I meant to write this blog entry last week, but I got distracted and then got a bit ill, so I put it off like a pansy (or some other kind of flower…flowers in general are notorious procrastinators).  So now I’m writing it, a bit on the late side, to the massive relief of those who have been anxiously anticipating it (no one).

I wanted to make a few announcements and give a few updates.  So I will.

First, there is a collection of blog entries that I had unpublished here, with the idea of starting a separate blog for my political reflections.  This blog was then to be kept more or less entirely for my author-related productions.  But then I thought, “The name of this blog is robertelessar.com, after all.  Not robertelessarauthor.com or robertelessarbutnothingpolitical.com.  Why should I try to segregate one part of my being from another?  Why should I behave as if, when acting as a writer of fiction, I have no strong political views or axes to grind?  Am I to attempt to live a lie?  Am I to put forward a façade, to fracture my identity in pieces in order to maintain some ironic pretense at unity?  Is it wrong for a writer of fiction also to put forward his views on political matters, even those that have had a profound and sometimes devastating impact upon his own life?  NO!!  I shall not succumb to that cowardly pressure!  I shall present my whole self, in all its parts, to the world, let the chips fall where they may, and other clichés.  As Whitman wrote, ‘I am large, I contain multitudes.’  Let the multitudes have their say, messy though it may be.”

Also, it’s a pain in the ass to try to maintain two separate blogs.

So, with all that in mind, I am going to be re-publishing my old, politically-oriented blogs, including some that are several years old (there is a long hiatus in my blog entries between, say 2013 and 2015, during which time I was a guest of the Florida Department of Corrections).  I may re-release them all at once, or I may get them out in dribs and drabs.  There will be little rhyme or reason to my decision in this matter; I’m going to do it as the mood strikes me.  I do hope you enjoy them, or at least find them thought-provoking.  I encourage comment and discussion on all of my blog posts.  I often don’t GET it, but I do encourage it.

Now, on to other matters.

The editing of Mark Red is proceeding apace, but it is laborious and often frustrating.  I can certainly tell that I was writing it under far-from-ideal circumstances to which, especially at the beginning, I had not yet adapted.  I suppose I should congratulate myself for having done it at all, given that through which I was going (Well done, me, well done), but Oy!  In any case, it’s probably going to be a few months, at least, before it’s in any shape to release.

I’m also, as I carry on the above herculean task, writing a new short story.  I had to do some new fiction writing, because going so long without producing anything new was making me depressed.  It’s a bit of an unusual story, I think, but I like it so far, which is a nice.  It’s usually a bad thing if an author doesn’t like his or her story even as he or she is writing it.  In any case, I think what I’m going to do once the story is done, and edited, and whatnot (you can’t skip the whatnot) is simply to publish it here, on my blog.  I released the fragment of short story “In the Shade,” so why not a whole story?

Regarding the short story fragments:  I have some other old bits of uncompleted short fiction lying around, including my beginnings of a Harry Potter fanfic (it’s quite dark…Harry Potter lends itself nicely to dark fanfics in my opinion).  I may post some of them here, just for fun.  We’ll see.

I also have some old, lost short stories that I think I am going to attempt to rewrite.  One of them won an award many years ago, when I was in high school (the NCTE award…only two were given in each state!  Well done, me, well done).  The other is a very dark short story I wrote during the summer in college one night while keeping my then-girlfriend company as she crammed to complete an assignment for her summer job.  It was a pretty good story, though very depressing, and I’ve always regretted that I didn’t do anything with it, and of course that I have lost it along with all my other worldly possessions.

However, I have forgotten almost nothing about those two stories, and recreating them should be more or less simply a matter of scratching and scribbling, scribbling and scratching, so to speak.  I shall probably release them, as well, on this page.

Of course, I shall (after finishing the rewrite and release of Mark Red) complete my rewrite and release The Chasm and the Collision.  And then I shall return to the very dark sci-fi/fantasy/horror novel, Unanimity, which I forced myself to interrupt in order to complete all of my hitherto uncompleted work.

Well, that’s the update, hope you’ve liked it.  Further bulletins will be forthcoming as events warrant.

TTFN!