Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 351

Through Fire

*There might be another post later, but right now I’m mid-fixing up/restructuring Darkship Revenge and I’m away at an undisclosed writing-holing-up location, so I don’t have access to my email or most of my online presence, save for here and face book. This is something to hold you until I get home later today.*

When Worlds Collide

A spaceship mechanic has no place in a fairytale, not even when she’s dressed in a flowing gown and being courted by one of Earth’s most powerful men.

I was desi...

Witty Promo Title by Free Range Oyster

Witty Promo Title by Free Range Oyster Max Florschutz Unusual Events: A “Short” Story Collection

Alaskan adventures. Haunted Hospitals. Something lurking under the kitchen… stove?

Nothing is as it first seems in this new collection of ten thrilling tales from author Max Florschutz. Magic intertwines with the ordinary in five new stories set in the Unusual universe, while in the world of Indrim steam and high fantasy intersect. Elsewhere, men struggle against the elements in the last frontier...

A Fatal Confusion

Somehow Kate Paulk has managed to give me her sinus infection/throat thingy. Since she’s in Pennsylvania and I’m in Colorado and we haven’t seen each other in the flesh in what? three years? this is very odd indeed. And yet, having survived both kids sick and home for the holidays I’m now felled by the dreaded Paulk Computer Virus. You heard it here first! ATH is science. Breakthrough science, even. And now you can pick on Kate over it. Two benefits.

I only figured out I was sick when after a...

Come On, Take It

Yesterday, on a private forum a friend of mine who here will go under the name Sam Anderson said the following:

Patriotism is good. Nationalism through a patriotic lens, seeing your country as worthwhile, as having prospects and things to be proud of, is not only acceptable but necessary for the health of any nation. But MOST especially the United States, because it’s one thing for the French to be ashamed of being French, but at the end of the day, they’re still going to be French. France is...

AFTER THE SAD SPECTACLE LAST NIGHT

Ungovernable – a blast from the past from December 2012

I’ve said before that I became an American by reading Heinlein books. This is true at least to an extent, though I’d be at a loss to explain the process to you. I mean, if you knew how to do that, book by book, chipping away, so someone starts out wondering what’s wrong with all those Americans who don’t like taxes (don’t they know taxes are civilization? And have always existed) and ends up thinking getting a Don’t Tread On Me tattoo is...

TRUTH

There is a technique in writing that, possibly because I had to do everything wrong before I learned to do it right, took me a long time to understand.

I only understood it when reading it in a mystery. The detective points out that she believed the murderer’s excuse because the murderer had said something about having a bad headache that exactly mimicked the detective’s own bad headaches.

Suddenly I understood. If you want people to believe the most outrageous things, you have to tell them s...

Oh So Special – Amanda Green

Oh So Special – Amanda Green

Everywhere you look these days, it seems like you will find someone who feels they are entitled to whatever they want simply because of who they happen to be. This isn’t anything new. There have always been people like that. Today, however, it seems like that attitude is becoming the norm and not the exception. Worse, this sense of entitlement extends not to just economic goals or even social standing, the main form a sense of entitlement used to take. Now we hav...

BETTER PROMO THAN NEVER – Free-range Oyster

BETTER PROMO THAN NEVER – Free-range Oyster

Hail, well-met, and how y’all doin’? Today brings us a new batch of new books for your entertainment and edification. We even have a scholarly work for a change, raising the tone above the pulpy schlock we usually get around here (he says affectionately). So go, check out some new books from our lovely commenters and lurkers. Read, enjoy, leave reviews, spread the word.

Now, a few housekeeping notes. First, I am not Sarah Hoyt. The emails for the pr...

Aztecs Next Door? Freedom and Neighbors Alma Boykin

Aztecs Next Door? Freedom and Neighbors Alma Boykin

What are the limits of certain rights? If we take the Declaration of Independence at face value, and accept that certain rights are granted by the fact of our existence as humans, including “life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness,” how do we square government limitations on practices that are also protected?

I use the example of Aztecs next door when I talk in class about reasonable limits on certain rights, notably the First Amendment. Set...

Burning Rousseau In Effigy

Despite strident denials there are large numbers of people who are Marxists without knowing they are Marxists. In fact, it is because they’ve never read Marx or studied economics that they’re not aware of how much of their world-view is Marxist. Well, that and because the Marxists took advantage of mass-media, mass-education and mass-entertainment to pound into their heads a uniform Marxist message that became what “Everybody knows.”

Yes, I imagine for some of them it is shocking to find them...