Beltane: Coping in a time of trouble.

 

Yurumi | Deposit Photos

The turning of the Wheel of the Year has been on my mind for the past week or so, ever since I (foolishly) volunteered to give a presentation on the Wheel to a Pagan group later this month. (Right after I opened my mouth, I thought, "Two hours! How will I ever fill two hours on the Wheel of the Year?" And then after some brief consideration, I thought, "How am I going to cram everything I need to say into two hours?" I'll let you know how I get on.)

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Beltane is coming up this Thursday. It's supposed to be a lighthearted celebration of spring; all around us, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, things are blooming, creating, procreating. It makes you want to skip and shout.

And then you check the headlines. Every day -- sometimes multiple times a day -- there's another outrage from the Trump administration. It's foreign students, legally in this country, being snatched off the street by masked people in unmarked vans; it's kids who were born in the United States being deported, including a child who was undergoing treatment for cancer; it's federal judges ordering the administration to stop any number of illegal actions and watching the Justice Department lawyers dance around those orders without outright refusing to comply; it's a judge being arrested for showing an undocumented individual another way out of her courtroom than the one where ICE was waiting to arrest him.

To say nothing of what Trump is doing with his on-again, off-again tariffs. No sane business owner can plan anything when they have no idea what the government's economic policies will be tomorrow, let alone five years from now.

And the Buffoon in Chief wears a bright blue suit to the pope's funeral and falls asleep during the service. 

Here we are, in the light half of the year now that the spring equinox is past, but it feels like we're still in darkness.

Are we under a dictatorship yet? Are we in a recession yet?

Would knowing the answers make any difference?

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The first three episodes of season two of Andor dropped this past week. At the end of the third episode, with a major Rebel Alliance offensive in shambles and Mon Mothma's financing of the rebels under threat of exposure, the senator deliberately gets drunk at her daughter's wedding reception and dances the night away.

I wouldn't recommend it as a healthy coping mechanism, but it's a way to get through a moment when everything is going to hell around you. 

And like Andor, which has nine episodes to go, it's not over for us yet.

A blessed Beltane to you all. 

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These moments of bloggy screaming at the darkness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

The no-writing life, three years later.

 

orlaimagen | Deposit Photos

I mentioned at the end of my post last week that it's been more than three years since I published my last novel. The final book in the Atherton Vampire trilogy, The Atherton Vampire: Midnight Creeps, was released in December 2021. 

I originally wrote that series for Kindle Vella, a new Amazon platform that was half book sales and half gaming, or so it seemed to me; you had to buy tokens to pay for the books you bought. I thought it would be a place to find new readers on a brand-new platform that wasn't as glutted as the regular Amazon marketplace had become. I figured maybe I could break out there and inspire those new readers to find the rest of my books. 

It didn't work out that way. As usual, the writers who did well on Vella already had a name elsewhere. Vella must not have made any money for Amazon, either; the Zon shut it down earlier this year.

Jerry Atherton was my last-ditch effort to goose my book sales. By the fall of 2021, I'd been self-publishing for about ten years. I did pretty well with the first five books of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, but the follow-on series didn't sell all that well. My top sales year was 2013. (I actually moved 15,000 copies of all my books that year. Damn! I wonder if that's enough to get me into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association? SWFA membership was one of my goals, once upon a time.)  

By the way, here's a shout-out to the person who bought all five of the Pipe Woman Chronicles books on Amazon this year. How the hell did you find them? They're all ranked at like #2,873,965...

I am off topic, a little, and now I'm going to go a little farther off-topic. Bear with me.

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A few weeks back -- actually, it was the afternoon of the day that the legislative session ended -- I chatted with a Tarot card reader. Now, alert hearth/myth readers know that I know how to read Tarot and I do readings for myself on the regular. But it can be easy to miss things you don't want to think about. So it's not a bad practice to check in with someone else every now and then.

The main message from this reading was that I had an internal conflict. I'd left DC and moved to Santa Fe (in the midst of a pandemic!) for a reason, and since then, I had kind of lost the plot. And I needed to think about how I was going to get back on track and re-focus on my original goal.

That original goal didn't have anything to do with fiction writing, although I did have vague plans to republish all my books with new covers and maybe make audio books for them all. No, the goal was to quit working full time. And here I am, back at work full-time.

I mean, shit happens. I bought a condo in a building that needs a lot of work. To afford that, I had to go back to work. And now, to be completely honest, with Trump back in office and the DOGEbros loose at the Social Security Administration, I'm just as happy to have a paycheck in case our Social Security and Medicare safety nets disappear.

But when I went back full time, my goal was to do it for just five years, until I turned 70. After these idiots in DC started mucking about, I was bracing myself to work 'til I dropped dead.

But I'm tired, y'all. I need to go back to having unstructured days at some point. So I'm returning to the "retire at 70" mindset, and we'll see where we are in three years.

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Circling back to the question that some of you may be asking: Am I going to write any more novels?

Honestly? I don't think so. I do so much reading at work nowadays that I can barely read for pleasure anymore; I tend to nod off after about 20 pages. (To be fair, I also nod off while watching stupid TV every evening. Maybe I just need more sleep...) The idea of sitting in front of a computer for even more hours a day sounds less like fun and more like, I dunno, I should get out and take a walk or something instead.

After I re-retire and get a few months of those sweet, sweet unstructured days under my belt, I may try writing again. Or if I get a kickass idea for a book in the meantime. But otherwise, I plan to stay retired from the writing life.

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These moments of introspective blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, all of whose 40-ish titles are still available on Amazon. 

NaNo no more, or: Why we can't have nice things.

 Earlier today, a friend sent me a screenshot of this headline: 

Here's a link to a free version of the story. It doesn't include the second headline, which is too bad, because it gets to the heart of why NaNo is going out of business.

As alert hearth/myth readers know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. At first it was a simple challenge: Write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Devote all of the month of November to churning out a first draft of the novel you've always dreamed of writing. Get the first draft out of your head and onto the (virtual) page.

I've been a big supporter of NaNoWriMo over the years, both by promoting my own participation in their events and, often, by sliding them some cash. I went back through the blog just now to figure out the last time I participated in a NaNo event. Looks like it might have been November 2020, or maybe summer 2021. I know I did NaNo something like eleven times, and I won every time I participated. But I can't check on the NaNo website anymore because I deleted my account last year, upon hearing about the change in their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their novels.

Apparently there were other problems with the organization: accusations of nefarious people using the forums for grooming and abuse. I never saw any of that because I never frequented the forums. I wasn't interested in wasting time on a message board (if I wanted to do that, I'd go to Kevin's Watch); I was doing NaNo to write my damn novel. I used it as an accountability tool to keep my word count on track. The certificate I got for winning, if I'm being honest, was mostly for bragging rights on social media.

When I started seeing things change at NaNo was about the time the founders sold the place. After that, there were deals for participants at indie-author-adjacent businesses -- stuff like discounts for having your novel printed by some pay-to-publish outfit. I don't think I ever used any of them. But I didn't call them out, either. Maybe I should have. 

Probably I should have.

Anyway, last year, NaNo changed their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their work -- and accused people who complained about the change of ableism, of all things. From the article: 

"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," the nonprofit's 2024 statement reads, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

Ooh, privilege and ableism! Insert haughty sniff here!

But the opponents of the change saw that for what it was: bullshit. Published authors believed -- as I do -- that the real aim behind the TOS change was to allow the new owners to scrape content written by participants to train AI so the organization could profit from it. That's just so far from the original purpose of NaNoWriMo as to be sickening.

"So many people worked so hard to make NaNoWriMo what it was," children and YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall posted on Bluesky, "and it was all squandered to prop up a plagiarism machine, truly betraying everything NaNo represented: the limitless creativity of normal people."

It's the same scummy behavior that finally made me quit the dead bird app. It's people who think it's okay to make money off of stuff they stole from content creators. It's not exactly plagiarism, but it's not far off the mark.

About two years ago, I wrote here on this blog, "by and large, creativity should be left to human beings." I still think so. And I still think we ought to be paid, every time, for what we create.

What I told my friend in response to the headline above was: "The founders (of NaNo) had the best of intentions and did a lot of good for writers. As usual, the capitalists fucked it up." 

It's a tale as old as greed. 

Any ideas on how to change it would be much appreciated.

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In searching the blog to discover the last time I last did NaNo, I realized it's been more than three years since I wrote my last novel. I'm thinking maybe it's time I wrote a retrospective on how my decision is holding up. Maybe next week.

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These moments of human-generated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

How many people attended the Hands Off rallies? Nobody knows.

When I was in college, I had a poster that featured artwork kind of like this, except that the bricks were gray: 

deberarr | Deposit Photos

The caption read: "For every complex problem, there is a simple solution -- and it's wrong." Apparently nobody knows who originally said it. But it came to mind this weekend when I was perusing stories about the turnout at yesterday's Hands Off protests around the country and around the world.

I didn't go yesterday. I had every intention of going, but it snowed overnight and most of the day, and I was a little worried about driving in it. But we had about 2,000 people turn out at our state capitol building, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican this morning. Our rally was one of several planned across the state, including Albuquerque, our largest city, where the media reported turnout only as "thousands".

Interestingly, that's the same vague number I saw out of most news organizations during the day for the all of the events combined: "thousands". The NBC-owned TV channel in New York City would only say that organizers expected thousands to come -- despite aerial photos showing the crowd stretching 20 city blocks.

Later in the day, some news organizations bumped the crowd-size numbers up to "hundreds of thousands".

But I was following the Alt National Park Service account on Facebook, which said their final attendance figure for all 1,200-plus rallies across the country was five million people.

That's a pretty big discrepancy.

A friend on Facebook blamed it on the corporate takeover of the American media by billionaires who support Trump (or at least want to keep doing business under the Trump regime). 

That sounds plausible until you look at foreign coverage of the protests. For example, The Guardian, which is British owned and proclaims proudly that it doesn't bow to Trump, used the same vague wording as every other news organization: "Organizers estimated that more than 500,000 people demonstrated in Washington DC, Florida and elsewhere." The BBC wouldn't commit to a final tally at all, sticking with "thousands". 

Here's the thing: It's hard to get an exact number of attendees at big outdoor events. You can get an estimate by counting the number of people in a specific area of known size -- let's call that a "unit" -- and multiplying that times the number of units that the crowd covers. That's the way the National Park Service used to do it in DC -- until the Million Man March in 1995, when the organizers claimed three million people attended and got big mad when the National Park Service said it was more like 400,000. It was far from the first time that event organizers had disputed the NPS's official counts. So Congress inserted language in the next appropriations bill that removed funding for the NPS for crowd size estimating. 

Now, 1995 was a while ago, but not so long ago that folks at the NPS have forgotten the methodology, which was never much of secret anyhow. (It's the same way you figure out how many jelly beans are in a jar, right?) The Alt NPS folks said they had a representative at every rally yesterday, and those reps were the ones who came up with the attendance figures for each rally.

But why aren't the media going with the Alt NPS attendance figure? My guess is that they have no way to confirm it, and they figured it was safer to go with something vague like "organizers said thousands had registered to attend" and maybe also say that "organizers later said way more people showed up than they expected" than to go out on a limb with the figure of five million.

Are the media deliberately downplaying yesterday's crowd sizes? Maybe. Is it because of some edict from their owners? I doubt it -- mainly because photos and video of the rallies are readily available. If the oligarchy were indeed trying to promote the undercount, all that photographic evidence would be gone.

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Here's your periodic reminder that media is a plural noun and requires a plural verb.

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Oh hey, I just found out that if you want a copy of the poster I used to have, it's available on eBay. It can be yours for just $40.48 (plus shipping, no doubt). I think I paid a buck and a quarter for mine in 1976, but hey, it's a collectible now, amirite?

The poster attributes the quote to someone named "Bradford", which is clearly wrong. And somehow, that seems appropriate.

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These moments of bloggy plausibility have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!