Tag: writing

The Baen Brigade Keeps Biting Ankles

Brad Torgersen and the Baen Anklebiter’s Brigade are STILL going on about Jon Del Arroz for no reason that anyone outside of their little Real Conservatives Club can discern.

This is a desperate and unconvincing attempt to reverse-DARVO. Remember, this was posted after Torgersen went out of his way to point out that JDA is divorced and even posted a link to the public record of the divorce filing.. Now, Torgersen was never a rocket scientist, but yes, if you’re publicly attacking someone over the state of their marriage, they are indeed the party who is being wronged.

It should be noted that JDA’s wife filed for divorce in November 2022.
– Brad Torgersen, Oct 1, 2023

Duly noted, Torgersen. Duly noted. Just remember, you’re the one who established that marriages are fair game.

Now, regular readers already know what writers active in the community have to say about JDA. Supporting that is this email I received yesterday:

I thought I’d add my two cents regarding the character of Jon Del Arroz — when I reached out to him on Gab as a complete nobody writer in 2017, he gave me an excellent blurb for my book in a couple of weeks despite his presumably busy schedule. Afterwards, he took the time to follow up on the release and when he found out that I hadn’t sold any copies yet, he posted in a bunch of private groups to try and drum up some sales for me. Great guy and I’ll never forget his help.

It’s going to be hilarious when Baen finally shuts down and all these wannabes and never-weres finally stop pretending that they’re the only real professional writers because someone once offered them a book contract for $5,000. What’s so amusing about their bizarre pretensions is that real writers with the talent to get signed by the major houses and the literary houses – which is to say, writers like me – have always scorned the talentless genre writers signed to specialty imprints like Baen.

Note: I said writers like me. Not me personally. I’ve never scorned independent or genre writers and after repeatedly getting paid to not write books from the major houses, the only reason I talk to Random House and Simon & Schuster these days is to acquire rights from them.

But perhaps the funniest thing about this Baen Books professional in the business is that he has all of 3,087 Twitter followers.

UPDATE: Another creator with direct experience working with JDA provides her testimony.

Authors Larry Correia and Brad Torgosen have been attacking their fellow author Jon Del Arroz, I think because he uses internet controversy as a marketing strategy. Apparently that’s a no-no? And they’ve attempted to use personal family troubles of Del Arroz as a weapon in their campaign, which is despicable. So I thought I should add my voice to the character witnesses for Del Arroz.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Cyberpunk Short

I started writing a story for the forthcoming cyberpunk issue of Stupefying Stories, but it turned out to be unneeded, so I initially abandoned it. Then I recalled that we’re going to release the print edition of The Altar of Hate, my collection of non-Selenoth, non-Quantum Mortis short stories, as soon as we get the second Chuck Dixon’s Conan out the door.

So, here’s a preview of “Shinjuku Satan”:

They call me doctor. Partly because I have a doctorate in neuropsychology from Nanyang Technopolitan, but mostly because doctor is what you call the man in the white coat when you, or your kid, or your cat, isn’t feeling well. Most of the time, the doctor can fix what’s wrong with you, the kid, or the cat. And when he can’t, then the doctor is the guy who gets called in to put them down.
I have an office on the 40th floor of the Tanjong Pagar Center, but it’s not your normal doctor’s office. It’s just one room, with a desk, three chairs, a coffee table, and a couch that looks exactly like what it is, a deluxe set ordered from the Professional Office section of the Japandi-Ikea site.
The 96-inch flat-screen is above the couch and across from my desk, which permits me to maintain the illusion that I’m on top of things. Of course, I’m not, because no one who has to sleep more than fifteen minutes a day can possibly keep up with global events without round-the-clock digital assistance.
The gentle sigh of a wind chime announces something new has happened somewhere, something algorithmically deemed worthy of my attention.
“What’cha got, Suzie?” I address the empty room and the screen wakes up. A platinum blonde 80’s-era cybergirl appears, with Barbie-pink lips, a wicked smile, and eyes like silver mirrors. Suzie Shades. She’s my main girl, my colleague, my librarian, and my confessor all rolled into one.
Some might say she’s not real, but she’s as real as anything else is to me. And if her intelligence is artificial, she’s got considerably more of it than your average man on the street.
“A request for a meeting from the Archbishop of Chengdu.”
“Archbishop?”
“In this specific case, the title refers to a priest in service to The Most Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church with Chinese Characteristics. Address him as Eminence.”
“Put him through.”
She coughs, delicately. It’s her way of informing me that I’m being obtuse. “He’s here, in the protein.”
“Very cute. Where?”
“The elevator. Just hitting the thirteenth floor now.”
I stand up and glance around the office space to make sure there is nothing exposed that might offend an Archbishop with Chinese Characteristics, whatever that might be. Then Suzie vanishes from the screen and is replaced by a live image of the corridor outside my office, in which stands nothing but a single potted plant until a man who definitely has Chinese characteristics, but is wearing a well-cut black suit with a red collar in the place of a necktie, strides past it.
“The Archbishop Zhang Wenlan,” Suzie intones a moment before the door opens itself before my unscheduled visitor.
I rise to my feet. I’m not sure what the protocol for greeting an archbishop of any sort might be, much less one with Chinese Characteristics but civility is my compass where potential clients are concerned.
“Anata no sonzai wa kōeidesu, Archbishop.” I bow as deeply as I can without cracking my forehead on the desk. “Dono yo ni o yakunitate reba yoideshou ka?”
“Doctor Sagamihara,” he says, with a barely perceptible inclination of his head. Status superior, but he’s willing to speak on neutral ground. So we’ve got that established. English it is. Good to know where I stand vis-a-vis His Eminence.
His Eminence is younger than I would have imagined, or perhaps just better enhanced. My best guess is sixty going on forty. He looks standard, but then, so do I. And I am, as they say, a very technical boy.
“We are informed that you are the world’s foremost digital neuropsychologist, specializing in the neurotherapeutic treatment, and if necessary, euthanasia, of disordered machine intelligences. Would you say that is a fair characterization?”
“Fair enough. It might be more succinct to call me a Rogue AI Hunter, but then I’d have to cut my rates in half, and in half again.”
“And your rates are?”
“Ten thousand gonghui per day, plus expenses.”
“We prefer to pay a flat fee. Five hundred thousand gonghui on acceptance and five million upon completion of the project to our satisfaction. Plus approved expenses, said approval not to be unreasonably withheld. Are those terms acceptable?”
I do a little math in my head. That’s fifty days at a full rate up front. It tells me that either The Most Holy and Apostolic Catholic Church with Chinese Characteristics doesn’t have an abacus or this job is going to be a definite bitch-and-a-half. Regardless, the offer is much too good to refuse.
“The terms are acceptable,” I graciously allow. “So spill, comrade padre. What’s the job? And don’t leave out all the little devils in the details.”
“It’s not a question of devils,” the archbishop says with a smile that never comes close to reaching his black eyes. “But rather gods, I’m afraid.”

The Archbishop of Chengdu, Zhang Wenlan

DISCUSS ON SG

A Sad Puppy Testifies

The brilliant Hans Schantz tells of his differing experiences with Jon Del Arroz and the big-name authors who are presently engaged in a series of unprofessional and inappropriate attacks on the Arkhaven author:

As my fans and Wise of Heart subscribers are well aware, I run periodic “Based Book Sales” where indie and small press authors join together to offer some of their books at $0.99 or free. I compile them in a couple of big blog posts and we all use our social media reach and email lists to promote the sale. We introduce our readers to other authors whose works they might find interesting. And those other authors introduce their readers to our books. It’s a win-win.

Lately, sales have been moving about a thousand books in each outing. The all-time record was about five thousand. Each sale connects several dozen authors to hundreds of new readers. And Jon del Arroz has been there since the beginning, participating and helping out fellow authors, most of whom have no where near his social media reach.

The big-name authors are well aware of the sale. We even include their books, since our readers may not be familiar with some of them and might appreciate being introduced to a new author. But with few exceptions, they prefer to whine about how they are being ignored by influencers with greater reach than theirs, while at the same time refusing to lend a hand to the “parasites” trying to “ride on their coat tails”…

The “Sad Puppies” saga is not my story to tell. I was merely one of thousands of backers and supporters of the movement. From my in-the-trenches perspective, though, it was an effort to carve out a niche for non-woke fiction from the Skittle-hair people in the publishing industry who sought to ignore and suppress not only dissenting views, but also any fiction that failed to properly kow-tow to their diversity quotas and social justice diktats. Great progress was made… until big-name authors and their big-name publishers decided enough controversy was enough, their point had been made and they were going to take their flags and go home, abandoning the rest of us on the field of battle.

Painful as that betrayal was at the time, it was probably for the best, because it gave rise to a more decentralized and less cancellable movement. Individual creators carved out their own independent pieces of a based literature movement, call it “Iron Age,” or “Comicsgate,” or “Superversive.” Based creators making based fiction and graphic novels serving their fans and defying their would-be gatekeepers.

And the legacy big-name authors and some of their fans are clueless and fail to understand what Jon means when he says “I am the leader of Sad Puppies,” for he omits the rest of the Gamergate-inspired mantra: “and so can you.”

L’Affaire del Arroz, 2 October 2023

As it happens, the Sad Puppies saga and the Comicsgate kerfluffle are my stories to tell, and I will tell them when I appear on Jon Del Arroz’s stream on Thursday night for an interview with him. It’s not my intention to criticize anyone, victimize anyone, or air any dirty laundry – and there isn’t any to air anyhow, Sad Puppies really was just a fundamental difference of opinions – but I will ensure that everyone knows exactly what happened and why it happened for future reference.

We’ll also have a new announcement to make concerning Alt-Hero.

In the interest of full disclosure, I note that Hans Schantz is an Arktoons contributor and I have occasionally supported his Based Book Sales marketing efforts.

DISCUSS ON SG

AI and SSH

An AI service sent me the following article on the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy that purports to mimic my writing style. And to be honest, the AI did a much better job on the basic concept than the average “If you want to know what it’s like to be Sigma Male, well, just let me tell you all about it” human grifter.

Understanding the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
As we navigate through the complexities of life, a range of invisible social rules and structures guide our interactions and decisions. One such framework often overlooked is the socio-sexual hierarchy—a system that categorizes individuals based on their tendencies and success in competing for and attracting mates. This intriguing concept not only sheds light on elements of human nature and social dynamics but also offers a lens through which we can view and better comprehend societal structures, relationships, and behavioral attributes. Moving forward, this article aims to delve into the socio-sexual hierarchy, explaining its basic concepts, various levels, effects on relationships and societies, and the ongoing controversies it attracts.

The Basic Concept of Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
Definition and Understanding of Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
The socio-sexual hierarchy is an anthropological and sociological concept that classifies individuals based on their sexual behavior, attractiveness, and appeal within their society. This hierarchy operates at both individual and collective levels, influencing patterns of encountering, choosing, and bonding with potential partners. The socio-sexual hierarchy model suggests that individuals can be categorized into various tiers, such as “alpha,” “beta,” “gamma,” etc., according to perceived sexual attractiveness and dominance.

Impact of Socio-Sexual Hierarchy on Society
Socio-sexual hierarchy significantly influences societal structure. It informs the social order and shapes the patterns of interpersonal relationships and interactions within the community. The socio-sexual hierarchy concept provides a lens to understand behavioral patterns, such as competition, cooperation, and selection, both intra-sexually (within the same sex) and intersexually (between the sexes).

For example, the societal perception that “alphas” are the most attractive and desirable individuals can lead to increased competition among individuals striving for this status. These competitive behaviors could potentially exacerbate social inequality and create tension within the community.

Socio-Sexual Hierarchy in Individual Relationships
On a personal level, socio-sexual hierarchy affects various aspects of individual relationships including dating and mating choices. Individuals tend to seek partners who are perceived as having an equal or higher position within the socio-sexual hierarchy. According to the matching hypothesis in social psychology, individuals of similar socio-sexual rankings are more likely to pair together, thereby maintaining the socio-sexual hierarchy.

Influence on Interpersonal Dynamics
Socio-sexual hierarchy also has significant impacts on broader interpersonal dynamics, not limited to romantic relationships. For instance, it may influence interpersonal respect, authority, and power relations within groups. An individual ranked high in socio-sexual hierarchy might have more influence and command greater respect within their social group. At the same time, those positioned lower in the hierarchy may face challenges in their social interactions and struggle for recognition.

Successful and Unsuccessful Hierarchies
Despite its influence, the socio-sexual hierarchy doesn’t guarantee success or failure in relationships or society. Many argue against rigidly applying this model due to its potential to foster harmful stereotypes, sexism, and toxic behaviors. While the socio-sexual hierarchy can help decode certain social dynamics, it’s essential to account for individual characteristics, emotional intelligence, and other factors that contribute to healthy relationships and societal cohesiveness.

The Influence of Culture on Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
In the socio-sexual hierarchy, the weightage and significance of different attributes, such as physical attractiveness, social status, or financial security, can change considerably based on cultural variations. Each society establishes its social and sexual norms which, in turn, impact its socio-sexual strata. Furthermore, contemporary societies are progressively dismantling and challenging historically conceived socio-sexual hierarchies. Advocates in these societies are pushing towards an egalitarian outlook, honoring individual preferences, and endorsing the appreciation of diversity.

The Different Levels of Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
The Structure of Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
Through the lens of psychological and sociological study, an understanding of the socio-sexual hierarchy has been sketched. This model theorizes that within each social milieu, males can be separated into numerous rankings or positions, with unique behaviors and attributes defining each layer. Although this theory has predominantly been framed around heterosexual male interactions, it offers a helpful lens to analyze female hierarchies and the behaviors of individuals oriented towards the same sex.

Alpha
At the top of this hierarchy is the alpha male, generally characterized as the most attractive, charismatic, and assertive males in a given social group. They are often the leaders, commanding respect and attention from others. Alphas are typically dominant, confident, and emotionally unaffected by others’ opinions. They exhibit high levels of social intelligence and have varying degrees of physical attractiveness. In terms of sexual relationships, alphas often have the most partners due to their perceived desirability and aptitude for social dominance.

I think it’s pretty clear that whether they like AI or not, writers are going to have to come to terms quickly with utilizing AI tools if they’re going to be competitive with those who embrace them. Hardest hit: James Patterson’s ghostwriters. However, it’s also clear that without a creative core, AI simply isn’t going to be able to do more than flesh out an pre-existing conceptual skeleton.

DISCUSS ON SG

Tilting at Windmills

Karl Denninger considers the possibility that he may have been wasting his time warning his fellow Americans about the coming hard times:

Tell me, how many of you have demanded your Representative and two Senators place the military on the border and treat the influx of illegal crossers as an invasion, shutting down all passage of bills and other Congressional activity until the Executive does exactly that and implements 100% E-Verify, ejecting all illegal aliens already here? Oh yes, the so-called “Conservatives” have, several times, placed 100% E-Verify in a bill but every single time they’ve pulled it rather than insist it pass to get anything else, yet that IS within their power to do. How many of you have demanded all the scams and frauds in the medical system, including that ruled illegal under 15 USC Chapter 1 forty years ago, be met with immediate indictment, prosecution and imprisonment? I have, publicly and repeatedly for over a decade and been raising hell about it for more than two decades. Have you? Or is it only a problem when the invading mass of people show up in your city and start taking whatever they want? Is that not what an invading army does? Do you only complain when you get hurt and need a physician — and get personally screwed with a bill ten or even one hundred times that someone else pays, or when you’re prescribed a drug that is one hundred times as expensive as the same drug, made in the same factory, sold in Europe.

WELL?

I get it, people go along to get along.

But every now and then I have to look at the record, along with the over 15,500 articles I’ve written (not counting replies and discussions) since 2007 and ask: What has come of all the put-in effort, other than a bunch of worn-out keyboards?

After all there’s only 24 hours in a day, and now matter what I do, and how much money I have (or not) I can’t get a single one of the hours I spend doing this — and its a fairly significant investment in time and effort, for which I expect and earn basically nothing in terms of money — back.

I’m going to spend some of them doing something else since, at a certain point, you have to wonder if you really are tilting at windmills.

By Karl’s chosen metric, saving the American nation from itself, he has been a complete failure and all his efforts have been a complete waste of time. And it’s true, he has been and it was. But this failure was inevitable, because there is no saving a nation from itself. The task that he set himself was always impossible from the start.

A better metric, I think, is to ask whether one’s efforts have been beneficial to others. And on that basis, it is absolutely inarguable that Karl’s efforts have been a near-unprecedented success. He has almost certainly saved more individuals from unnecessarily experiencing poor health, degraded immune systems, and sudden death than one thousand doctors over the entire course of their medical careers. That is more than success, that is time well-spent and a life well-lived.

I’m not saying this to try to persuade Mr. Denninger to devote more time to his Market Ticker, or to make him feel any better about how he has spent his time and efforts, or to curry any favor with him. I’m simply an observer pointing out the observable facts, and the observable fact is that by any historical measure, if there was still a real Catholic Church with a genuine servant of Jesus Christ at its head, Karl Denninger would be beatified as a literal living saint for his selfless services to humanity.

Lest any readers here fear for my own feelings about the complete failure of my own 27,333 blog posts and even more significant time investment to save the American nation or Western civilization, please take comfort in the reminder that I am a quintessential Sigma male, I have always believed most people are self-serving idiots who are totally incapable of recognizing the inevitable consequences of their collective actions, and I have never expected anyone to understand, let alone agree, much less take any action on the basis of, my efforts. I observe because I am an observer and I write because I am a writer. That may not be enough for others with more ambitious objectives, but it is enough for me.

Perhaps we are all just tilting at windmills. But so what? Dragons or windmills, some of us are just born to tilt.

DISCUSS ON SG

Forecast: Light Posting

Posting will be light today and tomorrow. It’s a good time to get caught up on Arktoons and UATV. The most recent episode of THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL now features illustrations from the 1.1 edition of the novel, and the most recent Darkstream offers some perspicacious advice on Deltas being Deltas.

It’s all good, no worries.

DISCUSS ON SG

Excellence is in the Details

Fawlty Towers is rightly considered one of the greatest television shows in the history of television. So it’s interesting to learn this little detail about it from the man married to the actress who played Sybil Fawlty.

It wasn’t just the lines that Pru and the cast had to familiarise themselves with.

‘In the case of Fawlty Towers, the devil was in the detail.

In addition to writing the dialogue, John and Connie had gone to great pains to explain exactly what was happening in each scene and why. Put it this way: the script for a 30-minute episode of a sitcom would normally be around 60 pages long, but for Fawlty Towers they were something approaching 140.

In other words, the reason Fawlty Towers so often resembled the synchronized perfection of an oft-shown play or musical is because it was essentially written as a play, with the script containing the choreography and the character motivations as well as the dialogue.

While it doesn’t rise to the level of Tolkien’s invented histories and languages, or Umberto Eco’s recreation in string of his monastery in order to time the length of the conversations properly, it does serve as a spur to the creative mind to up his creative game.

DISCUSS ON SG

We’re Number 20

I’m not sure exactly what these lists are supposed to represent, but according to Ron Unz and Similarweb, the popularity of this site has risen four spots, from number 24 to number 20, on his comparative list of 87 alternative media sites.

  1. ZeroHedge
  2. The Epoch Times
  3. National Review
  4. Daily Caller
  5. Infowars
  6. Daily Stormer
  7. Jacobin Magazine
  8. Reason Magazine
  9. The Unz Review
  10. LewRockwell
  11. Unherd
  12. Alternet
  13. Foreign Policy
  14. Moon of Alabama
  15. Conservative Treehouse
  16. Prager U
  17. Lifesite News
  18. The Daily Sceptic
  19. New Republic
  20. VoxDay

While the numbers upon which these rankings are based are an estimate piled on top of a guess added to a surmise, which is to say they are nearly entirely fictional, they are probably more legitimate than any numbers you see for the mainstream media. As Cerno and others have noted, even a massive headline article in a major magazine doesn’t move the needle by any objective metric, whereas a link from one of these sites is almost certain to sell a few books.

It would have been interesting to see where this blog ranked vis-a-vis the other sites before it was ejected from Blogger. As far as I can tell, pageviews dropped to one-quarter of what they were before, but I don’t trust either the Google or the WordPress numbers; other metrics appear to indicate that not much has changed in terms of the size of the community. Certainly there are more people on SG than before, but this blog is not the only conduit, so that’s probably not relevant. Regardless, we’re better off on our own servers.

The one thing that leaped out at me is the way in which many of the straight conservative sites such as American Conservative appear to be losing readers. This makes sense given the worse-than-uselessness of the conservative media and the Republican establishment. I expect next year’s list will be even harder on neocon sites like National Review and Prager U.

Speaking of writing, Castalia is about to publish the print edition of THE ALTAR OF HATE, my collection of non-Selenoth, non-QM short stories. If any established, published authors would be interested in having a look at the stories and writing a forward to it, please shoot me an email and I’ll get a draft epub out to you. I’m not looking for anything hagiographic, much less serious literary criticism, just the general perspective of an experienced and well-read fellow author capable of intelligently discussing the works for the benefit of the casual reader.

DISCUSS ON SG

Cyberpunk: The Revival

The Original Cyberpunk is celebrating 40 years of an original American literary style by putting together a special edition of Stupefying Stories dedicated to cyberpunk.

The question here for SF writers is: okay, posit that our students now all have Rocketbooks. We know what it’s designed to do and how it’s supposed to be used. Now, how will our characters misuse it, for things they aren’t supposed to do?

That, to me, remains the core question of cyberpunk. What makes a technology disruptive isn’t using it in the way the people who created it intended it should be used. Those people can only think of the right way to use a thing. The disruption comes later, when the people who grew up living with that technology start thinking of all the wrong ways to use it. When this happens, they come up with misuses the creators never dreamed might be possible, because the creators lack the fluency of someone who has grown up speaking the language of the thing.

So in 1980 I asked myself: in this bright and shiny high-tech future that’s coming in fast and hard, how are socially maladjusted younger people—let’s call them “punks”—living at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain, going to misuse this tech to get an edge over the eloi living above them?

Then I wrote a story that tried to explore one possible answer to this question.

Sidebar: Do I really need to explain again how between 1980 and 1982 this story was read and rejected by every short-fiction editor then working in SF publishing, and it most often came back with the standard, “Nice try kid, real close,” quasi-personal brush-off so often given to young and unknown writers?

Cyberpunk science fiction blossomed brilliantly and failed rapidly in the late 1980s to early 1990s, because the same thing happened to cyberpunk as happens to every other successful new thing in any branch of pop culture. At first it was a wonderful breath of fresh air into a stale and dying genre, as scores of new people with new talents and new ideas flooded into writing SF. Then publishers fixated on the commercial success of Neuromancer, and in a few short years cyberpunk fiction went from being something unexpected, fresh, and wildly original to being a trendy fashion statement—to being the flavor of the month—to being a hoary trope, complete with a set of stylistic markers and time-honored forms as immutable as an IEEE standard, to which one must pay heed if one is to write True Cyberpunk. It became, for the most part, Neuromancer fanfic, and the market was soon glutted with an enormous amount of “me too” work that copied the style of the genre’s pioneers but added nothing new to the vocabulary.

Whereupon cyberpunk fiction, as a genre, suffocated on its own vomit and died.

Now it’s 2023, and the 40th anniversary of the first magazine publication of “Cyberpunk” is fast approaching. It feels necessary to do something to mark the occasion, so right now we’re reading submissions for an all-cyberpunk issue of Stupefying Stories. No grand ambitions, this time. No book proposals. To do something like Cyberpunk 2.0 now would require either the backing of a major publisher, which I’m unlikely to get, or a Kickstarter campaign the likes of which I have neither the time, patience, or knowledge to run. Even if we were to start working on it right now, we couldn’t possibly have Cyberpunk 2.0 finished and released before the summer of 2024.

So a special issue of Stupefying Stories it is, then. And what I would truly, deeply, dearly love to see in my submissions inbox are at least a few stories that don’t try to recapitulate the 1980s vision of cyberpunk, but instead start fresh, from the baseline of now.

Like many writers my age, some of my earliest attempts at fiction were heavily influenced by Burning Chrome(1), Count Zero(2), and Mona Lisa Overdrive, though most of them were never finished and none survived the transition from my Mac SE through the various PCs I’ve owned.

But I’ll be making a submission to the Cyberpunk Special Edition, and if you’re one of the established or aspiring authors in the wider Castalia community and its tangential environs, I hope you will too.

(1) This was very nearly the name of a certain techno band.

(2) Yep. That was indeed the reference. We were recording soundtracks to books before we were doing them for games and movies.

DISCUSS ON SG

Vocation and Articulation

Sarah Hoyt describes the challenges of attempting to make a living doing what you love when the entire system is more or less stacked against you:

I want to talk about the human with a vocation/with a need to do something. The something exists in the world. They can theoretically do it.

Then human meets the broken systems. Which I don’t think are YET at peak broken, but are heading there.

As I said, I’ve seen it happen in writing, in art, in teaching, but I’m seeing it a bit everywhere.

You try, but no matter how much you try, how hard you work, or what you do, it seems like everything is against you. And because no one — no one — talks about it it openly, most people who are failing badly think they’re alone in this, and that everyone else is WILDLY successful: writers, artists, mothers (particularly of boys), teachers, etc. etc. etc.

You think “the system is broken? Or is it? Am I just making excuses for myself?” And you try harder. But since the system is actually designed NOT to work, (and you’re mostly seeing the successful people who are either flukes, a well polished facade, or people who are having transitory success and will be shredded later) you keep getting beat. Sometimes you have a little success first, but it all breaks apart later.

Another way to “fail” is to have a very strong brand, do very well with it, and then…. well, it falls apart. Either because you changed, and don’t do the thing the way you did it initially, or because — for artists, though I’m sure there’s parallels in other professions — your public changed. Or changed the way they see you.

Let’s say you’re to the right of Lenin (or these days, Stalin) and you’re a writer of science fiction and fantasy (or certain types of romance; or–), working in the indie side, you might very well build a huge audience, who run screaming when they find you’re one of those “evil right wingers” or who at least can’t withstand a loud and sustained cancel campaign. It’s happened to several of us. And then, of course, you start wondering why you feel called to do this, when you have political opinions so at variance with the “community who reads this” (Or at least the loud parts of the community. And this one is complex, because it’s hard to find readers, anyway, and if all readers think sf/f is left, a lot of people who would otherwise enjoy it don’t even try it out. Kind of like I keep running into “Science fiction is porn” which apparently is from…. guess? Oh, you’ll never guess. Clan of the Cavebear, which is neither science fiction nor porn, but some readers of a certain age associate that with both. That will change, as indie makes a dent. Takes time, though. I mean the association of SF/F and “left”.)

Okay, so…. Never mind why your heart broke. One day you wake up and you think “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s been my driving force since…. ever. But I can’t. I can’t anymore.”

What you’re experiencing, unless it’s your very first failure — and it usually isn’t — is … well, I call it a broken heart, but it’s actually ptsd and burnout.

My solution – and I am not recommending it, merely sharing my perspective – is to simply refuse to regard my activity as economic in nature. I’m not bearing down this week in order to finish the 297,500-word final edition of A SEA OF SKULLS this month because some people might buy it or because it might generate some revenue or because it will make a pretty pair of leather books or because some people might be impressed with me as a writer. I literally don’t think about those things at all, and I think that if I did, it would hinder my ability to write.

I’m doing it because I want to do it. I’m continuing the story because the story continues in my head and it isn’t finished yet.

Sarah touches on this tangentially in her piece: This is the secret no one else will tell you: There is no career. The career is a lie.

I don’t consider myself to have “a career as a writer”. I just write books. Then Castalia publishes them. Repeat as desired. As long as the ideas continue to percolate and flow, I will write them down, in part because the smartest girl I ever knew once told her friend that an idea is only a feeling until it is articulated. And I like to articulate my ideas, which necessitates writing them down because talking to other people too often leads to distraction.

Also, in case anyone is interested, I’ve recently written an introduction for an unannounced Castalia History book that I believe will prove enlightening….

DISCUSS ON SG