A while ago, I read an article that made a simple point about dogs – that they live in the present with all their attention focused on the moment. While this may be an overstatement, as someone who has lived with dogs for virtually my entire adult life, there’s a great deal of truth in that observation, although a dachshund hurrying to greet me with his squeaky pig in his mouth and his tail wagging is more likely thinking about the moment to come, rather than the present moment.

Even so, he’s obviously totally fixated on that moment to come, and once we’re playing with the squeaky pig, that’s definitely all that he’s concentrating on. But it’s a joyful concentration, with his tail wagging as he returns with the squeaky pig in his mouth. It’s not all rote concentration, either. Sometimes, he wants to play tug-of-war with me trying to pull the pig from his mouth (which won’t happen unless he lets me), and sometimes he throws his pig in the air as if daring me to catch it (that doesn’t happen, either, although he often manages to catch it unless he’s thrown it over and behind the computer and then begs me to recover it ). And if all that fails, he’ll drop the pig at my feet, with a whine that asks if I’m going to pick it up and throw it. I never know which he’ll do when he returns the pig.

One of our sons was dog-sitting several weeks ago. He was determined to see how long Buddy Mozart (don’t ask) would continue retrieving the pig. Our son gave up after two hours. Dachshunds are persistent and stubborn, even at play.

I obviously get great satisfaction out of writing, or I wouldn’t have worked so hard to get published and kept at it for so long, but I have to admit that I don’t often get the same unbridled joy from writing that Buddy Mozart does from chasing his squeaky pig or taking our morning walk.

That’s another reason why I love dachshunds.

In terms of presence in the F&SF field, in my view, authors roughly fall into five categories: wild and continuing bestsellers, such as Robert Jordan, Brandon Sanderson, Sarah Maas, and, recently, Rebecca Yarros; solid bestsellers; those lauded by various media, often regardless of sales; and everyone else.

Like a number of moderately successful authors, it took me years to become a successful full-time writer, i.e., one with a writing income sufficient to support a family.

My first science fiction story was published in 1973, a few months shy of my thirtieth birthday. My first novel appeared in 1982, a month after my thirty-ninth birthday. Given those dates, I was never considered an up-and-coming young F&SF author. In fact, I was rarely mentioned in F&SF trade publications. My first New York Times bestseller, as I recall, was Princeps, the second book of the Imager Portfolio, and that didn’t occur until I was in my sixties, although I did have another Times bestseller and have had quite a few Recluce books on the USA Today bestseller list in my fifties and thereafter.

Part of my comparative lack of “presence” in the F&SF field in my early writing years was likely because I didn’t even attend any conventions until I was forty-five. In fact, I really didn’t even know what a convention was or what it entailed, and working as a political appointee in Washington, D.C., took an enormous amount of time.

Another part was, I suspect, that my work has never fit into any of the F&SF marketing genres. I’ve never been nominated for, let alone won, a national award in the F&SF field, but I have won a few regional awards as well as awards in the romance field, including a Romantic Times Pioneer award, despite never having written an explicit sex scene (except for one).

Another factor is that my books appeal to a wide variety of readers, rather than a specific market segment. Because of these factors, the tours I did for Tor from roughly 1996 (after I left Washington, D.C.) to 2015 consisted of an evening signing every day and visiting as many bookstores as I could before and sometimes after the signing. Unfortunately, given the demise of so many bookstores and the smaller inventories of most of the survivors (and the greater restrictions on what managers of chain bookstores can order), this kind of handselling/personal presence marketing is no longer as effective as it once was in gaining and/or maintaining an authorial presence.

Another factor hampering author recognition is the effective demise of the mass market paperback, combined with the fact that most of the remaining bookstores carry much smaller numbers of backlist titles. Since eBooks are the replacement for mass market paperbacks, these days authors need to maintain some form of internet presence, but the problem there is that maintaining a presence on Facebook, X(aka Twitter), Instagram, and TikTok can be a full-time chore in itself, leaving less time for actually writing (which is why I only maintain a website).

And then, there’s the “fan” factor. For various reasons, the way and what certain authors write results in a sort of charisma that creates a wide and self-sustaining fan base, not necessarily based on the technical expertise of the writer, but usually where vivid storytelling subsumes everything else.

Given all the changes in publishing and communications, I’m glad I started writing when I did, because I suspect that, were I starting today, it would be difficult if not impossible to get published traditionally (given that it wasn’t easy back then) and almost that hard to establish a presence in the field as an independent self-published writer.

But then, who knows? “What ifs” are speculative at best.

There are many ways to tell a story or write a novel, and some writers use the same “methodology” for every book, while others explore different ways, one of which is to
write in a different culture.

This isn’t as easy as it seems. All too often attempts to depict a differing culture do little more change the names, but different cultures have different mores and different structures of relationships.

More than once recently, readers have criticized how I’ve depicted relationships, because what I’ve written doesn’t reflect either what they’ve experienced or feel they want to experience. Such criticisms are accurate in that I’m not depicting what happens today, especially in the United States. For most of human history and in most cultures, relationships have been formalized into almost fixed patterns, at least involving interactions that are seen publicly or that can be inferred publicly.

Every viable society/culture has rules and patterns, and those rules and patterns extend into and influence the most personal and seemingly private aspects of life. For example, certain Polynesian cultures allowed far more sexual freedom, both for men and women, and, as a result, inheritances, etc., flowed through the female lineage.

Private property requires legalities and the backing of power. How those legalities are written and enforced influence culture and personal choices. Economics and technology (or the lack thereof) resulted in comparative past values far different from what we experience today. In Anglo-Saxon England, a mason might make five pence a day, a carpenter four pence, and while a cottage could be rented for sixty pence a year, a simple velvet cloak could cost over ten pounds (and at 240 pence to the pound, its cost represented over two years’ earnings for a skilled tradesman).

Clothes literally were worth their weight in silver or gold, and theft of them could result in harsh punishment, even death.

While people did “fall in love,” love was usually secondary to property and status. Contemporary readers often fail to understand just how strong those rules and customs could be, and how risky any relationship outside of marriage could be. When a young woman was “ruined,” the results could destroy her future, if not any hope of a decent life in the future, and might even cripple the position of her family.

In the current Recluce “sub-series,” Alyiakal and Seliora have a painstakingly long courtship, not because they’re reserved, but because any serious misstep could destroy all they’ve personally accomplished. They couldn’t be even as close as they are without greater repercussions if Seliora were trying to build a factorage in a larger town or a city. And of course, as Seliora becomes more well-off and powerful, she can quietly let her relationship with Alyiakal become known, but even that acceptance occurs within unspoken rules.

The movie The Age of Innocence shows accurately just how binding unspoken rules were in New York during the gilded age. And all societies and cultures have unspoken rules, perhaps better described as unwritten rules, often with high costs for breaking them. Most writers understand that. What is less often mentioned or understood is the cost to society of not having unspoken and binding rules.

Societies cannot long survive without order. How order is maintained determines the nature of a society. Greater reliance on uncodified rules often means that the laws are few and harsh, because smaller infractions are handled on a “personal” basis. It’s hardly a coincidence that laws have multiplied in the United States as unspoken rules and conventions have been ignored or willfully disregarded.

One of the problems in dealing with public finances in a democracy, and particularly in the United States, is that, when it comes to large numbers, a significant percentage of the population suffers from innumeracy, i.e., a lack of full understanding of numbers and/or mathematical concepts, and the ability to reason with them.

For example, the Senate just passed a $9 billion recission bill that will “claw back” funds already appropriated for foreign aid and public broadcasting, a cut that will primarily cripple if not eliminate broadcast stations in rural areas. While a $9 billion cut sounds significant, it only amounts to less than one tenth of one percent of the total federal budget, according to the Republican Senate Majority Leader. But just a week ago, Trump signed his “big, beautiful bill,” which will raise national defense spending by $156.2 billion. The cuts in non-defense federal programs aren’t enough to offset the massive increases in defense and homeland security, and few if any politicians are keeping track of the negative multiplier effect of federal job cuts.

Likewise, as I wrote previously, the “tax cut” won’t grant most taxpayers any lower taxes than they’ve paid over the last several years. It will keep their tax rates from returning to pre-2018 levels.

Because “big, beautiful bill” also increases health care and other costs, families may receive modest tax cuts, but face higher costs in health, education, and other areas. According to the Congressional Budget Office, on average, families earning less than $56,000 a year will bring home $300 less than before the bill was enacted as result of the increased cost of federal or federal supported services, while families earning less than $43,000 will bring home $750 less. On the other hand, families with earnings in the top ten percent will benefit by an average of $12,000.

According to the most conservative of economists, the deficit from the bill will add over $2 trillion to the national debt, and that debt will need to be financed, increasing the pressure on interest rates. The apparent consensus among federal policy makers is that an inflation rate of two percent a year is “feasible,” but that “feasible” rate means that today’s dollar will only be worth fifty-one cents in twenty years – or that you’ll have to increase the value of your savings by almost fifty percent to have the same purchasing power in twenty years. And two percent is far lower than what’s likely to occur.

Yet the majority of Trump’s supporters don’t seem to have the slightest idea that the “big, beautiful bill” will reduce real incomes of possibly as much as a fifth of American families (based on CBO figures) both now and in the future.

Despite all the rhetoric about violent illegal immigrants and immigrant illegal drug dealers, what are ICE and others assisting it actually doing?

From what I can tell, they’re targeting immigrants and anyone who even looks like they might be an immigrant, largely without probable cause, in and around schools, colleges and universities, markets, churches, and even around immigration offices where immigrants are trying to follow the law. They’re also targeting immigrants here legally whose only crime is to have the nerve to criticize ICE and/or Trump’s policies.

What they don’t seem to be doing, or aren’t doing all that successfully, is targeting, arresting, and prosecuting and/or deporting the comparatively tiny percentage of illegal immigrants who are criminals (beyond being undocumented) and who are behind the epidemic of fentanyl and other illegal drugs, human sex trafficking, and other violent crimes.

The federal/ICE attitude seems to be that, if they deport anyone and everyone who looks like an immigrant, that will solve the problem. It won’t, because the skilled and hardened immigrant criminals avoid all the locations where ICE is patrolling and seizing people to deport, at times almost randomly, and without any form of legal proceeding.

This near-blind snatch and grab campaign terrorizes communities, disrupts workplaces and schools, increases the costs for farms and businesses, and creates chaos. It also provokes violence and crimes. What it doesn’t do is reduce crime and illegal drugs.

Effective law enforcement works systematically and with the community, not against it, to target and find actual criminals, prove their guilt, and apply the proper punishment. But all that takes planning, time, and hard methodical work, none of which seem to be employed by ICE and Homeland Security.