Assorted

Yes, Gentle Reader, it's "that time of the month" again!

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1. "All The President's Stenographers."

Ed Driscoll's column about the obsequiousness of a great part of the media toward The Won is worthy of end-to-end reading, but here's the snippet that most struck me:

When leftwing “journalists” start sounding like prepubescent girls at the height of Beatlemania, no wonder, as Peter Wehner writes at the Weekly Standard, the media will always love Obama; “It’s only a matter of time before the media are back in the tank.” Unless, in the case of the Washington Post, they never left to come up for air in the first place.

The key to this obscenity, this dereliction of the press's duty -- not merely toward us, but toward itself -- is to grasp the true significance of Barack Hussein Obama. He's not just the president. He's a celebrity.

Barack Hussein Obama is, indeed, the quintessence of a celebrity -- of one who's "famous for being famous." He has not one substantive accomplishment to his name. He rose to national prominence on the strength of promotion alone -- indeed, selection by others and promotion by others. As a public official, he might as well have been on sabbatical the whole time -- and I include his tenure in the White House.

Barack Hussein Obama is the press's idea of exactly what a celebrity should be: a figure of ineffable glamour, upon whom -- as he himself once said! -- they can project whatever image they find most useful at any time. How could they not love him past the point of madness?

There can be no more scathing indictment of our media than that they've made the promotion of their own self-esteem the highest of all their priorities. For that why the media loves the pure celebrity above all others: He allows them to say to themselves, "He's our creation! We made him what he is!"

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2. Kill The Fatted Calf!

A longtime favorite of mine, who some time ago announced that he'd done with blogging -- hey, I've been there myself -- is back and firing on all cylinders.

Please stop by BlackisWhite's place and enjoy his trenchant observations on all manner of things.

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3. Rejection Slips.

Time was, I sought entrance to "official" acceptance by the barons of publishing. I badgered agents. I sent out query letters. I mailed out manuscripts. I conferred with free-lance editors and marketing experts. I did everything but sacrifice small animals before a shrine to William Faulkner. Nothing availed.

Time was.

Such is the power of wishful thinking that it took me a while, Certified Galactic Intellect and all, to realize that I'd never be granted admission: not because I don't (or didn't) have the chops, but because of my material and my themes.

Pub World -- the aggregate of the institutions that control "traditional" fiction publishing -- summarily rejects material that falls outside what it conceives to be its orbit. That orbit is under constraints that make the strong nuclear force look puny:

• Militant feminism;
• Enforcement of politically correct attitudes;
• Hostility toward Christian themes and Christian protagonists;
• Deference to activist "victim" groups.

Vox Day, himself a writer of some ability, notes one of those influences at work in a field I'd long thought to be relatively immune to it:

A female writer quits the SFWA because she believes it isn't sufficiently feminized....

As we learned yesterday, I am unpublishable by the present standards in the publishing industry. But I am far from the only one, very far from it. I am no Heinlein or Herbert, perhaps more akin to a Resnick or Malzberg, but it should be abundantly clear that none of these four men could get break into publication today, that their perspectives are intrinsically offensive, and none of them would be able to successfully navigate the maze of scalzied manboobs and feminist fascists who have infiltrated the genre and now control the editorial gates at the professional magazines and publishing houses.

Neither should it be any surprise to observe that the genre is dying, just like every other male-dominated endeavor that permits, or is forced, to allow the "equal opportunity" that somehow always ends with women telling men what they are allowed to think, say, and do. It is the same pattern we have seen play out again and again and again. But I think Ms Tobler is to be congratulated for leaving the SFWA and I think her action shows that she is an admirable role model for many SFWA members.

Admirable in the sense that those who share her prejudices should be equally candid about them and do as she has done.

Feminist incursions, PC censorship, hostility toward Christians and Christianity, sanctimonious deference to "victim" groups such as Negroes and homosexuals...these and other influences have made the traditional bastions of fiction publishing a place no self-respecting writer should want to go. There are a very few exceptions -- Regnery; Baen; Prometheus -- but the trend is as delineated above.

Once I realized that, there was only one course to follow, and I have followed it to profit and satisfaction.

The self-publishing wave of our day is already battering Pub World's gates. It will either sweep those supercilious towers into the inky depths, reduce them to mere stumps, vestiges of their former arrogance and pride, or compel them to return to a sense of duty and responsibility toward their customers. I'll take any of those outcomes.

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4. Writers Are Not Saints And Don't Belong On Your Calendar.

The worthy Mark Alger cites an egregious case of writerly envy in action:

In the wee hours of the morning of January 27, 2013, a Wikipedia editor named “Qworty” made a series of 14 separate edits to the Wikipedia page for the late writer Barry Hannah, a well-regarded Southern author with a taste for the Gothic and absurd.

Qworty cut paragraphs that included quotes from Hannah’s work. He removed 20 links to interviews, obituaries and reminiscences concerning Hannah. He cut out a list of literary prizes Hannah had won.

Two edits stand out. Qworty excised the phrase “and was regarded as a good mentor” from a sentence that started: “Hannah taught creative writing for 28 years at the University of Mississippi, where he was director of its M.F.A. program …” And he changed the cause of Hannah’s death from “natural causes” to “alcoholism.” But Hannah’s obituaries stated that he had died of a heart attack and been clean and sober for years before his death, while his role as a mentor was testified to in numerous memorials. (Another editor later removed the alcoholism edit.)

Taken all together, the edits strongly suggest a focused attempt to diminish Hannah’s legacy. But why? Who was Qworty and what axe did he have to grind with Hannah?

The answer to this question is on the one hand simple, almost trivial: Qworty turned out to be another author who had a long history of resenting Hannah. The late night Wikipedia edits are certainly not the first time that a writer’s ego has led to mischief. But the story is also important. Wikipedia is one of the jewels in the Internet’s crown, an amazing collective achievement, a mighty stab at realizing an awesome dream: a constantly updated repository for all human knowledge. It is created from the bottom up, a crowd-sourced labor of love by people who require no compensation for their work but also don’t need to jump through any qualifying hoops. Anyone can edit Wikipedia. Just create an account and start messing around!

I can't agree unreservedly with the writer's assessment of Wikipedia as "one of the jewels in the Internet’s crown." It's reliable only on subjects wholly insulated against opinion, contention, and political leanings. Events in the recent past tend to be reported according to the ideological preferences of the writer / editors; consider the subject of "global warming" / "climate change" as an especially illuminating example. Nevertheless, the article depicts something of considerable importance: the degree to which the ego of the envious can lead to a particularly low and tawdry species of venality.

But writers are like that. Along with academics, our battles tend to be supremely vicious because the stakes are so small. That's the best imaginable reason to stay away from them...whether you're a writer or not.

To my fictioneering colleagues, I declaim as follows:
Ignore the venom of other writers.
Rarely does one writer bestow well-meant advice on another.
Indeed, the most common "advice" thus awarded is "Give it up. You’re hopeless."
Ignore the "workshops," "prize juries," and "critics' circles" in which they congregate.
Writers -- especially "professional" writers -- are, in the main, hyper-competitive, envious, and vindictive.
This is reinforced by the enveloping context, which has always been dominated by the small-souled.
Always suspect ulterior motives in the "helpful" or "generous" writer.
Never take what a writer says at face value.
Start with me.

Yes, really.

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5. Thank You.

Thank you who have made Freedom's Scion a rapid success. Thanks especially to those of you who have produced reviews of the book at SmashWords, as good reviews sell books faster than any other form of promotion except good word-of-mouth. When the book appears at Amazon and Barnes and Noble, I beseech you to replicate your reviews there, as no purchase is necessary to do so.

Freedom's Fury is already under weigh -- amazing how many people don't get that idiom right -- and, God willin' an' the creek don't rise, will be published in 2014. I hope it meets your expectations.

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6. My Latest Cause.

The "Oxford comma:" Use it! Not because it's "correct," but because the poor beastie is on the verge of extinction. There are several examples of its deployment in the screed above.

(What's that? You don't care about endangered species of punctuation? You Philistine! Avaunt thee!)

And now to the lawn.