Author Archives: sydlogsdon

715. Pettus Bridge, a fable

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Once upon a time, there was a lovely young woman. Unfortunately, she was black, enslaved, and living in Alabama. The year was 1815.

Her owner was just back from fighting beside Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans. He was a hero.

His wife didn’t think so. She had been running the plantation all the time he was gone. She hadn’t enjoyed that, but she enjoyed having him home again even less. In bed, he was quick and crude, and after three weeks his wife moved into a different bedroom.

A week later, he found the lovely young black woman in the fields. He ordered her to take off her clothes and lie down on her back in the shade of a tree. Ten minutes later he was on his way again.

Nine months later, the woman gave birth to a beautiful daughter. Nineteen years later, the hero’s son caught the daughter in the fields and did the same thing to her that his father had done to her mother. Nine months later, another lovely black girl-child was born, but now things had changed.

The plantation was failing. The hero’s son had become too fat to chase women, even slave women, and too drunk most of the time to miss the chase. The plantation was sold, the slaves were broken up and scattered. The girl-child stayed with her mother a few years, then was sold to a plantation south of Birmingham. When she turned seventeen, she was sold to a brothel.

When she was twenty-four, she gave birth to twins — but not identicals. One she named Flo; it had been her mother’s name. The other she named Cécile, since the father had been a Frenchman. She thought so, anyway.

The blood of Cécile’s white father, and grandfather, and great grandfather were strong in her makeup. He nose was small, her skin was pale, She would be a great addition to the brothel when she grew up. Flo had inherited the other side of the genetic lottery.

Both would remain slaves. Both were black, Cécile’s white looks notwithstanding, since the doctrine of that day was the one drop of blood was all it took to make you black.

Little Cécile was a favorite of all the men who came to the brothel. When her head was only up to their elbows, she had already learned how to lean against them, smile up at them, and laugh like she didn’t have a care. She earned coins that way and she kept them hidden. She listened to what they talked about as they waited their turn upstairs, and she remembered. She stored everything away in her finely tuned mind and she planned. She learned about Birmingham, but more importantly she learned about Memphis from a traveler who came often. Soon she knew all the street names, where blacks lived, and where they didn’t.

When she was fifteen, she ran away. Two months later, she was in Memphis. Her name was Celia, now. Celia White, because she had a sense of humor. Her name was White, and she was white, because she was intelligent enough to know that that was the only way to survive. Her husband never knew. Her children never knew.

Celia had eight children. Every time a child was born, she was in mortal fear that the child would have dark skin and kinky hair, but it never happened. When one of Celia’s grandsons had a black appearing child, he beat his wife for her infidelity, since the child clearly could not be his. Celia said nothing.

When Celia was 53, her husband moved to Selma, Alabama. Within a year most of the children and grandchildren had followed. Now Celia was only seventeen miles from the town that held the brothel where she had been born. She said nothing.

Celia’s mother was emancipated in 1865, but Celia never contacted her.

Celia had emancipated herself already. While the others traded slavery for Jim Crow, Celia had made herself white. Her emancipation was real, and she had no intention of jeopardizing it.

Celia live to be 71. They buried her in Selma, in a cemetery that black folks couldn’t use — but she did.

She had eight children, forty-seven grandchildren, and one hundred six great-grandchildren. Most of them remained in and around Selma, and many went into law enforcement.

In 1965, Celia would have been 116 if she had lived that long. She never saw her mother again after she ran away from the brothel. She never saw her twin, Flo, either. For most of Celia’s life, Flo was alive and in the area, having children, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, just like Celia, but they never met again.

On March 7, 1965 near the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, Celia’s great-grandchildren, thinking they were white, brutally attacked Flo’s great-grandchildren who knew that they were black and always would be.

Behold, America, clubbing itself to death over the myth of race.

714. The Soul of the Menhir

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Religion fascinates me. I had it, I lost it, and I have told that story too many times to repeat it here, but the fascination remains.

I invented a master religion in Jandrax, where Louis Dumezil wrote a compilation of all the things which religions have in common and called it the Monomythos. It was meant to end religious wars. It went through many revisions, after which religious wars were fought over which version was the correct one.

In A Fond Farewell to Dying Ram David Singh found his research impeded by those who believed in the Christian concept of a soul and by those who believed in the Hindu concept of atman.

That is the way I exercise my fascination. Whatever my personal opinion, I write about characters working out their destinies, guided by their own beliefs.

Of course, I nudge.

In the menhir series, menhirs are gates between worlds. (See post 710, January 28, 2026) How they are powered in the rest of the multiverse is not explained, but in the world of the menhir they are repositories of souls, and are fed by the ai (power) of the souls which are bound (enreithed) to them.

I’ll let my favorite priest, Dymal, explain further:

— <<  >> —

From Morning of the Gods . . .

Dymal paused outside the hedge and shook his head.

“Most improper,” he said and, looking at the direction the late afternoon shadows fell. He walked around to the eastern side of the thorngall hedge and pushed through. As Tidac and Cinnabar followed him, he said, “One always approaches a menhir from the direction of the rising sun.”

“We didn’t know.”

“Of course not. No harm was done. It’s just that you came in the window when you should have entered by the front door.”

Dymal stopped to survey the besh. It was rounded and lichen covered, a boulder perhaps a little under man height. He raised his hands and spoke a word, listened to the echo of his voice, then said, “Not a menhir, but certainly a stone of enreithment.”

Tidac was puzzled. His education should have included the details of menhir worship, but it had been cut short by Marquart’s death. Cinnabar knew even less, and said so.

Dymal accepted their ignorance with good grace and fell into a didactic mode of speech. “When one dies,” he said, “where does the soul go?”

“It is enreithed,” Tidac said.

“It hoovers above the body for a time,” Cinnabar said. “Then it sometimes goes into some object, or it just fades away.”

Dymal smiled as if his pupils had said something profound. A dozen years of teaching priest candidates had given him the skill of setting young ones at ease, and making the ignorant feel smarter than they were. “You are both half right and half wrong.” he said.

“No one knows where souls come from; the last great mystery is who you were before you were born. But once installed in a physical body, our soul, our essence, clings with such tenacity that not age, nor weakness, nor sorrow, nor torture can drive it out. Only death can free a soul, and in that terrible last moment it becomes abahara — bodiless. The word means disconnected, and there is no greater torment than that state.

“Thousands upon thousands of years ago, wise men discovered a way to attach those bodiless souls to inanimate stone, and give them rest. Over the millennia, as soul after soul comes to find rest in a single stone, those souls form a commingled whole — a gestalt soul, if you will. Thus a mere stone becomes a besh, as this one is.”

“But not a menhir?” Tidac asked.

“All menhirs are beshes, but not all beshes are menhirs. This one will never be more than it is. It is too far from where men now live. But in other places, as more and more souls are enreithed, the power of each soul — each soul’s ai — contributes to the ai of the besh. If this goes on long enough, the besh becomes a menhir gate, through which the powerful can pass from world to world.”

— <<  >> —

Thank you, Dymal. I’ll take over now.

Menhirs are gates between the worlds, but only in the world of the menhir are men so attached to them. They are every man’s or woman’s desired ending. Death is not particularly feared, if it is followed by enreithment and a commingling with all the souls who have gone before. However, it is much feared by travelers and soldiers, whose deaths may come too far from a menhir. They truly die. Their souls arise out of their bodies and hover in fear and agony. Over a few days they dissipate. It is the ultimate in loneliness, and those who endure it are called abahara.

But not ghosts. Once these abaharas are gone, they are gone. They do not return.

There is passage between living worlds by way of the menhirs, for those who have the personal power to compel them. There is passage into the menhirs, once and forever at death. The eternal loneliness is averted, but individual identity is lost.

There is no land of the dead for the abaharas to return from. The unenreithed are simply dead, irrevocably and eternally.

It’s a tough world. I wrote it, I enjoy visiting and watching my word-people working out their destinies, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

— <<  >> —

BACK IN POST 695 BIRTH OF A SERIES I gave my best estimate of publication dates for the Menhir series. That has been revised to:

The Morning of the Gods

May 27, 2026

Firedrake

July 15, 2026

The Lost Get

September 2, 2027

Whitethorn

October 21, 2026

The Scourge of Heaven

December 9, 2026

713. You and Me

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About sixty-eight years ago I was sitting in a fourth or fifth grade classroom, learning that I should always say, “You and I,” and that I was never supposed to say “Me and you”. I didn’t know that right there in small town Oklahoma I was being given a double-whammy of British imperialism and English politeness.

I did know that every child was going to continue saying “me and you” outside the classroom, and I suspected that the teacher probably would too. Adults were always full of advice they didn’t follow themselves.

I also knew that the adults in my little town didn’t talk like the people on television, and certainly didn’t speak the same English that I was finding in all those books from the county library.

I’m not talking about accent. Books are silent. Whatever was written in them, echoed in my head in the same Okie accent that I spoke. Even the local newsman on KTUL Tulsa, who used different words in different places than the people in my town, did so in the same Okie accent.

The teacher said, “Never say me and you. Always say you and I.” The implication was, memorize it and don’t ask any questions.

It wasn’t even grammatical. Let’s assume that we keep the other person first and ourselves second — it is “you and I” if we are using it as subject, and “you and me” if we are using it as an object. They didn’t teach us that.

Putting the person spoken to before the speaker didn’t really have anything to do with grammar. It existed because America grew out of British culture, before the rest of the world arrived. Britain was a stratified society in which you kept your head down unless you were top dog.

Don’t step in front of your betters. Don’t complain if they cut in line. Don’t speak until spoken to. And put your betters first in the sentence.

Any stratified society is dangerous, because your place in the system is never permanent or safe. If you work hard enough, you can rise — but if you slack off, you will fall.

That’s for the upper strata. If you are too far down, you had better plan to stay there, or your “betters” will make you wish you had. We are referring to Brits in Britain, high caste Hindus interacting with low caste Hindus in India, or anybody White in the era of my childhood, anywhere near the South, talking to anybody Black.

Until recently, and maybe still, that also included women trying to interact with men.

The English politeness — you and me, but never me and you — is not a matter of Mary Poppins sweetness and light. It is a word to the wise. Never assert your own value in a stratified society. Never put yourself first. Those above you will slap you down if you do.

— << >> —

In that class, I was actually being taught that grammar (in the larger sense of rules of language, both acknowledged and hidden) is what language is all about. It would be years later that I realized that an equally compelling case could be made for the idea that usage is what language is all about. Finally I came to realize that it is, and probably always will be, a struggle between those two positions.

To be short and snarky, usage is what people say, and grammar is what intellectuals tell people that they should have said.

So who cares? You do, probably, if you are or want to be a writer.

Language is always changing, and one advantage of being seventy-eight and being a writer is that I have lived long enough to see it happen. A disadvantage (from the same viewpoint) is that language always seems to move toward the more simple, at the expense of the measured, the stately, and the beautiful.

I hate it. I throw metaphorical bricks at my TV screen every evening because of the way the characters are talking.

Nevertheless, the changes are real. They reflect the language people actually speak. They make up the language you readers will expect to read.

— << >> —

When I was about fourteen, I knew I wanted to go to college, and I knew that the people there were not going to speak small town Okie. I got an authoritative book of grammar, Strunk and White, and made it part of my thinking. (It didn’t help my accent, but that’s another post.)

Even then, I didn’t buy into S&W as if it were the word of God, and over the years I have found that much of their advice was not helpful. No problem. I have never read a book without muttering, “Yeah, maybe?”, from time to time under my breath.

I know now that sentence fragments are as legitimate as sentences, and are frequently a great deal more expressive. Strunk or White would slap my knuckles for that, but who cares.

Are you a writer, or a would-be writer? I can’t imagine you coming this far into this post if you aren’t. There is a great variety of English out there. Pick and choose. Make it your own. Decide who your audience is, and how far you want to go toward sounding like them.

Especially,  be prepared for more changes in the future. Like it or not, change is coming.

712. God, Trump, and the Devil

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I originally wrote this post before Christmas. That’s not unusual; I always write posts early and revise them several times before they appear. In this case, you might expect that all the horrors visited on the world by Trump in Venezuela, Greenland, and Minneapolis would make my position harsher. It doesn’t, but only because this post is about the situation at the time of the last presidential election.

If those same voters still support Trump, that is a different matter.

— << >> —

The people who follow Trump are not necessarily evil. They also aren’t fools. If you disagree with them philosophically, it is all too easy to paint them blacker than they deserve.

I don’t feel that negatively about them. I understand why conservatives hate abortion. I understand why the more extreme conservatives consider it murder. It isn’t a crazy position. I would argue with them, but that doesn’t mean their positions are crazy — not even extreme.

It’s a Christian thing and I used to be a Christian. I understand it.

I hear complaints about transgender people reading to children in libraries. I understand that too, even though I don’t agree.

If God made men and women, separate and different, in the manner He saw fit, then there is no middle ground — no blurring of the genders. I disagree with that philosophy (or more properly, religious interpretation) but that doesn’t make it crazy. It doesn’t even make it extreme.

I understand why Christian conservatives would support someone who claims to oppose abortion. I can understand why Christian conservatives would support someone who tells them that there are only two sexes, so homosexuality is wrong. I don’t agree, but I understand their viewpoint.

Here is what I don’t understand.

How can Christian conservatives support Trump when he only plays lip service to what they cherish. They have deep beliefs about morality and religion. He has deep beliefs in money and power. Trump has no empathy, no sexual morality, no sense of justice, and no respect for the law.

Christian conservatives, you should consider this question — do you like him? He doesn’t like you, or anyone else but himself.

I have even heard it said that Christians should support Trump because he is doing God’s work.

Really?

Does God need the Devil to do his work for him. Don’t you think He could save the world without employing a lying, cheating, heartless, arrogant, self-serving buffoon like Trump?

That’s the Christian position I don’t understand.

Here’s what I would think, if I were still a Christian. My mind would stray from contemporary issues to the Revelation of St. John. I would think about the Beast. I would think about the Antichrist — that charismatic world leader from the final days whom everyone worships and everyone follows, but whose coming signals Armageddon.

Trump as the Antichrist? I don’t believe it — now.

But if Trump had been around when I was a Christian, it would have been the first explanation that came to mind. It makes a lot more sense than the idea of Trump doing God’s work.

711. Backstory, Cyan

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Backstory — these are the things a writer has to know about his fictional universe, most of which will have happened before his actual story begins. Some is dribbled out to the reader as the story progresses. Much is never known to the reader, but remains essential nonetheless.

The novel Cyan takes place in the late twenty-first century, but it was written during the last decades of the twentieth and first decades of the twenty-first century. A lot of things changed during those decades, and so did the backstory.

When I started Cyan, the expedition to Procyon was to be mounted by an international body as a cooperative effort. As the story matured in my mind, the notion of cooperation that was so important to the creation of the International Space Station began to fade in the real world. Things got grittier on Real Earth and also on the Earth of the novel.

In that changing backstory, some joker nuked Washington, which ushered in an America First period worse than the Trump era. That wasn’t a prediction. It’s just that the Open Hand and the Closed Fist have alternated throughout American history, and I needed a dystopian, overcrowded Earth to motivate extra-solar exploration.

Cooperation was no longer an option in Cyan; an all-American crew was required. Well, almost all-American, since the new America had gobbled up some of its neighbors as I watched the backstory change.

Due in large part to a disastrous economic downturn in the mid twenty-first century, Canada allowed itself to be swallowed up by the U.S.. Mexico and most of the Caribbean were given no choice. The result was the U.S.N.A., the United States of North America, twice as big with its new capital in Chicago.

Was the downturn due to tariffs? Beats me; all this reorganization of the backstory was finished long before I had ever heard of Trump, and I thought tariffs were a dead issue. After all, they had almost destroyed the American economy during the Jefferson administration, and that was a long time ago,

If this makes Cyan sound depressing, don’t worry. All this has already happened by the time the novel opens. Our ten explorers are half way to Procyon, where none of their problems will be political — at least until their year of exploration is over and they return to Earth.

— << >> —

In the beginning, when the explorers were to be from many countries, I chose their names accordingly. By the time I started reorganizing the backstory, they had already become people to me. I wasn’t going to give up anyone, and I wasn’t going to rename anyone.

Originally Stephan Andrax was Danish, Debra Bruner was American, Petra Crowley was Greek, Keir Delacroix was French, Viki Johanssen was Swedish, Gus Leinhoff was German, Leia Polanyi was from somewhere in the South Pacific, Ramananda and Tasmeen Rao were from India, and Uke Tomiki was Japanese.

Once they all had to be citizens of the U.S.N.A., this might have posed a problem. However, we are a nation of immigrants. Even in 2026, every one of them could have reasonably come from Topeka.

Just for fun — just because I could — and just because it was one of the places I had studied, I chose to let Tasmeen and Ramananda come from Trinidad, the newly admitted seventy-first state.

Yes this is an ongoing advertisement for Cyan,

available from Amazon.

710. Star Gates and Menhirs

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Stonehenge: the most famous menhir.

Star gates have been around a long time, often under other names. They have given us passage to elsewhere in science fiction and in fantasy for decades. They seem to work equally well in either genre.

Is a star gate science fiction or fantasy? The term seems to imply science fiction and looks a bit like a wormhole. The concept of a gate to elsewhere, however, could be either or both.

The first time I saw the term was in the title of Andre Norton’s 1958 novel called Star Gate. It was science fiction, but with some magic thrown in. I saw it next as the title of a theatrical movie Stargate in 1994, which had nothing in common with the Norton novel but the title. That movie spun off the television series which everybody remembers. It ran from 1997 to 2007, then spawned numerous additional spinoffs. You can find it on re-run channels any week.

I can’t speak authoritatively of the TV series. Military fiction isn’t in my wheelhouse so I rarely watched it, but I assume the places they were sent to were in our physical universe. That would make it science fiction.

Let’s drop the prefix star and continue.

Heinlein used a teleportation gate to other planets as the basis for his novel Tunnel in the Sky. Gordon Dickson used such a gate in Time to Teleport (a pretty good novel with a lousy title). It’s a fairly common device for authors who don’t feel like inventing a faster than light drive to get their characters to some extrasolar planet.

Also still within science fiction are alternate universes. Sometimes a whole novel takes place in one such alternate without any travel between them. More often, characters from one universe travel to one or more other alternate universes. Sometimes they go in time-space vehicles (example: Heinlein’s Number of the Beast). Sometimes they travel via a gate-like device that sends them directly to their destination.

Andre Norton used such a device in her 1963 novel Witch World to get Simon Tregarth from prosaic Earth to a magical world. Norton would preside over her Witch World as she and a few others spun off novels and short stories for forty years. She referred to the device that transported Tregarth as the Siege Perilous, referring to Arthurian legend, but essentially it was just another gate.

Was Norton’s Siege Perilous scientific or magical? Who knows? Who cares? If you are going in a book to a wonderful place, what difference if you get there by a space ship or you step through a magical wardrobe?

— << >> —

Now, a slight detour. Some time in the mid-sixties I stumbled upon a book. I can’t tell you the title or the author, but if you are a reader you will understand why I can’t remember them all. It explained that for thousands of years there was a culture of menhir builders who left megalithic monuments across Europe and the Middle East. No one knows why these menhirs were built. We now have some notion of by whom, but that wasn’t known when the book was written. It was all a big mystery.

I was intrigued by what I had read. I fantasized about the menhir builders. I wrote an unremarkable short story, then tossed it. Then I more or less forgot about menhirs for a decade, but they didn’t go away.

Years later, I dreamed up this medieval kid whose father was killed, but who didn’t want to seek revenge. I told you about his origin last October fifth.

In 1976 I began to tell his story, and that led me to build a world for him to occupy. Those fascinating menhirs came crawling up from memory and insisted that they become the center of his world. In fact, his world came to be called the World of the Menhir, and I plan to publish the first five novels this year.

The boy’s name was Tidac. I already knew that five minutes after he crawled into my brain in 1972. He had been introduced to me during a seance with a Ouija board in Oklahoma City in 1965. The board (or the lovely and imaginative young lady who seemed to be the one manipulating it) said that I was reincarnated from a Norman prince named Tidac. Who was I to argue with a lovely young lady?

When Tidac crawled out of Beowulf in 1972, I knew him immediately and I knew why he didn’t want to take revenge for his father’s death. He wanted freedom from his father’s shadow. I had wanted my freedom for similar reasons, only a few years earlier.

That’s not coincidence; that’s how a writer’s mind works.

709. Redneck Granny

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Here is my redneck Granny, who died long before the original of this was posted. I’m sure she would hate everything I have said here, but I love her anyway.

Redneck Granny

I started this blog late in 2015. When Black History Month rolled around in 2016, I had a lot to say — enough to fill the month with posts. This, somewhat modified, was one of them.

— << >> —

The first African slaves arrived in America about 400 years ago. If we count twenty-five years as a generation, that’s 16 generations.

Let’s look at the typical American today. He or she had two parents and they had four parents between them, and their parents had eight parents between them. And so forth. Up the line sixteen generations, that’s 32,768 direct ancestors. If you don’t believe me, do the math.

All those ancestors sent DNA down the line to make our average American. What are the chances that not one packet of DNA was out of Africa? What are the chances that there weren’t a lot more than one out of Africa in his/her lineage?

You might think whites didn’t mix with blacks in the olden days, but are you sure? Are you counting all the times when a white man was in charge, and a black woman didn’t have any say in the matter? They wouldn’t even have called it rape in 1619. Nor 1719. Nor 1819. In a lot of places they wouldn’t have called it rape in 1919. 2019 — maybe.

So much for black purity, but that isn’t any big secret. What about white purity?

How white do you have to look to pass for white? Three quarters? Seven eighths? How many generations does that take? Not many.

Now what are the chances that a whitish, black female would claim to be white if she could? Or a whitish, black male? Forget the twenty-first century when African-Americans are proud of what they are. Project your thinking back to when being white meant being free, and being black meant being a slave. Wouldn’t you pass for white, if you could get away with it?

I would. Some of my (and your) ancestors probably did.

More math. Lets say that by 1700 (eighty years into the era of American slavery, thirteen generations ago), one hundred partially negro girls could and did pass for white. That’s not a big number to surmise. In fact, it’s ridiculously small.

Let’s give doubters no excuse for their doubts. Let’s say that these passing girls only averaged two children who went on to have children. That’s certainly a minimal estimation. Their descendants are boys and girls who would disappear into the white gene pool.

That’s 408,000 offspring after 13 generations. Which is to say, in 2025.

Wow. And after a couple of generations, if Mom kept her mouth shut, none of them would know they were passing. They would believe they were white.

That doesn’t cover all the other blacks, male and female, who passed in the last four hundred years. That is only one hundred, starting in 1700. But there weren’t just a hundred, they didn’t start in 1700, and they haven’t stopped to this day.

There is one big change in the twenty-first century. People who are light skinned and could call themselves white, now often identify as black. It’s probably confusing for “white” folks who haven’t thought it through.

I don’t think it confuses “black” folks at all.

If math doesn’t impress you, if you think numbers lie, then let’s make it personal.

Rhett Butler was partly black. Scarlet O’Hara was partly black. Simon Legree was partly black.

You’re partly black. I’m partly black. And my Oklahoma relatives just disowned me.

That’s mighty white of them.

— << >> —

This was a modified version of a post from February 3, 2016. If you are wondering why this old “white” guy is so concerned with black identity, it is all a matter of upbringing. In my case, that means being raised on the edge of the South in the fifties in a culture that didn’t exactly hate blacks, but didn’t much like them either. My people fully believed in the separation of the races; the only good black was somebody who lived someplace else.

The problem with the community viewpoint was television. On the six o’clock news I saw black people being washed down the sidewalk by firehoses because they were marching for the right to be human.

They were right. We were wrong. Hardly anybody in my town got that message, but I did.

I escaped to college, where I studied Anthropology and got an extended view of what British imperialism had done to the black and brown people of the world.

Then I studied History, where I found out that English imperialism had been just as harmful to the ruddy-faced and red-haired poor in Scotland and Ireland. I also found out what white America had done to the Native Americans, the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and even the Irish.

In California, where I now live, white incomers from the east now discriminate against the Latinos, who owned California after they took it away from the California Indians, and before the white east-coast Americans took it away from them.

Over the years I wrote about all of those displaced and disadvantage peoples in my blog and now that has all been gathered together for publication.

Originally I planned to call the book . . .

Your Redneck Granny is a Black Woman, and she doesn’t even know it

I had kept that provocative phrase in my back pocket for years, but when it came to reality, the title . . .

Your Redneck Granny has a secret

. . . seemed more likely to make a prospective reader curious enough to pick up the book.

I originally wanted to publish it early in 2026, but the five novels of the Menhir Series will take the whole year to release. Instead Redneck Granny is planned for release on January 20, 2027, just about a year from today. Keep it in mind and tell your friends.

708. Pardons

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Five years and two weeks ago, on January 6th, 2021, Donald Trump caused an attack on the United States Capitol after refusing to admit that he lost the election.

One year ago, on January 20, 2025, as he returned to the Presidency, Trump commuted the sentences or pardoned outright nearly 1600 persons, either already convicted of crimes related to that attack or awaiting trial for their parts in the attack.

Please remember these facts when you vote in 2026.

707. A New Start

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A New Start

It is already January fourteenth, but the year is still new and the re-start of A Writing Life is still fairly new. It’s time to present something special.

On April 17, 2019 I was trying to write a review of a novel. I remembered the book clearly but didn’t remember enough details, and I needed to explain why I was going to postpone writing about it. What I wrote then does more to tell why I created this blog than anything else I have written.

— << >> —

I have written quite a few books over the years, but it is never enough. Writing books is just too much fun.

The fact is, reading a book is ten times better than watching a movie, but writing a book is fifty times better than reading one. And takes fifty times as long.

Besides the hundred thousand words a modern novel demands, there are the other hundreds of thousands of words you have to go through while getting to the right ones. And there are all those books you have to burrow through looking for just the right bit of information or inspiration to help you understand how that next chapter is supposed to come out.

Just reading a book for fun gets lost somewhere. I read the things I need to read, and late in the evening I read comfort books, like the thirtieth Nero Wolfe, which isn’t that different from the other twenty-nine.

It wasn’t always that way.

— << >> —

I was an only child on a farm in the fifties. We had one black and white TV that got two channels, which my parents watched in the evenings while I read. Of course I became a reader; what else was there to do? From the time I discovered the county library, there was no time I didn’t have a stack of books waiting for my attention.

But I didn’t talk about it.

My mother read occasional romance novels but she didn’t talk about it. My dad read the Bible, but he didn’t talk about it. The habit started early.

I read books about hunting and outdoor life. I already lived outdoors, but on a tractor. I never hunted, barely fished, and I had never seen a tent. My outdoors wasn’t for play, it was for work, and that wasn’t enough to satisfy me.

Looking back, I know that the place I lived as a boy was rather lovely, in a muted sort of way. It was farm country, lightly populated by humans, but with plenty of birds, and occasional coyotes and possums.

Nevertheless, every patch of ground was either under the plow or turned into grazing land. There was nothing wild. I wanted forests and streams, fish and game, and real snow, along with the freedom to wander through them.

That was all available in books, along with a thousand other adventures to be found all over the globe.

My fellow students in my little school read what they had to read — but nobody talked about it. Nobody read science fiction. Nobody wanted to know any more about science than they were required to know. I was reading and studying continuously, preparing to head for college to be a scientist — but I didn’t talk about it, because no one wanted to know.

When I got to college, one of my roommates was a science fiction fan. We talked about it, but only a little. By then, my habit of silence was pretty well set.

A lifetime later I started this blog. For the first time I got to really talk about the books I love and why I love them. Like right here, right now, talking to you, telling you why I had to postpone a review.

Hi. You see, there was this book called The Road to Corlay . . .

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I began A Writing Life in support of an upcoming novel, but it quickly evolved into something larger. It became a how-to, and a “How I did it”, and a “What I’ve learned about how others did it.”

Many of those posts, somewhat modified, are gathered together now in a pair of books for writers called Learning from the Masters (that would be Heinlein, Clarke, et al, not me bragging about myself) and So You Want to Write Science Fiction. Because 2026 will be fully occupied with the Menhir series, they are scheduled for release in 2027. Tentative dates are:

Learning from the Masters

March 17, 2027

and

So You Want to Write Science Fiction

July 7, 2027

706. Five Years Ago

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Even though Trump just “took over” Venezuela, that isn’t what I want to talk about. That story is still unfolding and full of unknowns, but there is no confusion about what happened five years ago.

January sixth — you can’t say that any more without special meaning. It has become a time-bound phrase, as specific as 9/11.

January sixth came five years ago. No doubt every newspaper and television journalist will have something to say today. Me, too. It’s personal; it should be personal to every American.

I saw it all on television, starting at nine on the west coast. This posting will match that time. At first it seemed to be only another address by the outgoing crazy. Then Trump called on the crowd to “fight like hell”, and they did.

I saw it all as it happened. From the moment it became apparent that there was going to be trouble, continuing until the crowd dispersed, I never left the broadcast.

Even if you were elsewhere that day, everybody knows about the attack. Unfortunately, not everybody understands that the attack happened entirely because Trump lied.

Trump had lost the 2020 election. He refused to acknowledge that fact. He instituted multiple lawsuits against the result, and lost them all.

He called for a rally. He stoked the crowd. He sent them to march and told them to fight in order to keep the Congress from ratifying the vote.

Trump orchestrated and authorized the horrors that followed. There is only one word to describe his actions.

Treason.

Trump is responsible for his words and his deeds, despite the subsequent findings of the Supreme Court which ended attempts to bring him to justice.

Trump ran again four years later, and won a second term. He continued to lie and continued to be believed, but he did not win without help.

The gatekeepers who kept the American people from knowing of Biden’s decline have to share the blame for Trump’s return. When Biden came on stage at the June 24, 2024 Presidential debate, clearly inadequate to his task, the election was already lost before he ever opened his mouth.

And now Trump is back with a vengeance.

These are dark days. They must not continue. 2026 is our best chance to return to reason. It may be our last chance.