down too hard on typos and grammar.

If you have questions, feel free to ask.

Your writing prompt this week is: COACH

*So I meant to write a post, but the minute we got in the car, the keyboard went weird again. Might be how its held in the car, or something to do with power supply. But since I cant do apostrophes or quotes without parking my finger on the key and pushing a million times, I cant really write in the car. Anyway, I stumbled on this last week, and I’d forgotten I even wrote it. So forgive me for reposting. SAH*

“Sir,” his servant said, bowing very properly. “Your car is waiting.

Kyle looked up from his computer game and blinked. You see, he didn’t have a servant. Or a car. In fact he lived in a spare room in his parents’ house, and worked just enough — usually as a day laborer or temp, to get whatever game he wanted.

Had he fallen sleep in front of the computer? Was this a dream?

The servant wore a tux, or something like that, and he stood expectantly.

Well, if it was a dream, Kyle was going to make the most of it. It seemed more fun than any game he’d ever played.

“Sure,” he said, getting up. “Sure… er…. Jeeves.”

The servant didn’t protest being called Jeeves. Somehow, he’d acquired a little silver tray, with keys on it, and extended it to Kyle. The keys had a weird emblem, with a dragon on it. But they looked classy. Definitely a dream.

The car was waiting outside, in his parent’s driveway, making their BMW look like chopped cabbage. The Car — in Kyle’s mind it was written in capitals — was low slung, curvy, bright green and glistening.

He pressed a button on the keys, and the driver’s door opened with a silent, gliding motion.

Inside, the seats were dark green leather, pliable to the touch. Not like other car seats. More like some very nice leather jackets. The kind Kyle had never been able to afford.

The wheel was covered in a similar material, and was a pleasure to hold.

Afterwards, Kyle couldn’t explain where and how he’d decided to drive. Or how long he’d been away. Driving The Car was like dancing with a beautiful woman. It wasn’t the destination but the journey. They glided together over roads, and he had a memory of sitting in the car, watching the sun set on the water.

When he got back home his parents must have been asleep, because all was quiet.

At breakfast his mother asked him about the car in the driveway. “Oh, it’s a friend’s,” Kyle said. “I’m keeping it while he’s on vacation.”

He was stung his parents accepted it so easily. Like they thought he wouldn’t have the initiative to steal it or something.

That afternoon he went for a drive again, and he stopped by the sea. For the first time, he noticed a golden castle atop a cliff. He blinked at it, in confusion, as he didn’t remember a castle there before, and he was sure his parents had come to this beach with him a couple of times when he was little.

When he got home, his servant was laying out a tux and snowy white, frilled shirt on his bed. “What–” Kyle started.

“It is your clothing for the ball, sir. I assume you’ll want to attend the ball.”

There was an invitation on his desk. It was gilt edged, and written in elegant calligraphy, and invited him to Miss Drake’s come out ball. It was signed by Mr. and Mrs. George Drake.

“Now, sir,” the servant said. “It might be best if you attend, but try not to catch Miss Drake’s attention. While she is very beautiful and very wealthy, if you try to attract her and fail, she will surely eat you.”

Kyle was sure he’d misheard it. Just like he knew without asking that the ball would be in the castle, by the sea.

Indeed, when he got to his favorite parking spot, near the sea, there were valets, ready to park the car. And the path up the cliff was illuminated with beautiful orb lights.

The castle looked far more modern inside than you’d expect. The vast salons had tables set up with food for the guests. All except for one, which was the ball room.

And that’s where Kyle met Dulce Drake. She was–

He stared at her, and he was lost. Flame red hair. A body that he thought only existed in the best drawn computer games. And she wore a cocktail dress the exact color of his car.

He asked her to dance and she agreed, and somehow even though he’d never learned ballroom dances, he could do it perfectly, gliding with her in the ballroom, and being so perfect together that all other couples eventually ceased dancing and just stopped and watched.

He left that night with his mind in a glow, his feet seemingly walking on air.

“Now, sir,” the servant said, materializing in his room, as Kyle came out of the shower. “I’m afraid you shouldn’t have done that. Now Miss Drake will surely eat you.”

He handed Kyle a letter. It was written by George Drake and it pointed out the terms for winning his daughter. Kyle had to have a job that would support him, he had to have an aim in life, and more importantly, he had to defeat her in her dragon form in single combat.

Somehow it all made sense to Kyle. He had no resume to speak of, but he wanted to glide with Miss Drake in the endless ballroom again. So he went out and applied at the first place that said “Help wanted.”

He worked very long hours and learned a lot — it was, as it turned out, a pet shop — including the care and feeding of small animals and… well, everything. After three months, they promoted him to assistant manager, and then the representative for one of the pet food brands asked him if he wanted to come work for them in testing the foods to see what the animals preferred.

At the end of a year, inexplicably — except for the fact that he worked very, very hard, and tried to learn everything — he was doing quite well at the pet food factory. Everyone told him he was headed to VP of the brand.

And he received an invitation to the ball at the castle. Once more, Dulce Drake favored him, and he danced with her all night long.

He went home and drew up a plan to start his own pet food business, all fresh and mostly raw food. It would have to be stored in the refrigerator, which would cause a problem for stores carrying it, but not an insurmountable one. He took his plan to a bank and was almost shocked they gave him a loan.

And after the next ball, he was told he was now at Miss Drake’s mercy. They walked outside to the terrace, and she shifted, without his knowing how, into a giant red dragon, who flamed at him.

Kyle didn’t know what to do. He’d never fought anything except in games. And he didn’t have a magical sword, which he felt would be necessary for killing a magical dragon. Also, he didn’t want to kill her. She was a giant, flaming dragon, but in her eyes, he saw fear. Fear he would let her win, fear he would leave. Just fear. He didn’t want to kill her. He didn’t want to hurt her. The last thing he wanted to do was make her unhappy.

So he ran around, avoiding her flame — he had got pretty good at running around, when he was managing the pet food factory — until he finally ducked under her flame stream to get to her head. She was furious at him, he sensed, but also starting to tire.

He ducked under the flame and kissed the side of her scaly face. “My darling,” he said, “I love you no matter what form you take. And I would never hurt you, but you must stop this.”

There was an hesitation, a shimmer in the air. And then suddenly he was holding Dulce Drake, in her shimmering green dress. And she looked up at him, still afraid but somehow reassured.

When he kissed her, the guests applauded, and George Drake invited him to his office to discuss the future.

They were married a year later, much to the confusion of Kyle’s parents, who didn’t even know he’d been dating. And the servant and the car, somehow, came with the house her parents gave her.

Kyle never asked where they’d come from initially. He thought there were questions best not asked of fate.

The servant and the car had saved him from life in death, and given him Dulce.

And he wouldn’t say she never again turned into a dragon, but he was always able to gentle her back into her sweet human form.

And we wouldn’t say they lived happily ever after. But they were more happy than not. And they raised three sons and two daughters, none of which needed the assistance of a magical car to grow up.

And that’s all anyone can ask for.

Promo post tomorrow. It’s difficult to do on the laptop, and impossible on the laptop while driving, which is when I CAN do it.

So possess your souls in patience.

I’ll be Bach.