Years ago, when I already had far more experience of traditional publishing than was good for my mental health, I came across someone talking about how you become an "old pro".
I no longer remember who it was, but I have a vague idea he was a bestseller, albeit one of those who only made it big purely by accident, after having been midlist for oh... twenty years or so. He was describing his experience, and he said his colleagues who became bestsellers off the get-go didn't understand the industry. Understanding of the behind-the-scenes mechanics was hard earned language you acquired when the impossible and disastrous happened. And it was experienced and learned as a series of hard kicks to the teeth.
That interview stuck with me, because I had just heard myself -- ten years ago, twenty years published, after thirteen years trying to break in every way but the right way -- referred to as an old pro and wondering when that happened, because I was a rank beginner the day before.
That stuck with an extra hard vicious twist because he was also older than I. By the time I broke in that kind of accidental best seller was bloody impossible. There were no little bookstores run by brilliant autists who could discover your book and sell it to the public in mass quantities. There were just the big chains, and no one in the big chains read your book (discovering this was one of those kicks. And would take to long to explain how I found out) not even the people responsible for "placing it." They just listened to the house about the "confidence" the house had and ordered a book or a hundred, dependent on what the house said. And son of a b*tch if the house wasn't always right...
I don't even hold it against the houses. In a highly controlled market, you have to have a justification for putting money behind a writer/book. And why would you do that (even if one book sold freakishly well) when they have twenty years of mid list? Sure, if you dove in you'd realize why, but you don't have the time for that for a mid list author and book. You just scan the numbers, and off it goes to fail like its predecessors.
This level of centralization is a lousy model that brutalizes everyone. For writers it tends to make us stop creating. For publishers, it takes out whatever passion they came into the field with, forces them to lie to creatives, and sullies their souls and sucks them dry. For readers, it produces lousy product that doesn't meat their needs, and makes them walk away to other genres, or long-ago-published books.
It started to break about ten years ago, with Amazon, and now it's chaotic, and-- I'll manage it. It's how I'm broken. Even all the kicks only managed to make me stop writing temporarily, and then it came back. It's a function of being a very simple tool, made for only one thing: in my case, storytelling.
But this long introduction is just for how I came across that image: kicks in the teeth. It applied to writing in later stage traditional publishing and it applies to us now.
Anyway -- kicks to the teeth. No matter your efforts, no matter how much you try, there is another factor that comes out of the blue and smacks you and leaves you reeling and walking around as if something had hit you hard on the mouth. Even after you recover, you'll never be the same again. Things that are natural to you -- like eating -- will hurt every time you do it. And other things will just feel wrong. All the time. Forever.
But the same way the burned hand learns best, the kicked mouth teaches. Oh, it teaches. It teaches with precision and pain, and you'll never forget the lesson. Ever. You won't be the same after either. Any other pain you'll shrug off. You'll become more determined, more ruthless, more -- no, not more like what you're fighting. In a way you become more yourself than ever. It's just all the little hesitations, all the kindness, all the normal decency you owe to other human beings you care for peel away, and you can't even remember why you felt them.
Because this is what the left has been doing to anyone who opposes them, with their stomping, their game rigging, their "brilliant" improvised patches, a lot of us are feeling these results as much as I did ten years ago, in writing.
I wonder if they know what they're setting up. The new rules they're evoking. The new enemy they're calling to face them.
Look, yesterday my assistant told me I was basically a nice person and I was gobsmacked. This was in relation to some fraud that probably has been taking place with our insurance accounts, and which has us in a bit of a pickle. Not financial. It's like this: we have a doctor who refuses to transfer records, and a new doctor who won't take us up, because it's continuing care without the transfer. The second is being stupid, but part of the reason we want them is that they're obsessive like that. The first-- it's unexplainable unless you assume massive gobs of fraud. Or an office so effed up they don't HAVE records. (In this office, that's believable, trust me. Part of the reason we're moving.) The problem being Dan (and I but I to a lesser extent) can't be without care much longer without serious issues cropping up. Yes, we ARE dealing.
Anyway, she called me nice and I was shocked, because I haven't thought of myself as that for a long long time. (And I don't think in this case it is that. I think I'm just gobsmacked --if this IS fraud -- at the sheer unmitigated stupidity. Because patients will transfer at some point, right? And I suffer from a very specialized form of dumb, in which I don't understand stupid that works at that level, okay.)
But long ago and far away, I was raised to be a nice girl. With all the meanings that implies. It never took very well, but I could play it for extended periods of time. And the things that took were things like never being rude unless I was ready to go on the war path. This left me curiously defenseless when people are rude to me, because the back of the brain doesn't believe it. Particularly when they expect no consequences. Because why would you declare war and not expect return shots?
Anyway there were other things, like not being meaner than I had to be. Always helping people even if I disagreed with them. Always honoring and helping the competent, even if they were in actuality rat finks, etc. etc. etc.
The "nice" I was taught is why the right of Lenin side of the political fight has been losing, worldwide. "Yeah, sure, he's a communist, but he's a brilliant musician. Of course I buy his albums." "Yes, he says things like he wants everyone like me dead, but he's a great writer, of course I'll support his career." "Yes, this series of movies maligns all my values, but they're a hell of a ride, I'll take my family to the theater."
And no, we couldn't call people names. -- I still remember the pearl clutching when I called someone in our field an abbreviation after she called me a racist. Oh, no. So mean. Much evil. We shouldn't descend to their level! Even worse the pearl clutching for calling Occasional Cortex what she in fact is. So evil, very demeaning. Yes, she's a commie whore, but we need to give her all dignity, or they won't treat us right either. (Hint, they don't.) -- We couldn't ridicule them. Under no circumstances could we hire by political bend as well as by competence. We should allow ourselves to be rolled over and our entire work perverted because look at the credentials of Random Marxist. Ignore that they captured the credentialing process long ago. Because if you undermine the institutions, we'll lose everything.
That was.... Scrubs hand across face... ten? years ago. Somewhere from fifteen years ago to... Oh, I think the last bits shook off around 2018 or so. Or not. There might still be bits of nice sticking to us, which we'll only discover when the boot comes out of nowhere and hits our teeth again.
Look, I understand. Particularly the hiring for politics thing. It's bad cess and a bad road. If you hire for anything other than competence, you over time break everything. Because only if you get very lucky does your second cousin, your friend's nephew, or your political coreligionary turn out to be brilliant and focused on the job. And the more you do it, the more it takes to draw that lucky card. It's like all gambling.
But we aren't given that choice. The left started doing it early in the twentieth century -- partially because they confuse agreeing with them with intellectual brilliance -- and if only one side does it, the side that doesn't loses.
And there's other begs for each one of those. Though at this time, the luck is on our side, simply because to make it in anything when the credentialing in every field and the gatekeeping in all the arts have been captured by the other side, it takes exceptional people. As long as we remember to flip it to "just competence" when we win this. I doubt we will, because we're human. And we're walking wounded. But I can hope.
Anyway, look, I came here to be nice. Here being described as this time, this place. I'm a very simple tool. I'm made to tell stories. Sure, my politics will leak into some of the stories. But except for kicks in the teeth at really, really early ages, I probably wouldn't even understand or pay attention to politics. I'd be too busy telling stories.
And even after I had become aware of, and weary of politics, it probably would only show around the edges of some of my stories.
Heaven knows I hope there is an alternate universe in which I ignore politics and just write silly mysteries and ditsy space opera characters, all held together by the rule of cool and a sense of enjoyment. Oh, I hope.
In this timeline... There have been a lot of kicks in the teeth. Weirdly this means I have more teeth, and they've gotten sharper.
I can't list them all. I remember election fraud going back to 2006 and to me it's been blatantly obvious since 2012. Kicks in the teeth. And then.... oh, the last four years. The last four bizarre years.
Yes, the bio-engineered virus with research funded by our own sh*theads in government. But also the lock down. The inconsistent, varies with every city lockdown, and no one else seeming to realize if the illness were that horrifying, we'd all be dead. And the chicanery with enforced vaccination. And and and and and and --
Government enforcing censorship of social media. People being debanked. "Weird occurrences" around those of us who won't shut up.
Kick, kick, kick.
To me the last kick in the teeth was October 7. Not that it happened. If you let your pet savages you've been nurturing like deranged piranhas out of their box to do what comes naturally, the results will be horrifying. I mean they do the same sort of thing among themselves all the time, it's just they expect it and no one hears about it.
But that someone planned and financed that piece of lunacy because they thought it would benefit them. And you know who, precisely, by the way the left flipped on a dime to demand the final solution in a way that would make Hitler proud. (Even while still calling their opposition Hitler.)
The evil, the stupidity, the BLINDNESS. Kick, kick, kick.
They think the kicks have softened us for the kill. You see, they confused the nice with cowardice, with a sense that we were wrong, and therefore wouldn't fight back.
Oh, they might even be right about some of the older people on our side. Not that they thought they were wrong, but they believed in the Marxist eschatological message and thought that the future was pre-ordained and that it all ended in world communism.
But Reagan and what came out after the USSR changed that. We saw the inept, bumbling evil behind the papier mache, flawless monster. And you can't undo that. Even the kids not being taught won't undo it. They'll stumble on the truth sometime.
The rest of us? We've been fighting mad a long time, and only holding back because only monsters and crazed cultists want the world to burn.
We still don't want the world to burn. And we're not going to lay down a fire storm. Unless we're forced. We might be forced.
Israel didn't want to lay down a fire storm, and they're still being controlled and careful. But the shrieking harpies of the left don't understand why Israel no longer cares about "world opinion" and no longer stops on command.
Well, you psychotic bitches of the left, because they've done that before, and you kicked them in the teeth, and the last one was warning that the next one will kill them. They won't stop -- I pray they won't stop -- till they cut off the kicking foot.
And those of us who would normally try to moderate the feeling that they should be justified turning Hamass to powder? We don't feel that way anymore.
The left and the right should look very carefully at this event.
The right because you need to understand what's happening to you. People who still are nice, much nicer than I, are now saying "I told him/her what I think, and if they stop talking to me, I don't care anymore."
"I don't care anymore." is the anthem of the nice person who's been kicked in the teeth enough. And next time? Next time it won't be just words. And they don't care anymore.
And the left? The left needs to stop. They just need to stop. Look at what happened there, take a deep breath and realize that while their manufactured "opinion" is demanding that Israel stop reducing an enemy that attacked her with no provocation, and which has yet to surrender, the real opinion in most of the world has turned.... On Hamass.
Most of us who aren't left realize that this is our battle. The battle for civilization itself. That what happened over there can happen over here. Has been happening over here in small increments. In light kicks to the teeth.
And we know it.
Now, it doesn't mean the right will go to war, as the IDF has been forced to go to war. But the forces are in motion and are going to be damn hard to stop.
You see, the left is starting to get scared. They have a prophecy that they'd win, and they believed it. And sure, the right seemed to give territory up as a matter of course, like we were pre-defeated.
But .... But particularly since 2020 things haven't been going according to plan. We didn't turn on and let the Kenosha Kid hang which they expected and which would have stopped all resistance to their rent-a-savages in Buy Large Mansions. And even the soft left is turning against their open borders insanity and their coddle criminals insanity. And only the very young and very pampered buy the lies about "climate change" (yes, it changes. It changes all the time. And it has mighty little to do with humans, really.)
The right has learned to boycott. And quietly, on the qt, the right has learned not to hire/buy/promote those who hate them. It's anecdotal, of course, but all of us are seeing it. So are they.
Their credentials are becoming worthless. No one believes authorities. Their attempts at shutting us down are not effective enough, which is why the WEF -- the grand babbling heads of their moron prospiracy -- is terrified of free speech. The farmers are in revolt against climate maumauing. And they're making it stick. AND people aren't hating on the Jews as the left hoped they would after 10/7.
It's all going sour for them. And they only know one way to continue. Unreasoning attack and aggression has worked for them for so long.
So, listen up, all ye pampered Jades of the left. Stop. Take a deep breath. Think.
The life you safe might be your own.
Because trust me, from this side -- and I'm not the biggest hothead on my side, not by a year of Sundays -- one more kick in the teeth, and the remaining HUMAN DECENCY flakes away.
You don't want to create what will come from that kick.
Hell, we don't want you to create what will come from it. We'd rather fight you on the details and mop you up in every day life, despite how many more lives and wealth that will cost us, until you damned (I'm not swearing. I use the word advisedly) ideology is in the ash heap of history. We'd much rather.
But those kicks--
If you make it so you survive or we do? Common decency will make it so we have to survive. Because in the world you create if you eliminate us (not that you can, truly) no one WILL survive. Not even you. Your poisonous, evil ideas will destroy all mankind. And the fact some of you just quietly cheered at that tells us all we need to know.
If you make it a choice, we will survive.
You will not like this. No one will. We won't be civilized anymore.
The world will enter a dark turn that will probably take up the rest of my life, and leave it to my grandkids to rebuild.
I beg you, with tears in my eyes, consider you might be wrong. Consider you don't want to do this.
Because once it starts, we won't.
The kicked teeth learn best. And you should have seen what you taught us.
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