Remembering September 11th

By Holly Lisle

Last year, the Forward Motion Writers’ Community put together the free e-book United We Stand: Community About Community Through the Lens of September 11th. You can download that e-book either in PDF Format — 223 kb, or as a zip file — 188 kb.

Hold in your thoughts today our men and women overseas and here at home who are fighting for liberty — not just for us, but for the citizens in Iraq so long oppressed, and in Afghanistan, and elsewhere in the world. Remember our allies, who had the courage to stand with us when it mattered.

Thomas Jefferson said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it’s natural manure.” The only things worth living for are those worth dying for.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


The Venona Project

By Holly Lisle

Some of the most fascinating reading on the Internet today, The Venona Project — http://www.nsa.gov/docs/venona — provides historical background and sample decrypts of the spy transmissions to and from Moscow that revealed the astounding depth of the penetration of the USSR, via American traitors into the US government and military during the 1940s and 1950s. It was through the Venona Project that the fact that Ethyl and Julius Rosenberg and Alger Hiss were Soviet spies was finally and irrevocably proven, that hundreds of other traitorous Americans were revealed, and that Senator Joe McCarthy’s reputation as a witch-hunter fell to the fact that he was right and that the government was riddled with horrendous security risks, including close advisors to then-President FDR, who needed to be kept away from classified material.

Highly recommended site.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


This Site Is Now on Hold

By Holly Lisle

I’m putting the site on hold for at least a few months, due to serious overwork and a desperate need to catch up on deadlines without any distractions. I’ll be removing the contact link, will not be answering e-mail other than from personal friends and family, my agent, and editors, and will not be doing any site updates. Nor will I be online elsewhere.

I’ve found a couple of links on the site that were broken. I’ll fix those today. Anything that is broken after today is not going to get fixed until I can breathe again.

To eliminate potential problems, comments on the weblog and other interactive elements on the site will be shut down for the duration. Please remember that the Holly Lisle’s Forward Motion Writers’ Community remains active and busy, though I will not be there at all during this time.

I apologize for my abrupt departure, but Real Life has become overwhelming, if in a good way, and I need to get some control over career and family issues before I spend any more time on this particular hobby.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Gender Activists — American Morons Without a Clue

By Holly Lisle

Resocialization article

Little boys don’t need to be resocialized into little girls, “gender sensitivity training” is bullshit, and the fact that the government foots the bill for a lot of this nonsense is simply criminal.

I am so sick of this crap.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


As the Dust Starts to Settle

By Holly Lisle

Mostly the move is done. There are a few bugs, chat remains down while we wait for a new key from Jonathan. The Research Index is going to have to be reinstalled by the guy who did it the first time. But now the community is there, and I am here.

It’s like walking one last time around in the place you lived in for years, after the movers come and take out all the furniture. Everything echoes. Rooms look bare. The whole space feels alien. You look at the empty walls, curtainless windows, scuffed wood floors, and you feel as hollow as the house.

Everything changes; that’s just life. Change or die. But what happens next?

I did something cool with the community, and for a while simply the fact that it was my thing made me kind of cool by association. But now it is on its own. It’ll run, be strong, be as vibrant and loud and lively as it has been since the beginning. I’m standing here in the empty house though, thinking, “I’m not going to be anybody’s start page anymore.” Yeah, that’s a little bit self-pitying. But really, what author was ever anybody’s start page? Forward Motion is a one of a kind thing, and I love it wildly. Walking away from everything but occasional visits rivals some of the other really hard choices I’ve had to make. And I know it was the right thing to do. I know it.

But, damn, the full realization is sinking in, and it’s hard. And why do the walls have to look so bare?

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Priorities

By Holly Lisle

Life changes are tough. They sneak up on us when we aren’t looking and change the very ground beneath our feet and we suddenly discover ourselves constantly falling over and not knowing why until we stop and look around.

I have discovered myself standing on alien terrain, not quite Dorothy in Oz and not quite John Carter on Mars, but far enough from where I thought I was that I’ve had to stop and reassess. I might have been here for quite some time without even realizing it, because when I am focused on something, I have been known to lose sight of both the forest and the trees.

I’ve been focused on writing, and more specifically, on writing in the setting of community, and suddenly I look up, and I’m somewhere else, and I’m someONE else.

I’m starting homeschooling my five-soon-to-be-six-year-old son in earnest in a month. I haven’t sat on my couch on a rainy day and read a book in five years. I haven’t pulled my guitar out of its case in about the same length of time. I haven’t had the oil paints and canvases out. I haven’t planted a single flower or turned a spadeful of dirt. And I’m tired.

I have been doing something tremendously valuable during those years, something that has been a cross between a passion and a mission to me. I have been paying forward for the good that writing has brought to my life. I have been sharing something that I love beyond words with a whole lot of wonderful people who share the same love. I have been building a place where people who love writing can get together and support each other; this matters, and I am proud of what I managed to accomplish.

But I have also been dropping twenty hours of my time a week into this project on a good week, every week, and on bad weeks when something goes wrong, thirty or more. One week it was almost seventy. That was a REALLY bad week, thanks muchly, FeaturePrice. I’ve been doing this seven days a week most weeks since some time in 1997, and the workload is getting heavier, not lighter.

I have had to deal with a lot of crap along with the wonderful things, and that wears. It wears even more when I take stock and realize that, because it is simply the nature of a project of this sort to generate crap along with wonderfulness, as long as I do this, there will be crap. Little nitwits with bad attitudes, liars, manipulators. They probably make up between .5% and 1% of any community, but they have really big mouths. When those mouths get going, they drown out everything else.

This last Jackass Parade was the event that made me stop and take stock of where I am. But we would have ended up here sooner or later even without it.

My priorities have become homeschooling, family, deadlines, friends. There is no room in there for a minimum twenty hours a week of site maintenance, membership debugging, password fixing, link checking, interface redesigning, post answering, rule-and-bylaw development, cool community idea creating, argument mediating, software testing, feature adding, and crap shovelling. There certainly isn’t time in there for thirty or forty or seventy hours per week of such things.

Zette is taking over administration of the community and all of its peripherals, effective immediately. We’ll be moving ALL of the cool site stuff — chat rooms, forums, research index, Broegga, member bio pages, community calendar, member weblog links, anything I put together specifically for the community — to a new Jatol-hosted site, fmwriters.com, which will already be paid for with the 35 GB per month for a full year. Registration of the new name used most of the rest of what was in the fund — I paid for some of it out of my pocket so it didn’t use it all.

My personal site — my weblog, my writing articles, and my chapters — will stay at hollylisle.com, which I’ll pay for myself.

While the split allows me to actually pay my own way without getting benefits from donations for my private site that were intended for a community in which I am no longer a fully active participant, it is not an entirely altruistic move. For now, the community will still be mine, but Zette will run it for me. As long as people in the community treat Zette well, I’ll drop in as I can and say hello and visit chat when I can, and things will continue to run as they ran before — my rules, same basic management, but with everything going through Zette, not me.

If there are problems severe enough to make Zette throw up her hands, however, things will change a lot, and very fast. Because if Zette quits, I either have the choice to shoulder the workload again, or drop the whole thing. I’ll tell you in advance what my decision will be. I’ll drop the whole thing. My name will come off the community that same day — there is no one else I’d trust with my name without my constant presence except for Sheila, and when I asked both of them if they’d take FM off my hands, Sheila declined. Without Zette, the doors have to close until someone else who is qualified to run it can be found. But there’s more than that. Without me associated with the community, all of the software that runs it becomes invalid. I’ve checked, and the licenses are non-transferrable. Unless I am associated with the community, it cannot get upgrades, patches, or bug fixes for most of the software that runs it. I own the licenses to the chat room, the forums, the index, the community calendar, and the member bios, and I cannot sell them or give them to someone else, and without a BIG infusion of new money to buy all-new licenses for these things, they will have to be shut down. With Zette there, it’s still my community. Without Zette, it won’t be.

With the community on a new server, it will be very easy for Zette to shut features down without affecting all the links and such on my personal site. Like I said, the move is not entirely altruistic. I think throughout the last five years or so, I’ve demonstrated my good intent toward the community, though, so I’d like a pass on this one.

I want to thank those of you who have been the good in all of this — every single one of you who came here to write. Thank you for ‘getting’ the purpose of the community, for ‘getting’ paying forward and showing that writing is a craft and a profession to be shared and loved. Thank you for writing, for not being a bunch of talkers and posers, but for using what the site offered to actually produce. You are an amazing bunch of people, and I’m glad you’re here, and I want to continue to be here with you, albeit in a vastly reduced presence. This place was for you all along, and so long as the .5% or 1% don’t screw things up, it will still be here for you.

Write. Hang on to your dreams, make them live and breathe and walk, pull each other up the mountain. What you’re doing matters. Never lose sight of that.

By the way, the domain fmwriters.com is ours for the next ten years, paid. I have faith that the community can be around that long, and still be wonderful enough to warrant a name domain name renewal for ten more years when the time comes.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


A Voice Worth Hearing

By Holly Lisle

(With thanks to baka_kit for this link) — Take the time to visit iFeminists.com, which you could look at as either Libertarian Feminism or Conservative Feminism if you’re looking for a label, but which supports what I prefer to think of as real feminism. I read down their list of positions on issues, muttering, “Yes, yes, yes, THANK you, YES, supportive of men’s issues as well as women’s issues — good, APPROVES the right to self-defense thank you very much …..”

Worth a look. Worth a contribution. If you’re a joiner, worth consideration as being join-worthy. iFeminists.com offers a voice on women, men, rights and relationships that is worth hearing.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Taking Back Feminism

By Holly Lisle

I identified myself very firmly as a feminist once upon a time. I was in sixth grade, the time was the early 1970’s, and I could see what feminism was accomplishing for women, and I could see myself fighting that fight.

That was, of course, before NOW, the National Organization of Wackos, lost all sight of what feminism is and decided it was a platform for defending and even lauding child murderers like Andrea Yates, pushing an anti-male agenda in favor of female separatism and endless wails of ‘down with patriarchy’, and cheering deadly cults like Falun Gong which encourages women and children to immolate themselves in protest of repression, and which has been responsible for mass suicides and family murders.

Feminism, real feminism, is about women sharing the world with men, being equal partners with men, having equal rights and receiving equal pay for equal work. And that’s pretty much it. It does not denigrate motherhood in favor of careerism — it supports choices. It does not encourage lesbianism while claiming that women who choose male lifemates are traitors to the cause. It supports choices. It sure as shit doesn’t claim that women like Andrea Yates are cautionary tales for all women who are mothers, one of those ‘there but for the grace of God go I’ examples of how risky motherhood is to your sanity, as if having kids damaged your brain, destroyed your capacity to judge right from wrong, and might just turn you into a murderer in spite of yourself; real feminism never portrayed murderers as victims, and never encouraged anyone to look at women as weak, helpless slaves to their hormones.

I’ve had enough. I say it’s time we — the sane women of America and the men who love us — reclaim feminism from the lunatics who are currently tarnishing it. I say we stand up and say to NOW, “Your vision of feminism has nothing to do with what most American women believe or want. We don’t want to live in a world without men, we don’t want to live in a world with men in subjugation, and we don’t want to live in a world where idiots like you are trying to destroy all the gains we’ve made by claiming we’re too weak and fragile and helpless to make intelligent decisions or to take responsibility for our actions. WE ARE NOT VICTIMS. We are women, and we can stand on our own two feet, and take our knocks, and keep right on going. All we want is an equal (not preferential, just equal, thank you) hand in the poker game with a clean deck of cards. We’ll take it from there.”

Care to join me?

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


The Things That Break

By Holly Lisle

Do you remember the Twilight Mom Yodel? I do. It was when the neighborhood moms realized they could see fireflies outside the windows, and their heads popped out the back doors all up and down the street, and in voices that echoed into the hills and back, they shouted in more or less unison, “Baaaaaarbara!” and “Liiiiiiiiiiissa!” and “Joooooohn!” and “Tiiiiimothy!”, followed by “Time to come hooooooooome!”

Do you remember the significance of the noon whistle? I do. It was when the local plant (in our case, Alcoa) shut down for an hour so the guys could go home and sit down to lunch with their wives and kids. Banks closed at the noon whistle, and so did some stores, and the kids who were playing in the back yards together went rocketing back to their own homes because it was time for chicken noodle soup and peanut butter sandwiches and an opportunity to listen to your parents talking about their lives.

You can take this as Charles Dickens’ “best of times, worst of times” — we were already deeply embedded in Vietnam; a majority of the population believed what the government was telling everyone; we had J. Edgar Hoover in the FBI and Lyndon B. Johnson in the White House and the Cold War in full swing and McCarthyism echoing in the voice of Barry Goldwater; the odds of a woman who didn’t want to be a homemaker getting a good job were only slightly better than the odds of the chicken she was roasting standing up and whistling “Dixie”; and many women still went to college to get their MRS degree and then vanished thereafter into the land of Mrs. John Doe-dom, never to write their own last names, or even first names, again.

Girls knelt in the school corridors while teachers measured the distance from their hemlines to the floor, boys were sent home if the hair on the back of their necks touched their collars, and racism (as deeply entrenched as sexism) was still so pervasive in some places that people not only hadn’t really thought of it, but they hadn’t really heard of it.

There was much about those years that was bad, corrupt, cruel, much that was truly wrong, much that needed fixing.

But kids weren’t walking into high schools and shooting teachers and classmates, either. They were not, for the most part, being raised by strangers. Community schools chose their own books and their own curriculums and graduated students who could read and write, add and subtract, and who knew at least the high points of their own nation’s history. Those same kids weren’t going home with a key around their necks to let themselves in, fix themselves a snack, lock the door tight behind them and not answer for anybody because they were the only ones there. There WERE neighborhoods, and neighbors, and if your mom had to go out for a minute the woman next door was home and you knew to go over there because you knew the woman next door, and her husband, and their kids.

Neighborhoods are gone, and the Twilight Mom Yodel is gone, and Lunch At Noon is gone. And those were good things. Real, solid things.

And I don’t think we can bring them back. Not even for those who want them, not even for most of the women and men who realize that raising children to be decent human beings is the most important thing any human being can do. The world changed, and it did so by sacrificing families and the needs of kids on the alter of personal freedom and self-actualization for adults. It sacrificed men and the jobs men did to take care of their families, and the honor men got for providing for their families, in favor of “we’re all the same.” It sacrificed women who cherished staying home with their children and raising families. Women’s liberation was supposed to be about the right to equal work for equal pay. The right to pursue careers. But not the obligation to, at the expense of the lives of our kids. Staying home to raise and teach their children is no longer an option for most women, and that’s wrong. The brave new world sacrificed jobs that pay enough to allow one person to provide for a family and replaced them with jobs that nearly all families in the middle and lower classes must have two of simply to survive.

And no matter what the government sociologists say about day-care being good enough, about more hours being spent in school and before-school programs and after-school programs not being harmful, kids aren’t as capable as they were, they know less, they are as a whole more prone to violence and drug use and sexual experimentation at earlier ages and suicide and self-destruction all along the line. Kids raised by institutions don’t have the experience of watching parents be good parents, either — and the institutions will always be there to raise their kids, raising the likelihood that children who were institutionalized from an early age will institutionalize their own children.

There are things about the world that are better today than they were in 1966, but what we as a nation and as a civilization do with our children is not one of those things.

The possibility that T.S. Eliot might have been right is never too far from my mind. He said:

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

I heard that whimper when my tiny daughter turned when I left her in day care and raised her arms to me and begged me not to leave her — when I listened to experts who insisted that she would do just as well with strangers as with me. I lost her for years, and got her back at last when she homeschooled high school. But nothing, nothing, could replace the years we lost, and now she is grown, out on her own, and I resent every day the state stole from me, and every hour I stole from myself, and I resent the liars who say, “Go take care of yourself first; as long as you’re happy your kids will be fine.” I resent being stupid enough or gullible enough to believe that. I have another chance with my youngest. I don’t intend to waste it.

We’ve broken something that I don’t think we can fix. We’ve broken it so badly that most people can’t even look at the pieces lying on the ground and guess what those pieces used to be, or how they once fit together. I can’t see the consequences far down the road, and neither can anyone else. But I can see the results so far, and the results so far are bad.

Families and neighborhoods should not have been the things we let break and left lying on the ground. They were the best things we had.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved


Inspiration and Community

By Holly Lisle

Responding to a post a couple of days ago, I suddenly got an inkling of what a varied lot of talents the members of the site’s writers’ community harbored. Testing my theory, I put out a request for community members to describe their hobbies. The response has been even better — more interesting and more varied — than I had expected. If you’d like to add your hobbies, interests, and talents to this list, I’d love to see them. And I’m putting together something pretty neat (at least I think it’s pretty neat) that will begin next month.

Contents © Holly Lisle. https://hollylisle.com All Rights Reserved