Author: genevieve one

Originally trained in Classical Studies, I now work at a major research university translating Science into Standard English. I write novels because . . . well . . . I can't stop!

Rationalizing Your Way to Virtue

virtue-cropped

We now know for sure that it isn’t the ability to use language or tools that sets man apart from other animals; and the jury’s still out on whether, if there even is such a thing as a capacity to contemplate the divine (huh?), man is in exclusive possession of it. But nobody’s shown to my satisfaction that any other species but humans so consistently and imaginatively rationalize. Our ability to conjure up exculpatory reasons for what we do seems to be our great defining characteristic.

I think this is a very important thing to keep in mind when writing fiction. Any character who isn’t meant to be a certified psychopath should not only have clear motives for what he does, but should consciously (and—to be authentic—continually) rationalize his misdeeds.

In stories I’ve written, based mostly on people I’ve actually known, the rationalization often turns out to be the most interesting aspect of the work. This is because many times humans don’t just want to convince themselves and others that some unkind or unfair thing that they’ve done isn’t really so bad after all, or should be excused because of some extenuating circumstance. People often rationalize their behavior all the way from bad to good; even from positively evil to virtuous.

Take, for example, an elderly aunt of my mother’s, now long dead. According to Mom, this woman’s perennial state of simmering rage was likely genetic. She was apparently just born hating the world. But after being raised in the same tepidly Methodist household that produced my grandfather and several other perfectly normal people, Auntie embarked on a quest for a rationalization for her inner rage; which, after some early experiments with radical—really radical—politics, eventually led her to a small church which preached that to hate your neighbor was a sure sign of Salvation. Like the members of Westboro Baptist, the innate anger of the members of Auntie’s church was righteous anger; and intolerance of not only the sin, but the sinner, too, was virtuous and good. Everybody who ever met her disliked her; but Auntie was—in her own mind, at least—sure of Heaven.

I’m seeing the same thing in certain Trump supporters. For years, some of the ones I know personally kept their bigotry and sexism quiet (at least in public), though the rest of us were all more or less aware of what they really thought. Then along came the Trumpkins, relabeling political correctness (otherwise known as an effort to screen overtly racist and blatantly hurtful language from public discourse) as hypocrisy; and bad manners and aggressive self-promotion as authenticity. Some Trump supporters are simply delighted—beyond delighted—to see hatefulness and prejudice redefined as “virtues”, because they like to be virtuous as much as anybody. Now, without having had to abate their hate and prejudice in the least, they can tell themselves that they—like Auntie—are so full of virtue that they’re sure of Heaven or at least a tax cut.

Of course, the problem Auntie had with being actively disliked is a problem for some Trump supporters I know, too. And if I were writing them in a piece of fiction, they would definitely see very soon that real virtue, practiced properly, doesn’t alienate you from your friends and relatives. In the meantime, I’m getting a lot of good information on how to write about families torn apart and old friendships destroyed by ideology, which is useful, I suppose; though sad. It remains to be seen whether I’ll also one day be provided with many examples of happy reconciliations and tearful resolves to try, in future, to come to some better understanding.

BURNING DOWN THE SYSTEM TO THE GROUND?

Pen & Paper

20161126_blp902-bannonWhy does Steve Bannon want to “burn down our form of government to the ground?”  By Steve Bannon’s definition, it means doing away with our democratic system of government. With words like nationalism, populism, and his strong belief in Eurasian, the writing is on the wall, literally.

Eurasian means a system of authoritarian government that is, at best a dictatorship, at worse a medieval form of governance. Think, the Ottoman Empire. Bannon is not a conservative, he is an “Imperialist – like Putin – but worse.

Bannon’s belief in Eurasian, is a system of government that loathes secular modernity, like America and most Western European countries. Bannon’s belief heralds back to the Slavic-Turkic land empire and it is Bannon’s wish to do just that, democracy must go, ergo, he intends through Trump to do just that – “burn down our system of government to the ground.”

How do I know…

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As We Go Marching, Marching

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The March for Science is scheduled for Earth Day. Please join me there.

In the meantime, stop telling me that there’s no point to marching in support of science or anything else because it’s not going to change Trump’s mind. I’m not (entirely) stupid, you know. I already know that. Nothing is ever going to change Trump’s mind about anything—unless maybe a large and aggressive brain-tumor.

All the marches against the Vietnam War never changed Lyndon Johnson’s mind, either—although they did make him sick of the presidency (something to consider). They didn’t change Richard Nixon’s mind, either. I’m sure that to the end of his days Tricky Dick was just fine with having sent thousands of young men off to die in a pointless, fruitless conflict. But after spending his first term as president bombing the shit out of Cambodia, Nixon got himself re-elected on a platform of Peace with Honor, and then he did, indeed, end the war.  (Not with any particular honor. Nixon—a man who, like Trump, would have actually been improved by a large and aggressive brain-tumor—threw the Honor part of his pledge straight out the window. As it turned out later, he was a man who didn’t actually know what the word honor even meant.)

So what made the difference? Why did Nixon suffer a change of—not heart—but policy?

The answer, I think, was simple mathematics. Nixon could count. During his first term in office he counted the protestors marching in the streets, but though they numbered in the tens of thousands, a lot of them weren’t voters, so he didn’t care. Then, in 1971, just when he was running for his second term, the voting age in the United States was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. Nixon and his minions suddenly remembered all those young marchers, noted all the young people (like me; a senior in high school at the time) who were flocking to register—not for the draft, this time, but to vote—and so-called Peace with Honor was the result.

My point is that while Trump will never be a reasonable man, or in the least responsive to the wishes/demands/pleas/anything of the people who—nominally—elected him, most politicians are more like Nixon, and value their offices (and the perks that go with them) a lot more than they value any of their so-called “principles”. If we stand up in our numbers and insist that, to get our votes, they must respect our rights and the constitution, some—I hope many—will see where their interests actually lie.

—Just please, when you write to your congress-people, or attend one of their “Town Hall” meetings, don’t tell them that you would never, under any circumstances, vote for them anyway. Even if it’s the truth. Maybe especially if it’s the truth. This is the equivalent of writing a letter of complaint to a business and leading with the statement that you will never patronize their establishment again. Why should they even try to please someone whose vote/business they’ve already lost?*

I believe the present administration’s policy of “every day, another outrage” is deliberate, and comparable to the car-thief’s strategy of repeatedly triggering the alarm of the car he wants to steal until its owner gets tired of running to shut it off, and stops setting it. Trump’s people are hoping we’ll get tired of protesting and go home and just let them have their way.

Well, I, for one, am not going to. See you on Earth Day.

*Town Halls are a particularly effective means of registering our concerns, I believe; and the one that I’ve decided to adopt. If your congressperson won’t hold a Town Hall, consider joining Indivisible.

(image source:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/87/March_for_Women%27s_Lives_1.jpg)

The Subtle Art of not Giving a Fuck

Okay, the language is definitely NSFW, but it contains one of the best definitions of “maturity” that I’ve read, and I can’t resist sharing. It also features a surprisingly compassionate analysis of that annoying old lady with all the coupons at the supermarket. I’m not her yet, but I’m headed that way, and glad to see that someone understands.

tonysbologna : Honest. Satirical. Observations

A practical man only lives by one principal, “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.”  For those of you  that know me, you would know that Mark Manson is one of my favorite writers and he wrote an article that all of you need to read.  I can’t top this – so I’m not going to – you know that whole bit about “If it’s not broke, don’t fix it.” that I opened this up with – YEAH. Any who, without further adieu, enjoy learning how the subtle art of not giving a fuck.

“In my life, I have given a fuck about many people and many things. I have also not given a fuck about many people and many things. And those fucks I have not given have made all the difference.

People often say the key to confidence and success in life is to simply “not…

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Meet You on the Barricades

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A long time ago, I used to wear a peace sign suspended from the love-beads around my neck, knew many verses to “We Shall Not Be Moved”, and kept a pair of good walking shoes handy for marching in support of civil rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and against American involvement in foreign wars—specifically, in those days, the one in Vietnam. In the days before the internet and social media, getting together and marching was the only way people knew to counter the widely-disseminated official government position that the American people didn’t really want civil rights to be more broadly extended, or the Vietnam War to end. Thousands of people in the street singing songs and carrying signs was proof for anyone to see that yes, indeed, vast numbers of the American people certainly did want those things, and weren’t going to be stopped from saying so.

The results of our activism were somewhat mixed. The war in Vietnam finally ended and I ceremoniously threw away my peace sign; but then other wars came along. Women lost the fight for a constitutional amendment to guarantee our rights; but we resigned ourselves to the longer, harder road of securing them piecemeal and kept at it. Though we’ve made progress at it, the struggle for civil rights in general has sometimes seemed endless. But along the way, I stopped marching, because our elected officials seemed, finally, to realize that people who marched on behalf of a cause also voted for candidates who supported that cause in Washington, and that if they ignored the marchers, it would be at their peril.

Now that it appears that we’re going to be governed—not through our elected representatives—but by executive orders and fiats imposed by people whose positions are outside of our traditional system of checks and balances, and implemented immediately and preferably when no one is looking.* Many of the elective officials I counted on to be our bulwark against this kind of tyranny are, instead, either indifferent or complicit in it.

Clearly, they need to be taught the lesson again that as we march, so do we vote; so I’ve hung a new peace-sign on a chain around my neck; crocheted myself a pink pussy-hat, and got a sturdy new pair of walking shoes. I’m going out to demonstrate again.

Some things will be very different this time. In the old days, the police hated the demonstrators. Honestly, I always had the feeling they were just looking for any excuse to beat us up. Nearly every police force in the 60’s was made up overwhelmingly of white men. The idea of allowing non-white, female people to have equal rights with men like themselves, who represented the pinnacle of human evolution, seemed to strike them as a personal affront.

But my daughter, who participated in the Woman’s March on Washington, tells me that this time, the police were on the marchers’ side. To prove it she sent me a picture of a man with a sign identifying himself as a Muslim being embraced by a (non-white, female) police officer who was wearing a pink pussy-hat pulled over her regulation one. I’m thinking of having it enlarged and framed.

The police have gotten smarter about demonstrations, too; and probably feel safer, which doubtless contributes to their improved attitude toward the crowd. In my day, we used carry glass bottles to drink from, and elevated our signs by attaching them to dowels and yardsticks. Do I need to point out how easily weaponized glass bottles and sticks are? Sometimes the police got so nervous that they confiscated them, leaving thirsty, cranky marchers whose arms ached. If you’ll notice in the picture above, the person carrying the “I’m with her” sign has come up with an ingenious way to calm the nice police officers’ nerves and elevate the sign so that the cameras can see it, too. S/he’s made a tube of an extra piece of poster-board (permitted by the police), cut a slit in the tube, and put the sign in that. This is such a brilliant idea that I wish I’d thought of it myself. Also, water comes in thin plastic bottles now. I’m going to take a couple extra with me on my marches, and if I see a police officer, I’ll offer one.

Other things haven’t changed at all, it appears. If you should happen to take part in a march, keep in mind that no matter what the organizers tell you, there will not be enough porta-potties at the demonstration site. Not half enough. Possibly not even one-tenth as many as are actually needed. Be proud of this—it means you have a good turnout—but be prepared. In the old days, experienced marchers sometimes made a quick stop at the camping-goods store before the march, for what I’ll just call “emergency supplies”. Nowadays I think the old-folks section of the drug-store might have a better selection. I know you get my drift, so I’ll say no more.

If you demonstrate, take snacks to the demonstration. Share them.

Chanting slogans is fine on a march; but singing is much, much better. But in any crowd, there are more people who want to sing than ones who know the words to the songs. In my young days I heard “This Land Is Your Land” sung by both the demonstrators and the counter-demonstrators at the same demonstration, so I made sure to learn the verses as well as the chorus. It hasn’t lost its popularity since I was young.  It was sung by the women in Washington, too.

Also, I noticed early in my marching days that lots of people will join in on songs like “We Shall Not Be Moved” because the only words with which the whole crowd must be familiar are “we shall not be moved”. Verses can be handled solo.  You can keep people singing this one forever, since anybody with half a brain and a cause they believe in can make up a verse on the spot and sing it solo.

Also at any protest demonstration,  “We Shall Overcome” should be sung. I have known even hard, bitter people to be moved to tears by a chorus or two of “We Shall Overcome”.

Just say it’s a hunch, but I kind of suspect that something—some catchy jingle—with a chorus along the lines of “Super-callous-fragile-ego-Trump-you-are-atrocious” will catch on soon, too.

Although the exact date hasn’t been set, there are going to be Marches for Science in Washington and around the nation soon. I’ll be there, of course. I almost have to be. If you should happen to attend too, let’s meet. I’ll be the one under the “Science, Not Silence” sign, wearing comfortable shoes and a pink pussy-hat; and I’ll be singing: “We’ll take back the Congress! We shall overcome! We’ll take back the White House, too! We shall overcome!”

Also, all the verses of “This Land is Your Land”.

*And please don’t bother to tell me this is justified because, “Obama started it”. I have never subscribed to the notion that two wrongs make a right. As far as I’m concerned, people who believe that former president Obama was wrong to issue so many executive orders have less excuse for supporting those of Trump; not more.

Adieu, Apostrophe!

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Maybe this is a strange thing for someone to say who spent as much time as I did learning to use apostrophes, but I won’t miss them when they’re gone. It seems clear to me that they will go. Like the hyphen, we’re quickly learning we can live without them; and texting, I think, will be the apostrophe’s death-blow.

I always found apostrophes a little equivocal anyway. The rule—as I learned it—was that an apostrophe had three functions: One was to indicate a dropped letter in a contraction of two words, as “don’t” for “do not”, for example; and “sha’n’t” for “shall not”, which—to be correct—actually requires two apostrophes. (So does “foc’s’le” for “forecastle”, even though “forecastle” isn’t actually a contraction of two words at all, but one word that sailors pronounce very badly.) A second use was to indicate possession (“Jack’s book”), although this rule was just a refinement of rule one, since “Jack’s book” was originally a contraction of “Jack, his book”—a usage that has been obsolete for so long that a lot of people don’t realize that it was ever the “correct” way, and “Jack’s” would get you points off on your English paper. To make the rule regular, “Mary, her book” would have to give us the form “Mary’r book”, which you’ll notice doesn’t exist.

The third use of an apostrophe was to pluralize individual letters, as in, “all the a’s and b’s”, which I still think is useful but I seem to be the only one who remembers it.

Do we need any of those? The extra apostrophes in “sha’n’t” and “foc’s’le” went the way of the Dodo and we still recognize those words when we see them—which in the case of “shan’t”, we hardly ever do anymore. As indicators of possession, apostrophes seem to cause more confusion than clarity. I’m so tired of seeing “it’s” used incorrectly (it can only be a contraction for “it is”), that I’d rather just never see that word with an apostrophe ever again. And “Jacks book” seems intelligible enough to me.

But anyway, love ’em or loath ’em, in twenty or thirty years I think apostrophes will be gone. In 1978 the Colorado State Legislature decreed that the only acceptable spelling of the name of the mountain is “Pikes Peak” without the apostrophe; and as goes Pikes Peak, so goes the nation. Remember that you heard it here first.

Age of Innocence?

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A few days ago I was telling a writer friend about a story I was working on, in which the protagonist was a child growing up in the 1920s—an era I characterized as more “innocent” than our own. My friend objected. People weren’t more innocent then, she asserted. They were just more hypocritical about pretending to be innocent. Neither of us had any data to support our positions, but I did offer this anecdote (which I did not include in my story, by the way).

In 1924, my maternal grandfather was employed by the railroad, and one of the perks of the job (it may have been the only perk) was that he got free rail passes. They were for travel anywhere in the US; but only for the “day-car,” meaning seats, not berths, and they didn’t cover food, of course. But unlike most married women of her day, my grandmother had a part-time job. She supervised a team of women—mostly housewives like herself—who supplied fancy-work to order for Marshall Field’s department store. My grandmother spent the money she got for teaching the women to make beaded purses and embroidered baby layettes to bankroll a family trip to relatives in California.

Even with rail passes and my grandmother’s savings, the five-day journey was an extravagance, and economies had to be made. My grandmother packed a basket with enough food to last the first two days (the diner, my mother always remembered, charged the shocking price of ten cents for a single boiled egg in the days when a dozen eggs cost twelve cents at the grocery store). For the first night, my grandparents and my mother’s baby sister shared a berth (it must have been snug), while my mother and her older sister were supposed to sleep stretched out on seats in the day-car. (On subsequent nights the family would be able to afford two berths, because one day out of Chicago, ridership on the train diminished, and the price went down.)

The train left Chicago at dinnertime, and at ten o’clock the family went to bed. The day-car was still fairly crowded, but luckily my mother and her sister each got a seat to herself—though not, as they had anticipated, facing one another. Instead, my mother was on one side of the aisle, and my aunt on the other.

And on the seat facing my aunt was a man. He was already asleep, with his arms folded and his hat pulled over his face.

Next morning at breakfast, my aunt looked terrible. Eyes ringed with blue, she could hardly hold her head up. When my grandmother questioned her, she admitted, shamefaced, that she hadn’t gotten a wink the night before; but wouldn’t say why until her mother—probably fearing the worst—took her aside. In private, it all came out: The man in the seat opposite had slept soundly, never stirring—but the only “fact of life” my aunt knew was that if a girl slept with a man, she might have a baby. My aunt was eleven years old.

My writer friend and I eventually compromised on our positions: She agreed that there was a time in human history when the so-called “innocence” of young people was more “protected,” and I conceded that this era was very short (the approximately one hundred years or so between the time when ubiquitous barnyards ensured that the means of mammalian reproduction was on regular display, and the time when popular media took over that function).

On the other hand, we weren’t able agree on whether this kind of “protection” was a good thing or not. My friend did find the story hilarious, however. She said I should use it some time.

So now I have.

Image by Charles O’Rear, 1941-, Photographer (NARA record: 3403717) (U.S. National Archives and Records Administration) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Have a Little Respect (for your readers)

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Long ago, just at the time that I was nervously considering submitting my first work for publication, I happened to come across an article (in a magazine I respected), called something like, “My Life as an American Gypsy.”* I was interested. Growing up, I’d seen groups of Roma sheepherders near where I lived (in the days before RVs became standard, they’d adopted large Cadillacs in place of their traditional caravans), and I was curious about their lives.

The piece was purportedly written by a contemporary Romani-American woman, but when I read it I discovered (to my annoyance) that it was nothing more than a slightly reworked series of incidents lifted straight out of Jan Yoors’ memoir of his life with the Lovari Romani in 1930s Europe. My annoyance stemmed from the fact that Yoors’ The Gypsies (I highly recommend it) is a standard work on the subject, and not only I, but lots of people, have read it. I felt totally dissed by the assumption that I wouldn’t know the work.

I was insulted—but I learned a good lesson. Readers read. Some of them—like me—read a lot. With this in mind, I never ever directly recycle anything I read into something I intend to share.

Other people’s personal experiences are great source material, though. I’ve praised family stories for this before, and I’ll say it again: If you listen carefully, Granny’s got some good stuff there. And if you look around, Granny’s granny—or at least, somebody’s granny—probably kept a diary or wrote a memoir way back whenever. Whatever historical period you want to write about—and without borrowing any one specific incident—you can mine primary sources for all sorts of period detail.

Project Gutenberg is my new favorite source for historical tidbits. For instance, I’d never considered the inconvenience—even danger—that colonial New Englanders subjected themselves to by observing European fashions in a rough new country with lots of snow and not many Old Country conveniences until I read Anna Green Winslow’s account of how a broken axle one Sunday forced knee-breeched and daintily shod neighbors (no trousers or boots at church, please) to abandon their carriage and struggle in silk stockings through three feet of snow. Keeping in mind all those voracious readers I mentioned, I’d never plagiarize Miss Winslow; but I could easily come up with a story of my own in which it’s a significant point that, in Ye Good Olde Dayes, there was no Gore-Tex. Anna Green Winslow’s Diary, written in 1771 and first published in 1894, is a treasure-trove of all kinds of historical material, in fact; and it’s free to download.

Another good one—which in my opinion ought to be required reading in American schools—is Fanny Kemble’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, which pretty much knocks the stuffing out of Gone with the Wind-type ante-bellum fantasies of the Old South. This one was a forehead-slapper for me. The reality of plantation life becomes obvious when you keep in mind that plantations were intended to be money-making (preferably, lots of money), and not humanitarian-or even humane-endeavors. Again; the book’s free, convenient to get, and contains information not only about ante-bellum America, but also things like women’s issues. Ms Kemble left her husband, but spent years afterward feverishly placating him so that he would refrain from invoking his paternal right to take their children away from her.

And then there are the periodicals…

Ah, nothing like a good Victorian periodical to remind us that it isn’t just tight stays that can constrict women.  One year of “Godey’s Ladys Book” is packed with enough articles written by male clergymen about a woman’s duty to shut her mouth and please her menfolk to precipitate clinical depression in any normal female.

On the other hand, “The Prairie Farmer”, full of no-nonsense articles written by farm-wives to advise other farm-wives on how to increase cash-flow in the butter-and-egg sectors happily makes it clear that, whatever the folks at “Godey’s” thought, a lot of women were getting right out there and making something more than household ornaments of themselves. And with the full support of their men-folk, too.

All of which makes me wonder why would anyone plagiarize one book (and risk offending the subset of their readers already familiar with it) when right at hand are a thousand good sources of material on every subject. –Of course, I admit it’s really easy to get so interested in reading those thousand sources that you have no time to write at all. That can be a problem. It’s certainly mine.

*I should point out that this was in the days when “gypsy” was the accepted name for people who now prefer to be called “Roma” or “Romani”, and I certainly intend no offense by using it.

Why I Don’t Write Novels about Scientists—and Why, If You Knew Them, You Probably Wouldn’t Either

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People who know me are sometimes surprised that I don’t write about scientists. “A scientist would make a great character,” they tell me. “People are interested in scientists; they’re colorful; and you know all about them.”

Even without asking, I know the people who say this all really enjoyed the Back to the Future movies.

Heck, I enjoyed them myself; and the character of Dr. Emmett Brown did, in certain key ways, actually resemble some scientists I have known. Just dial Dr. Brown’s eccentricity and flamboyance waaaaaay back, preserve (or enhance) his single-mindedness and drive, increase the Brown family fortune that he spent up doing his research to at least twenty million dollars* (it took him—what? thirty years?—and doing research is very expensive), then load him up with a lot of teaching duties and administrative responsibilities and the fictional inventor of the time-traveling DeLorean would make a perfectly plausible researcher.

But—and this is the critical part—not a very good character in a movie, or book.

While it is true that a lot of scientists are a bit eccentric (some quite charmingly so), to be successful they have a lot of other traits that are the opposite of colorful. Doing research, as I mentioned, is expensive and most real scientists don’t have a family fortune to spend. Therefore, they must secure grants, which requires, not flamboyance, but an organized and linear thinker who can marshal past research successes, the present research status, and a coherent three-to-five-year plan for advancing the field into a forty-page document that will convince a panel of competing researchers and at least one cold-hearted government agency that any large chunks of money they throw his way will be well spent. I’ve known researchers who sported flying hair and flapping lab-coats à la Dr. Emmett Brown, and even ones who, like Einstein, eschewed socks. But believe me, when it comes to getting funding, they are as practical and business-like as any CEO, and just as uptight.

And then, if Dr. Brown is a scientist, then why isn’t Marty McFly more educated about time travel? Hang around scientists for long (five minutes) and what you find is that they can’t stop talking about what they do. They’re used to talking about their research, because that’s a huge part of their job; and since they mostly talk to other researchers who find what they say riveting, they’re used to thinking that everyone wants to hear all about it. Scientists teach everybody, all the time. Even scientists in research institutions who have no classes to teach still have to educate their graduate students and post-doctoral fellows; the public (funding again!); and—through seminars and symposia—their peers. Marty was Dr. Brown’s friend and didn’t know about the flux capacitor???? He’d have heard all about the flux capacitor nine million times!

In my experience your average scientist, far from being a wild-eyed loony, is much too serious, driven, single-minded, analytic, practical, deeply but not widely knowledgeable (there are exceptions), and naturally skeptical for me to want to write about.

Also—and this may be the real reason they don’t come up in my novels—despite all this practicality, etc. etc., an incredible number of them love the Three Stooges. I just don’t think my writing skills are up to making that seem believable.

*Question: Are we supposed to deduce that Dr. Brown burned down the family mansion to get the insurance on it to fund his research? Because this has been suggested to me by several people in a “duh! Of course he did” tone of voice when I totally did not see that at all. Not that don’t believe that there are real scientists—a few—who might do this if all their other funding sources ran out; I just didn’t see it.

Ant-Lands — Free for the Holidays!

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You’re probably bored by now, right?  Too much holiday cheer; too little time to yourself?  Here’s a thought:  Read a book.  My book.  In honor of the holidays, you can download a free copy of my post-apocalyptic novel, Ant-Lands, from now through January 10, 2017. Go to Smashwords and use this coupon code: ZJ72E

You may enjoy it. Let me know if you do.

Here’s the blurb on on Ant-lands.  Keep in mind that I HATE writing these things: Centuries after civilization was destroyed by genetically engineered workers called Ants, a small girl, victim of an Ant-raid, is rescued by a melancholic soldier; while in a town nearby, a schoolteacher struggles to build a new life. A horrifying revelation uncovers an unexpected bond between the three, which—provided they work together—may at last make it possible to defeat their common enemy.

And here is the first chapter:

on a night of no moon

A woman lay fully dressed on a straw-stuffed pallet on the floor of her hut in a tiny farming settlement and stared into the darkness of its single, dirt-floored room. Beside her, her small daughter was sleeping curled up like a kitten with her doll in her arms, but the mother lay rigidly alert to every soft night-sound. Life in the village of a dozen or so sod huts and barns was generally promising and secure. The early spring weather was pleasant and dry; the crops were greening the fields; and the Ants in the Ant-lands—as the woman reminded herself—were said to be going about their work nearly naked and wholly unshod.

This reassured her. Men who had nothing, having nothing to lose, might be driven by desperation to acts of aggression. But Ants judged that the time was right to make war on their neighbors when the harvests had been sufficient to feed workers to ret flax and weave linen for clothes, and cattle were plentiful enough that there were hides available to make shoes. A bare, hungry Ant worked passively all day in his colony’s fields, and Men in their own countries had nothing to fear from him.

The Ants were not insects, of course, despite their name. In fact, it was said that very long ago they had been man’s own creation, made to labor for him. Physically, they resembled man; though the Ancients had by some means no longer understood made every Ant entirely like every other one, so that all were identically short-statured, blue-eyed, and fair. But in that past age something had somehow gone desperately wrong; and man’s creation (made in his image), was now man’s feared enemy.

It was because the night was one of no moon that the woman was afraid. The watch in the watch-tower had been doubled, of course; but if one pair of eyes could make out nothing in the blackness, twice nothing was no improvement. In another hour or two, perhaps (she had no clock to tell her how many), the sun would rise and all would be well again. But while the dark persisted the mother lay without sleeping, and almost without breathing. She knew that the villagers were so few that their only hope in the event of an Ant-raid lay in the Ants finding them wide awake and forearmed.

A sound outside the shuttered window: A footstep. An early-rising neighbor? The woman sat up, and willed her heart to beat more softly so that she could hear. No second step followed the first, and she had lain down again and drawn a breath of relief when the unmistakable metallic whisper of a knife being drawn from a sheath brought her bolt upright again. More footsteps, a grunt, and the jostle of one body against another; and then a sound like heavy raindrops pelting to earth. When a head is struck from a body the heart does not immediately know to stop pumping, and blood spurts from the severed neck in a gory fountain. The sound was that of great gouts of a watchman’s blood falling from the watch-tower where the Ants had surprised him onto the ground below.

“Anne,” the woman whispered urgently, shaking the little girl awake. “Up, up.”

The child stumbled sleepily from the pallet. She knew instinctively not to speak.

Dragging the rough mattress aside, the woman felt for the hole dug in the earth beneath it.

Into her daughter’s ear she breathed softly, pushing her down into the cavity, “Here. Lie here: That’s right. Make yourself as small as you can.”

The child still clutched her doll. “Mama…” she whispered—just that one word.

Dawn was breaking at last—too late!—and mother and child could just see by it the gleam of one another’s eyes.

“Stay here, stay covered. No matter what happens, no matter what you hear, don’t move. All right? Not until you’re sure it’s safe.” But how would such a little one know? “I’ll come for you, if I can,” the woman whispered.

Another glint than her mother’s tear-bright eyes caught the little girl’s attention—that of the knife, a big one, in her mother’s hand.

The noises outside were growing louder and more frenzied. Gods! A child’s cry!

“Stay here, stay still; all right, Anne?”

The little girl nodded soberly.

A scrape at the door—

With a mother’s hungry eyes she devoured her child’s face one last time. “You must live,” she murmured, touching small Anne’s cheek. “You must try to live.”

The pallet in place again, the woman ran to the door and listened. She was waiting for the Ant who had tried it to move aside. She had already decided that she must not be taken inside the hut. She must get out somehow, clear of the door, and then run and run as hard as she could; and at last, when she was caught—she knew she would be caught—she must fight. Every step she ran led the Ants further from her child; every Ant that she tired by running was an Ant who would search the hut less carefully. And any Ant that she killed was an Ant who wouldn’t kill Anne.

In one swift movement, the woman threw aside the bar to the door and burst out.

She made it as far as the clearing surrounding the watch-tower, twenty steps or so from where her daughter lay shivering with fear, huddled in a hole in the ground with her doll in her arms. Eyes closed, the child kissed the doll’s face repeatedly, seeing in her mind as she did so her mother’s loved one—but she made not a sound. She was trying to live.

As she lay hugging her rag-baby, an Ant whose feet were bare and who wore only the ragged remains of what had once been a roughly-sewn shirt caught her mother by her long hair and flung her to the ground, and her mother, making good on her promise to herself, sprang up again slashing wildly with her knife.

She was not, in the end, able absolutely to kill the Ant. His own comrades performed that service for her later when the injuries she had inflicted festered, and he could no longer keep up with the common pace back to the Ant-lands. She fought him until another Ant, coming behind her, struck off her head with his great iron sword.

As soon as he had done so, both Ants immediately lost all interest in the woman. A dead Man was neither a threat nor plunder. As her body fell, Anne’s mother’s head rolled a little way, to the feet of another Ant. He kicked it casually aside.

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