That has been true for every interesting person I know, too. People are not all alike. No one is normal, not even normal people.

I’ve got disabilities. Some of them are congenital — I’ve never known anything different. I overexerted for a good chunk of my life without knowing that other people weren’t in as much pain as I was and didn’t fall over with exhaustion if they did those things. I just thought they didn’t complain as much.

And heck, I didn’t complain because if I did all I’d hear is “Oh yeah, my back hurts a lot too after a long day.

If I told people I couldn’t do something it wouldn’t get taken seriously. Instead I’d get all this advice that did me harm, like “Take long walks, if you start walking every day you’ll build up some strength and it won’t be so hard.”

Except that’s not what happened whenever I was dumb enough to try it. I’d try it because I’d try anything to get the pain to stop and then I’d wind up a lot sicker and eventually throw my back and wind up in bed for weeks or months.

At the same time, some of the things I do, I do very well. Things come easy to me that are much harder for other people. Like writing a rough draft of a novel. I can do one in a three day weekend and think of it as a lark, about the way most people would spend a long weekend reading a new book by a favorite author. The process isn’t that different except that since I’m making it up, it’s exactly my flavor and my fingers are moving on the keyboard.

I was too intelligent as a kid and not ignorant or trusting enough to fit in and act like a child. I look back and it’s not that surprising I didn’t trust adults to be right or tell the truth — generally a lot of the things they said got disproved fast by reality.  That cast a lot of doubt on the less provable things and so I’d go reading. Reading definitely dispelled a lot of the expected childhood ignorance.

The one thing that stands out is that I got as much harassment and trouble for anything I couldn’t keep up with as anything I got ahead in. People would explain “Oh they’re just jealous” of anything I actually had or did well. But it was just natural for them to pick on anyone who couldn’t keep up.

The big lie was that everyone’s normal or that normal is what you ought to want to be when you grow up. Just like everyone else. I had a goal.

It took me decades to realize that most people that young do not have goals that intense and personal. Most children don’t develop that sense of self and identity that early and choose the direction of their life. That most of them do just more or less drift till they find something they like or something that’s convenient. Or just do what everyone expects.

I’ve met a lot of middle aged people who made bad choices when they were young by trusting the leader, doing what they were told, doing what was expected of them rather than making choices.

I never did fit in. I didn’t understand why people wanted to fit in that much, although I did without quite seeing it that way. I wanted to go somewhere that I’d find people I liked who liked me the way I am, not change who I am so that people would like me. Especially so that people I couldn’t stand wouldn’t like me — why would I want to give them what they want and stand up for things I believed were wrong? What kind of happiness would that bring?

Well, obviously, theirs, but it didn’t do anything for me.

It didn’t solve the problem. If you have to lie to people to make them like you, that means they don’t like you and you know it every time the lie escapes your lips. That grinds in deep and it’s just a different flavor of social rejection.

The worst danger is that you can wind up believing the lie.

I got told too many times that I was malingering and there was nothing wrong with my legs or my back. That I was just lazy. To the point where I looked at it and decided I’d rather be free to be lazy as an adult than bother with things I couldn’t stand or didn’t want to do in the first place.

I didn’t actually understand the truth till I was in my mid forties and didn’t get the full diagnoses until I was fifty or so. That shocks me, to think that there was a level that big and that important that I did go along with all those people I disagreed with so intensely about everything else. They thought I was depressed.

See earlier, if you have to lie to people in order to make them like you, there’s proof they don’t like you.

They talked about it in relation to other people and got the message through loud and clear. People with birth defects ought to be locked up for their own good. Or maybe sterilized or euthanized (murdered) and it would be a kindness if the government would just do that, what kind of a life could “those people” have? If you can call them people.

Listen to those rants a few times and come down to the point where it’s just an opinion and there’s nothing to support yours that people who happen to be sick ought to have the same human rights as everyone else. And know that’s what you’d get if they did believe that you weren’t faking the limp — life in prison, no parole and the risk they’d do worse if they can shove the legislation through. After all, they did in Hitler’s Germany and “Hitler was right about some things” got bandied around more than a few times while I was growing up.

Yeah, disabled people got thrown into death camps too. Just one of the categories.

That and the bizarre twisted Darwinism that got tossed around — and bore no relation to real Darwinism. That “Survival of the strong, the weak should be killed off” thing isn’t exactly how nature works. In nature, living creatures adapt in some of the oddest ways and if you survive, you did, if you don’t have a niche, you search for one or create one that fits you.

You don’t just fold up and piously say the leaders of the herd are right and you ought to just die in order to let them have what they want, a world without you in it. One of the dumbest things in the world is to listen to people who by their beliefs are categorically your enemies and take their opinions as more important than your own.

That’s self destructive.

Most people will be very fast to give you their opinions and cite various authorities to support them. Wherever they stand, everyone’s got an opinion. Just don’t buy into the ones that would hand you the short end of the stick and justify it by the Good of the Many or the good of the few who’d like to convince you they’re the many — they really are the few when you start knocking out every single group of other people they look down on.

The many, the majority of people anywhere, are neither rich nor powerful nor physically perfect and advantaged in all things, talented in all things evenly and I would seriously doubt that would be the sort of person to trust to make policy for me anyway. If they’ve never known what it’s like to be hungry or too sick to work or gotten the short end of the stick in any way, how can they understand what it’s like to lose your apartment or your job to having too many sick days?

The only thing I ever wanted to do is actually one of the few things I’m physically capable of doing. So maybe some of that passionate drive to become a writer was a deeper awareness that writers can do the job sitting in a squashy armchair and work at home at two in the morning instead of having to get up at six to go somewhere.

The old Norse had a better attitude about disability. There’s usually something a person can do, they respected someone who had no legs and figured out something he could do sitting down. Or blind, and found something he could do that didn’t take sight.

Most people have limits too and don’t realize it, they live within them and hit their heads hard against them sometimes. It’s less noticeable but it happens all the time. Everyone has limits. Mine aren’t the same as other people’s. But for all the things that come hard or are impossible, there are also things that come easy.

And maybe some come easy just because of the situation. Would I have really wanted to sit still that long and never go out if I had long matching legs and could hike all the way across the country? I still might’ve become a writer, but I might have been a very different one and traveled more. I’ll never know though.

Let it go.

Just don’t believe the people whose ideas about life include giving you the short end of the stick, because that’s self destructive. They’re wrong. Trust the ones who will respect you the same as they would those who don’t have health problems. Someone who can say “I’ve never been sick in my life” is lucky — weirdly lucky, rare and surprisingly lucky — and they don’t quite get it that’s exceptional. But they have little patience for anyone else if they’re that lucky and will think of it as normal. It’s not. It’s exceptional.

My grandfather was that exceptional. He was also the person I quoted who said “Hitler wasn’t wrong about everything, he did some good things.” Yeah right. Nothing like growing up in the house of an enemy to give you a weird view of life and make you want to write in order to make life make sense.

Most of all, at least a little space shows between paragraphs.

The title doesn’t get cut off by the text block. While the preceding Cloudy Sunset was pretty cool looking in the abstract, I should have previewed it for how it’d look with actual text in.

One of the good professional novelist habits I need to cultivate is Blogging Well. Using a keyword like “theme” and then cleverly talking about themes and ideas in novels as well as what new theme I stuck on my blog. Using the theme artistically to show some of my personality – and the feel of my books, which is what book readers who don’t know me will get out of reading my blogs.

This is something that helps sell books.

It may be farther off for some of us than others, but one of the natural consequences of having written a novel is that someday you will be selling novels. Or at least giving them away and trying to build up enough audience to get trickle income on the ads at the download page. That’s a perfectly good thing for a leisure novelist to do.

It could even keep you in replacement netbooks if your budget’s tight. Nothing to sneeze at.

Part of the blogging thing is keywording. Theme is one of the things people might search on. They like certain themes and not others. They share your slant — your general ideas in life — at least some of them. Your core readers do. Marketing is really more about making sure your core readers know your book exists than about trying to fool everybody and their dog into buying your book whether they’d like it or not.

Okay, some people get so skilled at writing that marketing is more a matter of announcing that they did another one. Everybody and their dog does buy it, if only to pan it. But that’s far away from any first novelist’s current milestones.

It is a selling point in a cover letter if you’ve already got a blog with an online readership. The more people who know who you are and buy your book because they’re your friend, the more likely buzz will reach the thousands on thousands of readers who aren’t your friend. If they remember your name and connect it with your writing and actually remember what flavor of fiction you do, that’s enough “friend” factor to shove you way ahead of millions of other novelists they don’t remember or don’t like that flavor.

This is part of why those superstars stay superstars because if you only have enough spending money for one new novel and like Stephen King, you might not want to pay just as much for a different scary novel from some guy you never heard of in hopes he’s as good as Stephen King. Even if the other guy is Richard Bachman and actually is Stephen King under a different label.

Or you write more than one flavor of novel and your publisher or agent suggests that you create a pseudonym. A new persona. The one that does the horror novels isn’t the one that does the nice happy fantasy-comedies and isn’t the one that did the romance novel. This can work out well for the prolific because the same publisher may buy three or four of your books in the same year, giving you multiple incomes and chances at the Literary Lottery.

That’s my personal term for what happens if you get a best seller. It seems to be random. Writing a brilliant good book helps, but only so much. Brilliant good books sometimes get buried for years and become cult classics instead long afterward. It more seems to be something random between a general audience and something that is at least halfway decent or publishable quality.

It’s a fad, and if there was some artificial way to create fads, advertisers would do it and then it wouldn’t work so well any more. They all would and it would flatten out.

So I think of that as something like the State Lottery, except that while the prizes are huge, there are fewer players and skill counts. It’s not predictable and the only things you can do to increase your chance of winning are to get more tickets and to write better books — consistently well, so that it doesn’t matter which of them became the hot big deal. That way your core readers will come back and get copies of all your other books too, but not be disappointed because only the bestseller was a good one.

Themes are funny things.

Some are controversial. Others only seem so because they were controversial thirty years ago and the majority of undecided lean in your direction on it. Others are so universal that they’d unite extreme conservvatives and extreme radicals on how moving the story is.

To me theme is something in a novel that just happens.

The story’s meaning is not clear to me till its end. It’s there as a force driving everything in it, but I don’t consciously recognize it till the end. I did not expect “Magic in the Streets” to be about someone overcoming past abuse and standing up to the ultimate bully — the ghost of an abuser, someone for whom no order of protection could do any good whatsoever.

Yet that’s one of the main themes in the book and was foreshadowed from the moment that waif turned up drifting around a week after her eighteenth birthday confused without having eaten for days. Her old world of abuse was gone and she hadn’t figured out yet what to do in life. She lucked.

She got an eight week old kitten for a guru and he was a good one.

So that was fun to write and I cried while I was finishing it. I was so moved at the end that I sat there stunned. I could not believe the story had taken that direction or done it that powerfully.

Creative writing is sometimes right-brained, intuitive and unconscious. It’s not always planned. It’s not always organized. It happens and when it goes right, the high is like nothing else.

So if you don’t pre-decide the theme of your book, reading over it afterward will probably give you some idea of what your themes are. There’s usually a central theme but may be several other subthemes. Love is a big theme in Magic in the Streets, explored not just between lovers but between both those young people and their cats, familial love among the cats.

Creative activity as something positive that pushes back the dark is another big theme in it. So is learning. So is joy, these things aren’t incompatible at all, much as schools tend to try to separate them.

Hope you enjoyed a second ramble on Theme and Themes. At least this one’s more readable than my first experiment!

I love landscapes. I love nature. I draw and paint almost as much as I write and almost as well as I write.

So naturally finding one that didn’t either look like the techno-geek who knows more HTML than Bold and Italic (a definite fraud) or girly or worst of all, “Cute” was perfect. Cloudy sunset thing in muted deep blues and grays.

I could paint something like that when I’m not in the mood to haul out all the brights in the box and do a sunset or some flowers.

There’s a difference though between flowers ala Impressionists or realism and flowers ala cute and stylized or girly. I love the Victoriana or the Steampunk look but found a good theme on page two, so didn’t keep going till I found a Steampunk one that’s all brass gears and Victorian ornamentation.

Besides, Steampunk takes someone who’s more of an engineer geek than me, someone who actually does remember enough chemistry to know how to age-treat bits of brass paraphernalia and has the power tools to go cutting and soldering it into shape.

That would be my son in law.

He’s even planning on making the goggles. I love the steampunk look, but I’m more the guy with the notebook sketching the velociraptors and geeking on natural history. Then applying it within fantasy worlds and asking myself how the magical levels of the setting would affect the evolutionary pressures on various sentient and nonsentient beings.

There’s a bit of science fiction in my purest fantasy — from all the social sciences on up through natural history. There’s a bit of fantasy in my SF hich always seems to involve epic stories if I do it, along with archetypes, hero’s journey and characters pretty much larger than life.

So I have to just look at myself as a speculative fiction writer, draw on the sources I have and backgrounds I’m familiar with, then read up on things if it starts going off my beaten path. This is good though. I do it once in a while when the story demands it.

“Medicine Show” this year actuallly took a significant amount of non-writing time zipping back to Wikipedia and other webpages for backgrounds on 1860 and history in the West and the South and San Francisco street maps, all sorts of things that don’t normally go into my novels. When I make up the setting, all I need to do is stay consistent with what I already did. In a novel with a historical setting or even a contemporary one, I have to watch out for people telling me “that neighborhood doesn’t exist” or “that movie didn’t come out in 1975.”

Some very good Star Wars jokes got left out of the Greenwood Series because the kids were from 1975 instead of 1978.

Oh well. Such is the life of a novelist. Maybe I’ll relax with something that’s completely made up one of these other times and not have to go checking Facts and Dates so much.

Dave Barry writes 100% Fact-Free columns, so why shouldn’t I bring that same artistic style into fiction?

It’s not like it hasn’t been done. I can’t count the number of good fantasy novels I’ve bought that are a whole lot like medieval Europe except for the overwhelming religiosity and religious pogroms. Or it’ll be carefully renamed as something else and turn up as the bad guys while the good kingdom in Fairyland has, like medieval Iceland, royally mandated freedom of religion.

Yet I buy all those books and love them. The real middle ages were grim and in a lot of ways, they’re depressing to read about. The stories set up in Mythic Storyland are very different and should carry modern messages of ethics and meaning. They are our stories.

They may be set Long Ago and Far Away but they are about where we live now and who we are now. That includes a lot of people who’d rather not have the story interrupted by the version of annoying religious-right that showed up with torture implements and massive armies just a few centuries ago. If that’s not what the story’s about, then it’s extraneous violence.

So there’s today’s ramble on writing — hope you like my new theme as much as I do!

Same for the altogether modern themes in my books — wow, I actually managed to connect the topic and the subtopic. Go me. Maybe I’m even learning to blog intelligibly.

I’ve had a long journey to get to this point but in 2010 I’m going to take my best shot at becoming a self supporting novelist.

I’ve been sick all my life and spent the first forty years of it thinking everyone else was that sick too. Like a lot of people with chronic pain and fatigue, it got misdiagnosed as depression — it was so obvious since I was bullied, abused and mistreated so often. Wouldn’t anyone get depressed and traumatized with that treatment?

Funny, they didn’t notice that I could not walk from one classroom to the next within the time one class ended without running in the halls. At a full run, I reach an abled person’s walking speed. At a walk, it’s maybe a quarter of that. If I were a counter on a wargame board I’d have a movement rate of 1 hex when everyone else gets five or six.

This is because right side hemi-hypoplasia makes my right leg 3cm shorter than the left. I lurch along like Boris Karloff in “The Mummy.” Can’t count the number of times I got screamed at, punished and told to “quit faking that limp” or the number of sports injuries I got in grade school from overexertion. I flunked gym, the only person in my own experience ever to do so. I flunked gym steadily every single time until at sixteen, my scoliosis got diagnosed.

They told me “There’s an operation, but you’re a bit too old for it. You’d have a fifty fifty chance of fixing your back problem or winding up paralyzed from the neck down.”

“So I wouldn’t be able to type.”

“It’d be everything from the neck down.”

“No thanks. I’m not willing to risk it. I don’t care if I wind up in a wheelchair.”

The right side is also weak. My right arm is also about an inch shorter than the left. The big joke is that I can’t operate a manual wheelchair at all, that throws my back faster than walking. In fact, my back trouble is more of a canary in the mine than anything else.

If I stop when my back hurts, I won’t wreck my hip, knee or ankle on my right side.

Then throw in fibromyalgia and you’ve got a double dose of chronic fatigue. The orthopedist cheerfully said “Well, there’s what causes your chronic fatigue.” It takes me five times the body energy to stand or walk or do anything physical than it would a symmetrical, abled person.

The up side of this is that I’m not fat. I burn it off just doing what Activities of Daily Living are in reach, which is not all of them.

Throw in asthma on top of it, stress induced. Throw in fibromyalgia — the symptoms of which go right back into that nightmare that was grade school.

It seems amazing to me that all those doctors and pediatricians who were so worried about my Morbid Imagination and Maladjusted Social Fit did not recognize that I couldn’t walk like other kids.

But those were the 1950s and early 1960s. I was Morbid, intelligent, imaginative and most of all Subversive. While family members sat around the dinner table seriously considering whether every black American should just be rounded up and shipped to Africa or not, I was reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles.”

When they talked about what should be done to people with Birth Defects, from “They should be institutionalized, kept out of sight, it’s not right just having them around all over the place” to suggestions for euthanasia and forced sterilizations, some part of me did swallow Boys Don’t Cry and most of all not to complain if I was sick. I wound up in some fierce denial. It may have saved my freedom and civil rights, it wasn’t till the 1970s that anyone disabled was even protesting that treatment — or getting lawyers to get out of Institutions.

I’m full of historical horror stories.

On top of that, fibromyalgia and most of the autoimmune diseases hadn’t even been discovered. None of the doctors knew any of it existed as such. I wasn’t the only one to have the pain assumed to be emotional or psychiatric.

Most of the radical subversive ideas I held now are moderate to liberal. Society’s gone through a lot of changes. One of the most welcome is the way disabled people can live now with freedom and dignity.

I’ve got Social Security now and coverage. If something new came up, I could go in for it — not that I want to, not that I really want anything to do with doctors beyond “Hi, I just moved here, I need a new doc to renew my prescriptions.”

I always wanted to be a writer.

I read a short biography of H. P. Lovecraft in a paperback of his short stories and it had this golden sentence, the one that became my blog title. “H. P. Lovecraft was a sickly child.”

That resonated in my imagination. It went right to my heart. There was, out there in the enormous lexicon of Great Men who climbed mountains or invented important things or composed symphonies — there was one who’d been the boy that flunked gym too. I didn’t know if they even had gym in Howard Phillips Lovecraft’s day.

I knew one thing though, H. P. Lovecraft did something cool in his life, something every bit as cool as becoming an astronaut or a cowboy or a field paleontologist would’ve been. His stories took me through geological time and astronomical space. He had this wonderful perspective that was supposed to be the mind-shattering screaming horror of them… the idea that the rest of the universe is really big and most of it doesn’t know we’re here. If they did, they might not think much of humanity. They sure wouldn’t just bow down and go “oh you great and perfect beings tell us the best way to live” and all that. No, to some of them, we’d be some squeaky little newcomer species with bad habits or maybe even tasty meat if you use the right seasonings, whatever. It was right up there with stories about cannibals and tropical islands. It was good stuff.

Lovecraft wasn’t the only author I loved. Franz Kafka showed me characters whose families couldn’t stand them and turned the events of the average school day into something larger and uglier than life. Poe was just this wonderful adventure writer, “The Pit and the Pendulum” was more riveting than scary. Come on. The guy escapes, does it by being really clever, he wins at the end.

That’s not horror, that’s closer to Indiana Jones.

Go ahead and read it — and picture Harrison Ford with that leather hat going through everything in the story. You’ll see what I mean. “Pit and the Pendulum” is not horror. It was set in horror, the Spanish Inquisition was real horror, but “Pit and the Pendulum” is a neat adventure story.

I took in Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mars, Venus and Pellucidar. For some reason I didn’t read Tarzan till I was an adult. I think I was just always more keen on dinosaurs than apes. I read J. R. R. Tolkein and everything by Shakespeare. I read Moby Dick without it being assigned. I read Mark Twain before it got assigned. I gave some teachers nightmares and I’m pretty sure my grade school teachers were really scared I’d succeed in my life’s ambition.

To become someone like H. P. Lovecraft or worse, Harlan Ellison… write my visions and imaginative fables in ways that helped change the world. When I read the Dangerous Visions anthologies, it opened up a world outside my narrow life in which I really could turn this into a life with an ambition in it, a life with achievements.

So here I am, blogging again on a site for others with chronic disability. The decor is very pretty, though girly — I know that many of the autoimmune diseases strike more women than men. Just imagine my bit of it decorated in Frazetta volcanoes or dark forests of the soul, mysterious places where the mind is never fettered and sentience can triumph over any adversity.

I don’t think writers ever grow up. Nor artists. Nor musicians. People who do these things, people who work in the arts can’t just shut down their childhoods and put them away.

I ran into something wonderful in a tagline on Nanowrimo this year, a quote. Like most quotes, I can’t remember who first said it. My memory’s as sound as the average bit of soggy blue cheese that’s been stepped on, except for plot details meticulously tracked in a “pad” file attached to my novel chapters for continuity and updated per chapter.

“The only people who disapprove of escape are jailers.”

That said, I write escape fiction.

The coolest thing about escape fiction is that sometimes it comes true. I’m 54. I live with my loving daughter and son in law, my grandkids, their two big dogs, their cat and my beloved longhair Street Siamese companion, Ari Cat.

Ari sheds Cat Hairs of Inspiration on you and everyone.

Dream and make it happen.