Time to Come Home

Hello, intrepid explorers!

It’s been a while, I know. I don’t want to make too many excuses, as I’m sure you’ve heard them all from many quarters over the last year. But I will make a brief explanation of my hiatus. A couple years ago I needed to find employment that would secure my health insurance for reasons I won’t go into very much. I didn’t want to be stuck in a place where my previous cancer kept me from being insured because it was an “existing condition.” Such is life. What I thought would only last a short time was extended as my household financial stability was tenuous as the pandemic began shutting down everything. So I kept the job, thinking I’d just start writing in my free time after work. Unfortunately, I don’t have whatever it is Taylor Swift has (lots of money probably helps! Even so, 2 albums last year!) and everything that was happening in the world was not fertile ground for my mind. I couldn’t focus enough to productively write about adventures, thrills and horrors while worrying about the vulnerable members of my family catching this thing. Virginia Woolf wrote that a writer needed a room of one’s own to practice their craft. She was speaking both literally and figuratively, at least in my reading of the piece. You need a physical space where you can concentrate fully, but you also need a mental space where you can sink into the realm of imagination without stray, anxious thoughts intruding and stepping all over your stories. Even if you write to get that stuff out, which I sometimes do, you still need to be focused to do that well. At least I feel that’s the case.

So here we are, a couple years after Voro was published, and ready to begin fresh. I have been cleaning up The 11, as I feel that really is overdue for publishing, even though I have a couple new fantasy books completed and ready for editing – that four book series I was working on before all this started, for instance. This post will be brief, but I have a longer one discussing what the different kinds of science fiction are and why I write mine the way I do. I wanted this to come out first and sit on the front page of my site for a few days though. It’s my way of saying, I’m still here, and ready to get back to what I feel I do best. Writing.

Talk to you very soon!