Hello. It has been a long, long time since I posted anything here – or much of anywhere for that matter. I still hear from some of my readers from time to time, and I always appreciate it. Many things have occurred in the giant gap. Other endeavors, health issues, legal stuff, many old dogs, and so on… Plus a great deal of writing.
I did a roundup last fall. I had it in my head that there were about 12- 14 books floating around my hard drive, in various stages of completion. It turned out there were 29. Admittedly, most of them were an only a few chapters long, but some of them were in the neighborhood of complete. This is the year that I start putting them out there again. I said that last year, and proceeded to spend most of the year dealing with a shattered foot and a trio of mystery afflictions that I could say have finally been improved. I feel better.
Of course, I can’t use the word “years” these days without noticing a few important things. One is that I have a lot of them behind me. This has a couple of hopeful effects. I feel like I’ve got a lot invested in this life, and I’m willing to work a lot harder to maintain it. I have lot more of watching the world go around the sun, which in theory means that my pattern recognition and understanding of life has been somewhat improved. Two is that the world has changed drastically since the last time I was here. I’m sure I don’t need to explain that one. You were there too. And perhaps most importantly, that all those years have changed how I view the world…
Renewal itself is a good example. When I wrote it, I was responding to some patterns that disturbed me in the real world – the conversion of farmland into subdivisions in the rural area I spent half of my life, the idea that we wouldn’t be able to cope at all if the proverbial rug were yanked out from under us. I believe we have learned that the rug in question could comprise a great many factors, all of which are worth a look and a few “what if” questions. So, I wrote a story set in one of those subdivisions where the rug was throughly yanked, just to see what happened.
Would I write it the same way now? Not likely. I’ve threaded through a million other “what ifs” based on the world that has rolled by since 2010. I’ve spent several months reading through everything, and I’ve learned what it is I actually do. I write about how people deal. With themselves, with each other, and with the world at large. I put them in speculative situations for several reasons. I like the situation itself to drive them. I like to separate the issues I am really writing about from the real world because lord knows it’s dangerous to have an opinion about anything anymore. And finally, I have been a speculative fiction reader since I first picked up The Spaceship Under the Apple Tree and The Chronicles of Narnia.
There is a baseline optimism in all of it. Even the darkest future scenario requires the notion that we will be alive to see it. I’d like to imagine that we will thrive to see that future, but failing that, I like to think that we are clever and adaptable enough to handle whatever may come, and that’s what I like to explore. Let’s see, shall we?