Classical Values

Author: Sarah

  • Day of Rage 2: This Time It’s Personal!

    [This was not written by me but by I friend who wishes to remain anonymous.  I realize it falls under taking a sledgehammer to an ant, but sometimes ants deserve to be crushed with excessive force.  This one certainly does.] You know, there’s a certain kind of political radical that, observed from a safe distance,…

  • Day of The Squirrel

    *I put this up at According To Hoyt, but was going to spare the CV readership.  Only… Eric went to racoons, sooo….  This is the incident that caused me to have a running gag about the RLF (Rodent Liberation Front) in my Shifter books.  Oh, and I can no longer spell French.  Sad, but it’s…

  • Tingly Tribadism And Other Twisted Tales

    *I meant to publish this last night, but being slap-happy completely forgot it.* I figure I’ve lived a blameless life these last few weeks. The death threats and exclamations about my moral depravity and lack of social caring (read ability to toe the line) have slowed down to an almost imperceptible trickle. In other words…

  • Coming Soon From Naked Reader Press

    Here is an excerpt from Death of a Musketeer, coming out later this month from Naked Reader Press. This will be the first time the novel has been available in digital format. If it does well enough for NRP, I will resume the series with number six, The Musketeer’s Confessor, probably early next year. Enjoy!…

  • It’s Revolting

    In the art museum, in Denver, in the portrait section, there is a painting of a Spanish grandee, ambassador to some court or other, Lord High This and That, Keeper Of The Royal Watchmacallit. (Give me a break, I barely remember names for people who are alive!) I like to linger in front of that…

  • Teaching and Learning

    Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about education, something that is eventually going to find its way to my blog, though probably not at Mad Genius. I was thinking how for the first time I disagreed with Terry Pratchett’s “overt nudge” at the end of I Shall Wear Midnight. Oh, not on the idea that…

  • This Article Does Not Exist

    * A guest post by Robert Anson Hoyt aka #1 son — who has suspected he’s an elephant since he was about two, in the same way I’ve often suspected I’m a cat. So excuse the pachiderm-o-centric imagery. He is what he is. 🙂 And, oh, yeah, he does overthink it. (Wipes furtive tear.) My…

  • Hoyt On Heinlein – A Forest Of Jungian* Knives

    As some of you know I got to read Learning Curve by William Patterson in Advanced Reading Copy format, and I was dissatisfied – through my own fault – with my blogging about it at Tor.com. (I was NOT dissatisfied with the book, which I think every Heinlein fan should read.) Not blaming anyone save…

  • A Melodrama in Three Cats (plus one)

    (The onslaught of felines on CV continues!  I have no idea how to say “felines to victory” in Latin, but consider it said anyhow.) First there were Euclid and D’Artagnan. And Euclid and D’Artagnan were inseparable. I mean, really inseparable. Couldn’t separate them with a water hose inseparable: Miranda cat, the girl in the house, was…

  • A Wilderness Of Mirrors

    First and before I go into this post, I want to make it clear that I don’t believe in writing-with-a-message. I am in full agreement with whoever said “if you want to send a message, use western union.” Since everything became infused with “message” which somehow always comes down to politics and since everything local…

  • Science Fictional spam bot!

    Okay, so Classical Values might be the blog (proudly) devoted to overthinking everything and I might be the resident (cat infested) science fiction writer, but oh, heck, for thinking outside the box we’ve got nothing on spambots. In the process of springing my last comment from spam — I’m dangerous, what can I say?  ‘s okay.  It’s a…

  • Hostile Working Conditions

    See, I don’t think we’ve seen enough cute doggie — or fish — pictures lately, so I thought I’d pick up on Eric’s slack. (grin)  Of course, this means CV, a staunch dog blog, is being taken over by the cat-blogging side. Frankly, the internet consists of fifty percent cute kitteh pictures and fifty percent…

  • Days Of Future Past

    Sometimes I get nostalgic for the future – a future in which people have flying cars and flying houses; where diners were run by sentient bots embedded in the walls; where there are colonies in other planets. You see, I read Clifford Simak when I was very young, and that was the future I’d thought…

  • Pushing Humpty Dumpty

    Back when I was eight I read Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.  I’ve since heard it has a globalist sub-text, or whatever.  I don’t know.  I haven’t re-read it since I was eight. At eight, what I took away from it was the mechanics of change in society and how people react to change.  Also, that…

  • The Tight Rope Over The Lion Pit

    Today at the breakfast table, the entire e-publishing thing flipped on me. It started with nothing more significant than a flutter, a feeling of excitement. Now, you know – if you’ve read me – that when it comes to technology and how it affects our lives, I’m a “the glass is brimming full” kind of…

  • What Baen Does Right

    I’ve talked a lot about what publishers are doing wrong in the analysis of the current transformation of book marketing and publishing. Let me talk about some things one of my publishers is doing very right. First, let me admit to some built-in bias. For those who haven’t heard the sob story at cons or…

  • Vee Hav Vays Und Means

    So, ebooks throw the publishing field wide, but have some drawbacks. The first drawback is giving readers a way to weed out the truly awful. Not that readers can’t weed out the truly awful themselves. Of course they can. I weed out bad books by the score any day of the week. I read two…

  • We’ve Got Trouble, Right Here In Ebook City

    Okay, so – as a commenter told me yesterday – why do writers still need publishers? What is the point? Why can’t writers self-publish on the web and be done with it? Let’s dispose of the silly stuff, first. I have had people tell me they could never self-publish because they need “editors” by which…

  • The Still Small Voice Of Writers

    Continuing my view of the coming of ebooks, I’d like to go into the good things brought by ebooks first. This is important. There’s a feeling of doom and gloom in the air. Publishers tell us daily they’re on the verge of collapse *because* of ebooks. (This is not exactly true, in my opinion. Look…

  • There’s No Business Like Book Business Like Any Business…

    I promised sometime ago to do a series on my views on ebooks – where I think all this is going, and what it means for the future.   First, though, I need to set up the stage – as it were – and explain what, from my perspective, is wrong with the current system…