From Kristine Kathryn Rusch:
There’s something hopeful about going to school. School is about the future, no matter what your age. There’s a sense that you’re studying something because you’ll need it at some point. Or you’ll need the degree, and since you need the degree, you need to take these five classes whether you want to or not.
Sure, there’s the day-to-day drudgery of class, online or in person. There’s the day-to-day drudgery of homework and the frustration of testing. There’s a lot about school to dislike, and a lot to love—even in these trying times.
I think it was the return to school in the form of my Spanish class that started a realization for me, and then the calendars, as I mentioned in the last blog, cemented the realization.
The future will come, no matter what.
The problem I’ve been having—that we’ve been having, if the articles I’m seeing and the discussions I’ve been having are any indication—is that the future has been incredibly uncertain.
Not that we wouldn’t have a future. As I said, the future always arrives.
. . . .
As with everything else, we’ve had to pivot a little, because the upcoming decade looks very different from the perspective of August than it did in January.
Rather than being discouraging, the pivot is bracing. Because it shows the students—and reminds us—that the best-laid schemes of mice and men, as the poet Robert Burns said, usually go awry. (or, as he wrote, “Gang aft a-gley”)
I’m old enough to know, though, that there are opportunities in the chaos, and that some will look at the problems and find a better solution for themselves than they would have had if they had stayed in the same old rut.
Link to the rest at Kristine Kathryn Rusch
Here’s a link to Kris Rusch’s books. If you like the thoughts Kris shares, you can show your appreciation by checking out her books.
PG suggests that, for most indie authors, their professional/writing lives were less impacted than the professional/business lives of those in many other businesses.
Amazon certainly faced challenges, but it has thrived and grown during the last several months of craziness.
Trigger warning – there is a significant amount of politics in the OP.
Is KKR trying to reduce her audience?
I’m very thankful that TPV avoids politics 🙂
I will continue to do so, Tony.
Wish I’d read your comment before clicking through. Ugh. I hate amberries (and the ambushes they grow on).
Just about 99%. Sigh… I have stopped recommending her blog to people that want to know about the writing business.
I expect that her condition will soon degenerate into ADS, not just TDS – going from one to the other seems to be a common problem. (Which makes me scratch my head, as about the only thing that the two have in common is extreme wealth and expensive public divorces. Not enough to keep them from absolutely detesting each other.)
Yeah, when I read the original post, my eyebrows kept rising, and rising…
But as we know, Bob, the SF/F industry is full of trapped-in-their-own-bubble thinkers. I’d love to give them my experience for even a day, of being forced to constantly interact with people who believe radically different things from them and have more clout, prestige, or pull than they do. You do that, you learn quickly that people who don’t share your beliefs are also human, and guess what, they have to be worked with because there are a whole lot more of them than you think is plausible.
But hey, no such thing as “political” privilege, am I right. *eye roll*
Don’t get me started.
Been tbere done that.
I was once spent six months on a reorganization effort designed to reduce overhead costs and align the support groups with the primary lines of business.
( “Who uses the technical library? It costs xxxxxx a year.” ” It’s available to everybody. ” ” Sure, but who actually “uses* it?! There’s this thing called the internet…!” “Don’t know. My job is to keep it stocked.” )
All it took was one call to his “friends” by the politically connected emperor of support, who was seeing his mainframe glass house replaced by workstations and clusters and the cost-cutting efficiency bottoms-up drill was replaced by a top down reorg to “improve demographics” and promotion opportunities for the non-technical. This in an advanced engineering R&D outfit.
I thanked my boss for the chance to see how the management track operated but that I would stay on the technical side. Less politics and less idiots to deal with.
Politics are everwhere and they help nowhere.
(sigh)
(Makes for great story fodder, though. One person’s utopia is the next’s hell on earth.)