New book!

 

 Sleigh Bells and Wedding Bells 

Amaryllis and Chris have been in love since...forever. Even if Amaryllis didn’t realize it until Chris fell off a ladder. A year later, they’re working and planning toward a wedding. Eventually. When they get enough money built up, and can take the time to do it.

Unfortunately, Amaryllis forgot Thanksgiving. Her mother decided that since she forgot it, she could make it. And that would have been fine, if the turkey hadn’t suddenly been the worst thing ever.

Now, she’s got three weeks to plan her own wedding, and only four hundred dollars to pay for it. But she’ll manage. It’ll work.

It just has to.

This is a sequel to Fixing Up Love, from last year.  You don't have to read that one, but there'll be bits in this one that'll make more sense if you have.  

 

 

Musings on Charity, Dependence, Independence, and Entitlement

I grew up a victim of federal charity.  

Yes, I said that exactly how I meant it.  

Mom had food stamps.  It was the '80s/90s.  She got $285 per month of food stamps.  Actual stamps--the government, food-only cash counterfeit.  Came stapled in bundles of twenties, tens, fives, and ones.  She had to tear them carefully out of the booklets and give over as exact of change as she could.  She normally paid just under and made up the extra with coinage.  Because we didn't get change back.  Not at first.  The rules didn't permit for it.  Just like the rules didn't permit for the food stamp money to buy anything but food.  

And that was a good thing.  When the rules changed for people to be able to get change back?  People started going in, buying the bitty packs of gum, one at a time, a dollar at a time, and getting change back.  Real money that would buy cigarettes, beer, or whatever.   

And believe me, fraud was rampant.  People paid drug dealers in food stamps.  Which then meant that the dealers didn't have to use cash to buy their own food.  Yes, I saw it happen.  More than once.  Usually on the back steps of the income-based government duplexes.   

Wanna know what else you couldn't spend food stamps on where I grew up?  Convenience foods.  Junk foods.  Luxury foods (steaks--except bottom round, because that wasn't really edible without a lot of work--roasts--beef and pork--boneless chicken). Not because it was against the rules, but because the cashiers wouldn't ring them up for food stamps customers.  There was one rancid old bitch that wouldn't ring up packaged ground beef, either. 

And you'd better believe that everyone knew who got food stamps.   

You know something?  People (who weren't in our situation) worked to get off food stamps with that kind of difficulty and limitations.  

Most of the meat I had through childhood came from church-supplied food banks.  So did cheese.   So did boxed mac and cheese.  

Also, we got boxes with the gawd-awful USDA white-label crap that the government gave away: potato flakes that congealed, big boxes of American "cheese" that was so awful I'd never had anything nearly so bad (until I met Velveeta), bags of dry beans, and rice, and limp canned veggies.  

We didn't starve, but we wouldn't have eaten well.  Not if Mom hadn't known how to cook from scratch.  Most of the food stamps we got got spent on milk, bread, flour, potatoes, the meat the people at the registers would ring up, sugar, eggs, baking powder, baking soda, yeast, lentils, brown rice (which we never got in the boxes of charity food), and other dry staples.  

But Mom did know how to cook.  She could take bottom round and turn it into country-fried steak, or really anything she could think of.   I ate a lot better than most of my classmates who were also on food stamps.  

Wanna know what I didn't learn?  

I didn't learn where it came from.  I didn't learn why it wasn't fair for Mom to get that, didn't learn why Mom was wrong when she groused that food stamps didn't cover soap, shampoo, toilet paper.  

I did learn that I wanted to get the hell off of food stamps.  And I did.  All the way off.  We've never gotten them.  Or WIC.  Not even when my other half wasn't employed, and we had a toddler and an infant.  

Now, government charity traps people.  In the name of "removing stigma" so that "more people that need help can get help," the people that run the programs have made victims.  They've created a perpetual underclass.  Because the way the programs work?  Yeah.  It encouraged dependence on the programs, and penalizes any attempts to get off the programs in question.  The only people willing to put up with that are grifters who never had any intention of being honest, and often didn't really need the help to begin with.

And the people who desperately need help?  They often aren't getting it.  Because of how government charity is set up, it rewards the people who moan, wail, and perform "need" that they don't actually have.  There absolutely are people who do need help.  They, by and large, don't get it.  Most of them suck it up, tighten their belts...and slowly sink.  Debt and despair.  

These are the people who, a hundred years ago, their entire parish/congregation would have known who they were.  They'd have had help.  Often quiet help, and often without asking.  Neighbors holding each other up until they can get their feet back under them.   

But that's in small towns; in larger areas, the help took longer to manifest, and had more strings attached.  It was, however, still there.  And it didn't encourage continued dependence, not like current government funded charity does.   

The church I've been going to for a while now...they're doing a lot of charity work.  Almost none of it is local.  The money they raise goes overseas, to buy playground equipment for orphanages in Africa.  Not to buy groceries for local food banks.  Not to pay into local charities that pay utilities bills for people who get injured working and can't work for a while.  

That's...I mean, it's admirable to buy things for underserved children in underserved nations, but our kids here need stuff first.  

Right now.  

And we can't afford to do both.  

Not as a church...and not as a nation. 

Part 3!!!

 It's out, it's out, it's out!!!

 

Thus finishes the enormous, complex, detailed first novel set in the world of Elly.  I just got my e-copy--it's triple points day, and next paycheck is already spoken for, so why wait?   

What?  You hadn't even bought the first volume?  Why not?  

Oh.  You were afraid of being Martined.  Rothfussed.  

But...didn't I tell you?  With the first and second links? That the book was finished and scheduled for release?  I could have sworn I did...

Well.  You can go get them now.  If, y'know, you'd waited.   

I have the first volume in hardback* as well as e-book, and will be doing the same for the second when I can.  And the third.  Because the covers are pretty, and because sometimes you want to curl up with a real book, not just a reader.**   

 

*Books work better than stickers as writer rewards.  And the first one came out at just the right time to reward myself for a first-draft finished novella.

**YMMV, but I read differently if it's e-copy than I do if it's a hard copy.  When it's an e-book, it's easier to shake me loose to do things that need done.  When it's a hard copy...well.  I might notice the house burning down, but only if I caught fire, or the book did.   

Part 2 of No Man's Land is out!!!

 

Part 2 of the gigantic novel dropped yesterday!*  Go!  Grab the first volume (if you haven't) here, then get this one!  

The third part will be out in the first full week of October--yes, that does mean it's finished.  No this isn't an unfinished work (looking at Patrick Rothfuss as much as George R.R. Martin).  Yes, there will be more books in this world, but this one is finished. 

And I know this is in volumes, but it is the same book.  It's broken in three parts because if it'd been an all-in-one, it would have broken its own spine...or had print so small you'd need a magnifying glass to read it.  

That said, the author is gracious, and awesome, and has had mercy on us by splitting it into thirds.  

Go!  If you haven't bought the first, go do--then buy the second.  Pre-order the third.  

You really won't be sorry.



*I spent yesterday sitting at a dealership while they looked my car over, and clean forgot to make the announcement.  Doesn't help that I'm coming down with a respiratory bug.  Again.  

"Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?"

Those were the words of Henry II, referring to Thomas Beckett, the Archbishop of Canterbury.  Two knights, freshly back from the Crusades, heard the king, and took it as an order to kill Beckett.  The king denied all fault in the matter, loading all the blame onto the knights.

Don't let the media dump the blame on anyone.  They've been screaming about turbulent not-really-a-journalist journalists on the right for as long as I can remember.  

They did this.  Oh, they didn't hold the gun themselves, but they did this.

Pray for Charlie Kirk, his family, and our nation.  He wasn't a firebrand.  Not like some.  Anyone who steps up after this is going to be more of an extremist.  

It's out, it's out, it's out!!!!

Sarah Hoyt's first volume of No Man's Land has dropped live!  

What are you waiting for???  Go get it!  

Oh.  You want the back cover text/description?  Can do!   (seriously--go get it.  It's truly excellent.)

 

 Sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.

On a lost colony world, mad geneticists thought they could eliminate inequality by making everyone hermaphrodite. They were wrong. Catastrophically wrong.
Now technology indistinguishable from magic courses through the veins of the inhabitants, making their barbaric civilization survivable—and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus Kayel Hayden, Viscount Webson, Envoy of the Star Empire—Skip to his friends— has just crash-landed through a time-space rift into the middle of it all.
Dodging assassins and plummeting from high windows was just the beginning. With a desperate king and an archmagician as his only allies, Scipio must outrun death itself while battling beasts, traitors, and infiltrators bent on finishing what the founders started: total destruction.
Two worlds. One chance. No time to lose.

  

Fuck "efficiency," I want things that WORK.

Do y'all remember the days of running five loads of laundry in a day?  Flushing once, and not having to flush again to get the rest?  A dishwasher that was loud as fuck, but cleaned the damn dishes?  

I do.  And I'm pissed as hell that those days have gone.  

I hate high-efficiency fittings and appliances.  I do.  They don't do their fucking jobs, and they waste time, electricity, money, and my tolerance for enviro-weenie bullshit.  

When my pixie was a toddler (she's going to be fifteen in December!!!), I had to let my second-hand '80s Maytag washer go.  I was really sad to see it go: it'd been an excellent washer from the time my in-laws gave it to us, and we'd had it repaired until the repair guy said, "I can't get parts to fix this anymore."  

It took twenty minutes to run a wash cycle. Used a full tub of water, didn't lock the lid unless it was spinning so that I could rinse the cup, and got the smells out of everything.  

When we replaced it, we got a Maytag.  A Bravos.  Did you know that the first load, three quarters of the clothes were bone dry at the end?  And that it took three and a half fucking hours to run said "washed" load?

That was on normal.  That is not normal.  Normal was filling the fucking tub, agitating the fuck out of the clothes, building up a huge amount of suds from agitation, then draining, rinsing (with more water, agitation, and a hard spin to get the soapy water out instead of sucking it down through the clothes and re-depositing the residue).  Done in 20 minutes or so.  Half an hour, if the load was really dirty; an hour if I soaked first.     

"Deep water wash" doesn't fill the tub all the way.  Just barely covers the clothes, but they're at least all wet and floating.  Takes three and a half hours, but the clothes get clean.  Ish.  The tub lacks an agitator.  Which...does make a difference.  I've been using that for years, and the enviroweenies can fuck themselves with a cholla for making two loads of laundry take ALL FUCKING DAY.  Even the PowerWash setting takes two and a half hours.  

Don't even get me started on the dishwashers.  I have had dishwashers that ran in under an hour, sprayed water HARD, and pressure washed the damn dishes.  Things got clean even without the phosphates in the detergent.  My current one?  There's a lot of time where nothing's spraying, even in the "express 60 minute" setting, and nothing's draining.  It's silent.  I just opened it after a cycle, and the first and last of a set of three dirty bowls are still dirty.   I haven't looked at anything else yet, but I can tell you that there were three spoons that got left in from the last load, and a leftovers-for-lunch dish that didn't get clean.  

I cannot hand-wash things before I put them in the dishwasher.  I got the dishwasher because I do not have the energy to hand wash everything I use every day.  I don't have the energy to do it, and I can't replenish the energy I spend by eating or by sitting and resting.  

What's more, I refuse to wash dishes before I wash the goddamn dishes.  I want a fucking dishwasher that WASHES THE FUCKING DISHES.  With phosphates in the goddamn soap to make sure it fucking rinses CLEAN.  

Toilets.  Toilets are fucking terrible.  "Oh, you'll use less water when you flush!  It's cheaper!"  

Okay, first: yes, you use less water per flush.  Both toilets use less than a gallon.  Both toilets routinely clog, because this house and its septic were designed for a 3.5 to 5 gallon per flush toilet.  I fucking hate the spit-of-water to try to push SOLIDS out of the pipes.  

Second, on the whole "cheaper" bullshit.  

Bitch, I've got a well.  I don't pay for water (just electricity, and I have rants there, too).  

"But can't you just...I dunno...flush more than once?"  

It takes fucking time to refill the tank.  By the time I can flush again...the solids have lodged and ain't moving with a bare spit of water.   

I want a 3.5 gallon-per-flush toilet.  And I'm being told "oh, you'll have clogs!  The new ones are better tech that work better!"  Yeah, the nay-sayers can go fuck themselves.  Again, with a cholla, that has been dipped in a freshly flushed low-flow toilet.  The toilets that can get the waste into the pipe, but not all the way to the septic tank.  Which...is the fucking problem.  

 Damn it, I want things that fucking WORK.  Not things that promise "efficiency" but aren't at all efficient.