Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 321

Generational Rites

When I came of age, back in pre-history, we sure were handed a messed up world.

It was 1980 and all the science fiction authors were predicting nuclear holocaust if we didn’t disarm and submit to the Russians immediately. This was rather president Carter’s position, I gather, but he softened it somewhat for public consumption.

Being a cold-warrior was a bad thing, in my day. You see, we came just after the boomers.

Now we’re being aggregated to the boomers which is loony because in 1968, that...

Last Night I Dreamed Again

“Last night I dreamed again of Manderley” is one of those iconic lines of English literature. Even if you’ve never heard of Manderley, it evokes a feeling of longing for something lost. The narrator goes on to describe how even in her dream Manderley is in ruins, and then to establish once and for all that there is no hope of return.

Rebecca is one of my favorite books. I think I first read it when I was twelve or thirteen. It is a foregone conclusion that I liked it, I suppose, since the ma...

Slipping Between

I come from a culture that firmly believes that on Halloween and All Hallows, the world is close together to “the other world.” It is more or less assumed the other world is the world of the dead, but that’s not necessarily true, since anything supernatural or weird was also supposed to have come from “another place.”

It was on Halloween when I was six. In Portugal we were not quite as crazy as in Mexico about the whole day of the dead thing. There isn’t much about skeletons and that whole “d...

Sunday Vignettes for your Monday by Mary Catelli, Luke and ‘nother Mike

Sunday Vignettes for your Monday by Mary Catelli, Luke and ‘nother Mike

*We at According to Hoyt are true rebels. We’re so rebellious we don’t let the calendar dictate to us. In fact, who is the calendar? How many divisions has he got?

Okay, right, so I was out of it after partying like a Libertarian on Friday and dealing with household emergency on Saturday. We were both so out of it we didn’t even waste the day by going to a museum, we just sat home and watched Predestination, because that’...

Dark Fate 7 – Still Annoying Grant

*First I want to point out that 28 hours is “some.” Second I want to say that we’ll have the Sunday vignettes on Monday, because that’s the kind of wild and crazy we are around here.

Sorry, yesterday I had a minor household emergency. Really minor, not life or health threatening save for the part where I had to go up and down a very tall staircase about 15 times or more. The upshot is that not only didn’t I get to SIT much less at the computer, but by the time it was all done at seven pm or s...

The Homework AGAIN?

There will DEFINITELY be Dark Fate in a few hours. I ended up having a night of debauch and insanity yesterday, having crashed Milehi con (yes, I know I could be invited for the asking, but I COMPLETELY forgot to fill in/answer the thingy, because of move, cat’s death, son’s move, member-of-family surgery. Or in fact, because I was trying to figure out why I couldn’t push the novel out by force.) So we didn’t have badges or panels,a nd I decided I wanted to go up to see L. Neil Smith receive...

Dogs and Homework

Today is one of those crazy days, because I’m finishing re-purposing son’s room, soon to be guest room and my craft den (I don’t have as much time to play with fabric and paint and clay as I used to, but sometimes I need an hour or two to do something with my hands while the brain turns something or other that I’m having trouble with upon itself.)

I am now under sail on Darkship Revenge. I’ve attempted it before, and managed it for a few minutes, and then I’d lose it, that sense of being in t...

Who and Why?

*A note to say that it was definitely the anti-histamine. 24 hours after the “time of effect” I could write again for the first time in months. Of course, the plot immediately complicated. Oh, what tangled web we weave when our characters don’t ask permission to go off the reservation. Eh. SAH*

My mom, who is considerably paler than I am, who has green-hazel eyes and who, in her pre-coloring days, had hair of a pale walnut brown, came to dressing and buying me make up by a simple process: she...

Obsolete

One of the strangest, and most persistent excuses for the expansion of big government in the name of compassion is what is now being called “post necessity economy.”

Apparently in the future, robots will do everything, and we need this big re-distributive economy to make sure that all those people made redundant aren’t starving the gutter.

There are so many things wrong with this meme it’s no wonder it’s a favorite of intellectuals and those suffering from a superiority complex, particular th...

A Bagful of Things

It’s one of those days I can’t think of a coherent topic, so I’ll do an update of sorts. Depending on how the writing day goes there might be Dark Fate in the evening.

My first reflection — mark me well — is that it’s a bad idea to sleep with two hot-water-cats, unless it’s really cold in your house. Husband was covered up to the nose, and I threw back all my covers, but with Havey on my stomach and Euclid on my legs, I was still burning.

They’re disturbed by the loss of boss-cat and have bee...