Sarah A. Hoyt's Blog, page 382

A Genre by any other name By Tom Knighton

*Apologies to Tom for putting this up so late. I can’t even say I wasn’t awake, but for medication reasons I still haven’t had coffee, and I’m prone to just sit and derp without it.*

A Genre by any other name

By Tom Knighton

Tell someone that you’re writing or have written a novel, they’re likely to ask “What genre?” Well, unless you’re dealing with someone like the Books-A-Million employee who responded to a question about novels with, “What? You mean, like, fiction?” They don’t count. Most...

Bright Lines

First an apology for being so late. Tom Knighton sent me a guest post, and Bob sent me one a while back, and I have one from Chris Nuttall, but as I’ve said before, I don’t like giving my guests short shrift by putting them up late. And I was all set to put up Tom’s post last night, when I suddenly found myself in bed. I guess it’s like that.

I should explain this was actual abdominal surgery and not entirely laparoscopic. Which explains the slower recovery.

Also, while I’m now at a point I c...

The Freedom to Dream

So the endless recovery – tm — comes with a load of depression. I’ve been assured this is normal (oh, no. Tell me it’s abnormal. At least I’ll feel like I’m unique.)

Part of the way depression manifests in me as thinking everything I do is bad, and everything and everyone around me is tarnished by my incompetence, and…

Yes, I do know what part is real and what part is Memorex, because being me requires me to spend an enormous amount of time watching myself and making sure I’m not telling myse...

Becoming America

I am one of those people who doesn’t get along with her body. Or, as my son calls it “inadvertent suicides” by which he means in his work at the emergency room he sees many people come in who are at or almost near the point of death but who put off coming in because they were convinced that their symptoms were “nothing.”

I add another layer to that in that I don’t trust my body further than I can throw it, and at the current avoir du pois I can’t jump that far. I.e. I expect my body to be inf...

Creative Destruction – Cedar Sanderson

Creative Destruction – Cedar Sanderson

I was introduced to this term this week when I was invited to create a presentation for a panel of this title. I’d never heard it before, and didn’t know precisely what it was all about, but the summary I was given sparked my imagination.

What can destructive forces create? What can they precipitate from the solution, sparking the coalescence of something new, and sometimes unpredictable, from human civilization catalyzed with tragedy?

I began my presen...

Trips Down Memory Lane

I must admit that though I learned to read sometime between four and six, I learned to read Disney comics. it was easy, after having the stuff read to me so much to sort of remember the words that went with the actions.

My brother did character voices, which made it easier to remember. After that I read Disney comics whenever I didn’t have much mental space for anything else. This is weird since — unlike my kids — I never got into “people” comics, which included mystery comics (really big in...

Tribalism in SF – Sanford Begley

Tribalism in SF – Sanford Begley

Humans are a tribal species. We all have tribes we belong to and resonate with. That doesn’t mean the tribe is monolithic for us, just that those in various tribes have similar views on various subjects. For example I fit into the MilSf tribe rather handily. i like the genre and communicate well with most of the tribe members. While most of us will read some varying amount of social consciousness SF we are not driven by its precepts. If the social consciousnes...

A brush with voter fraud By Tom Knighton

A brush with voter fraud

By Tom Knighton

There’s been a lot of talk about voter fraud through the years. For very good reason, it’s something people take seriously and want to kill with fire. Well, a lot of us at least. However, people often have a misunderstanding about the forms that voter fraud takes. Having looked into events surrounding a local election here in Albany, Georgia, I have a unique perspective on how it actually happens.

My understanding started with a phone call. A woman, wh...

An Update

We interrupt the scheduled program for an update on the state of the Sarah.

So, I had surgery Monday, and first I want to say that the anesthesia was a oh, wow. Partly, I was lucky getting an anesthesiologist with a sense of humor. When I told him I started problems with anesthesia by not going under with chloroform (Portugal 65) he solemnly promised me not to use chloroform.

But the fact is he put me under at 2:30 and next I was aware of was at 7, and I was very cold, and they were piling bl...

A Good Servant But… – Jeb Kennison

A Good Servant But… – Jeb Kennison

[This post was originally published at JebKinnison.com in 2014]

I’m writing about the history of government thought control and the means of
restraining it by constitutional limitations on its powers. Western
governments are more and more intrusive on private decisions, and modern
activists and feminists strongly influence government policy and propaganda
from their positions in academia, government, and nonprofits. Restricting
government’s powers to interf...