personal

by

Won’t you spring into silence with me?

Hello and good morning.  It’s Thursday, the day of my old, traditional blog posts.  It’s also my second and the planned last blog post for this week.

In the morning, I entertained trying to write a post in the afternoon yesterday, and I even thought about it in the afternoon for a bit.  But there was just too much noise and irritation, and I couldn’t summon the concentration.  This is a bit similar to what often happens with my thoughts about studying during slow time at the office.  I consider it often, and in the morning, while I’m walking, if I’m listening to some science-oriented book, I think with truly eager anticipation about cracking open one of the texts I have at the office.

But the overhead noise and the people being late and saying silly things and all that just wears down my concentration.  I have to use all my energy just not to go berserk and/or leave the office.  Even when I am the one who chooses the overhead music playlist, as was the case on Monday and Tuesday, it’s not enough.  The only playlist I want is the original sound of silence, and I don’t mean the song by Simon and Garfunkel.  I mean silence, like that abyss between the stars I mentioned a few days ago.

There’s a reason Sailor Saturn is my favorite Sailor Senshi.  She’s the sailor of silence, the bringer of total destruction (and also rebirth, but no one’s perfect).

Anyway…

I walked to the train yesterday.  It was a good day for it, since it was relatively cool down here.  I also wrote a little over a thousand words on Extra Body, and that’s also good, of course.  I really find it tempting to want to write some on it every day, but I fear that I would lose my motivation if I did.  Also, as I’ve said before, this blog is my only frequent contact with the “outside world”, and my only personal “cry for help”, though that last part isn’t doing so well at its purpose‒which makes it pretty typical for things that I try, come to think of it.

The whole thing highlights one of the big problems with the various forms of serious mental illness:  The very nature of the problem significantly hinders the ability of the sufferer to seek or ask for, let alone to obtain, help.  If no outside person actually does anything, no assistance arrives, except perhaps after some true catastrophe, by which time it is often too late.

I suppose part of my problem in using this blog for that purpose is that I leave readers subject to the bystander effect.  Read about it.  It’s quite disheartening, and is yet another way the world sucks.  Basically, a person is more likely to help someone in need if he or she is the only one who can help.  When there are more people around, not only is each individual less likely to provide assistance, but the overall chance of anyone helping the person in need is less than if there was just one person to help.  At least, that’s if I recall the overall data about the effect well.

The most famous case of it turns out not to have been as clear-cut an instance as is often believed, so I won’t describe or link it here.  But there is some data demonstrating that people are less likely to offer aid to those in immediate need if there are other people around.

There’s at least a fair chance that someone will catch any events surrounding someone crashing and burning on their smartphone, though, and will share the video to social media.  If anyone ever wonders why I often express the sentiment that the human race ought to be destroyed, it’s these sorts of things that engender such a sentiment.

I don’t really know what else to write about today.  I’d love to discuss psychology and physics and math and economics and biology and philosophy, not to mention writing, but I’m frankly just exhausted.  I had a terrible night’s sleep last night, and I feel less well-rested after getting up than I did when I went to bed.  This is not unusual.

Also, the arthrosis in the base of my thumbs is getting worse, and I have not yet figured out any adequate therapeutic intervention.   Even doing the small amount of note-taking by hand that is required by my job is quite uncomfortable.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not horrific pain or anything like that.  I’ve had and continue to have far worse.  It’s just yet another straw laid across the dromedary’s hump, which would be fine if there were a good reason to keep carrying the load, but I have no such reason; I merely have the habit.

Life, for me, may be merely that:  a bad habit that I need to break.

Anyway, that’s enough for today, and for this week, and so on.  I hope you’re having a good first few days of Spring in the northern hemisphere; I hadn’t realized on Tuesday that the equinox was that day, slightly earlier (from a Gregorian calendrical point of view) than is typical, and by the time I did, the post had already been published.  Oh, well.  I’m probably the only one who cares, anyway.

TTFN

by

This is the way the whirled Ns knot…

Hello and good morning.

It’s Thursday morning, which long-time readers will be able to tell from the opening line of this blog post, even if they don’t happen to have the day of the week displayed on their computers.  Does that actually happen, anymore?  Are there people who have smartphones and tablets and laptop computers and desktop computers where the computer‒they are all computers‒does not keep them informed of the day and date?

Based on some of the things I see at the office, you would imagine it to be thus, but I think that’s mainly a function of people not paying attention.

Speaking of people not being as sharp as they might be, I was a serious mess yesterday.  I’m not at all sure that my blog post was coherent, but I know that at work I struggled to be sensible.  Numerous times while I was there I lost track of what I was doing, and had to shake myself into focus.  It’s a good thing I prepare for the payroll ahead of time and that the boss looks at the results before I send the numbers in.  Also, it’s good that I do it every week, so it doesn’t require as much concentration as it would if I were doing it for the first time.

I did not write any on Extra Body yesterday, despite my hopeful intentions.  I left the office after lunch, with my boss’s blessing (so to speak) because he and everyone else could tell that I was really a mess.  If I were someone with a drug problem, they would probably think I was using.

I wish I could say that I had been able to get back to the house and go to sleep and sleep until time to get up.  Well, I did get back to the house, of course; that much is true.  But it took me a long time to be able to get to sleep, despite half a Benadryl.  I also started waking up at a little after 11pm (!).  I didn’t get up then, of course, but I kept going through my frequent awakening more or less from then on, until I finally got up five minutes before my alarm.

I feel more rested than yesterday, but that’s not saying very much.  It’s like beating your personal best on the 100 meter dash when your personal best was 5 minutes.  My chronic pain doesn’t help any of this.

I’m sorry, I wish I could write about more interesting things, or even that I knew what readers would like to read.  It seems that unpleasant things are all that’s ever on my mind.

I know a fair amount about various science topics and obviously about medical matters, and some mathematics and some philosophy and psychology and (ugh) politics and whatnot.  But it’s very difficult for me to find the energy to do anything interesting because I’m always tired, I’m always stressed, I’m always in pain, and I never get enough sleep.

I don’t know if I’m going to keep doing this much longer.  I didn’t even bring my computer back with me last night; I’m writing this post on my smartphone.  I’m tempted to go back to doing at most once a week blog posts, and trying to do fiction on the other mornings.  But I feel this blog is the only strong connection I have with the wider world out there, other than my sister.  This is my only means of reaching more than one person.  It’s also my only good means of sending out my distress call, my cry for help to the world.  At least, it’s the only one I seem capable of using.

It’s not very good at that, though.  There just aren’t all that many people who read it, and though I get some encouraging words from time to time, that’s only going to have a limited effect.  If you’re trying not to drown, it can be nice for someone to shout for you to keep swimming, that you can do it, that you just have to keep treading water…but only if more concrete help is on the way, and you just need to stay above water until it arrives.  If there is no actual boat or floaty ring or rope or lifeguard coming, then at best you just become a spectacle, where onlookers perhaps try to guess just how long you’ll be able to keep afloat before you finally go under for the last time.

At least I guess I’ve been able to offer that bit of entertainment.  I wonder if anyone has been making bets on length of time and specific outcomes for me.  If anyone has, let me know‒I think I would find it funny.  Don’t tell me what you bet on, whether it be how long until I die or by what means I will die or what have you; I don’t want to be unfairly biased either in your favor or against you.  But it would be funny to learn that there were spectators who were willing to admit that they’re morbidly curious just to see if I’ll actually die, and when.

That’s enough of that for today.  I don’t know what I’ll do from here on out.  It was tempting just to drop onto the tracks in front of the train as it was arriving, and sometimes I feel like I don’t give a shit if I inconvenience all the passengers.  But of course, I do give a shit about that, at least so far.  I don’t want to screw up everybody’s day.  The world is hard enough as it is.

Also, it would be a frightening way to die, and I’m not sure I’m bold enough for it.  You have to overcome really powerful instincts to do something like that, which is no doubt why many suicides are associated with drugs and alcohol.

I don’t know.  I might go back to writing fiction every day except Thursdays.  Or I may stop writing at all.  Or I may just collapse and fall apart and give up, I don’t know.  I’m so very very very very tired and uncomfortable.  And I have no real reason to expect it to get any better.

TTFN

by

Monday, Monday, heavy as a ton day (why is there no Qunday?)

It’s another Monday morning at the train station, and I’m waiting for my morning train.  I don’t feel much like writing today. but I don’t feel like passing my time doing nothing, either.  Similarly, I really don’t have any wish to go to the office, but I likewise have no desire to stay at the house.  I have very little desire for anything.

I have not yet turned either of my two previous “audio blogs” into “video audio blogs” yet.  Perhaps I’ll do that today.  Probably not.

I do sometimes (as I’ve noted before) get irked by the terrible waste of storage space necessary for audio and especially for video, given that written language is such a storage-efficient means of communication once mastered*.  Also, one doesn’t need a microphone or a camera if one chooses to write.  I suppose it may be easier to convey emotions in some sense through audio and video, but I don’t seem to be very good at conveying my emotions in any format, even in person; hell, I often don’t recognize them, myself.

I admit that writing on my phone, as I am doing now, is not nearly as satisfying as doing so on my laptop computer; it is also slower.  Additionally, I make far more typos, since the keys are so small, and the autocorrect is often wildly and stupidly incorrect in its suggestions.  Using the phone likewise exacerbates whatever arthropathy I have at the base of my thumbs.  But I’m always in pain, anyway, so that doesn’t matter very much.

I’ve been thinking lately that maybe I ought to get a new bicycle (a mountain bike style one) to try once again to do my morning and evening train station runs on the bike.  I never did fix the previous one’s front tire, but that was partly because riding it hurt my back.  In fact, I put that one out for the large trash pickup day last week, and it was gone within an hour.  This is something that makes me glad.  I hope whoever picked it up makes good use of it.

I’ve had mountain bikes before and they didn’t seem to hurt my back.  Maybe that style of bike would just work better for me.  Plus, they come in a wide range of prices.  The thing that keeps bringing it back up in my mind is that it would give me greater mobility in more reasonable time than walking gives me.  But bikes are frustrating because they require maintenance, and I’m not great with that sort of thing.  I can readily enough do the work once I start it‒it’s nothing terribly arcane, after all.  But I simply have no motivation to do so.

In unrelated news, I got a calculus problem and solution review book that was free through Kindle unlimited last week, and on Saturday I worked through the problems in the first chapter.  There weren’t very many, and they were pretty easy‒it is chapter one‒but it was also rather unsatisfying to do problems though a Kindle book on a Samsung tablet (I used pencil and paper to do the problems); I just find a physical text more satisfying, probably because that’s the way I did such things throughout my life before.  I don’t know if I’ll do any more of them, though.

Everything seems almost completely dreary and uninteresting, and I feel rotten to the core‒by which I don’t mean that I feel sick**, but that I feel that I am a horrible, horrible person, who tends to bring pain and heartache to the people closest to him, to those about whom he cares the most.  And so, because of that, I am alone.  Which really sucks, but is at least appropriate.

On the way back from work on Saturday, I stopped in at the Yellow Green Farmers Market, which I’ve been meaning to visit, and it was indeed all that I expected:  a lovely place full of stalls and stands and local musicians, just the sort of thing I would really have loved if I had someone with whom to share the experience.  By myself, although it was interesting, it was also rather hollow and depressing.  I didn’t stay for long, and I didn’t buy anything.

I’ve gradually come to realize that things like movies and TV shows and farmers markets and malls and so on are all things that, at least partly, I’ve enjoyed because they let me connect with other people.  I don’t know how to connect directly, but even work and school and reading were and are conduits through which I could actually have friends and be able to interact because there was something about which to interact.  Without such conduits, I seem to tend to involute and wither away.

Even now, once I’ve watched an episode of Doctor Who, which is the only new show I’ve enjoyed since The Big Bang Theory (though that got boring after a few seasons), what I like to do after is just watch other people’s “reaction videos” to Doctor Who episodes.  It’s almost like having friends with whom you’re sharing an interest in something, except there’s no actual back and forth.

Anyway, that’s enough about nothing.  I’m already tired and I’ve just barely started on the way to the office.  Every day is more pointless than the previous one, if such a thing is possible.  The most interesting thing that I’ve done lately is that yesterday I made a makeshift “flame-squirter” as I call it.  It’s pretty neat, but it’s not as intimidating to raccoons as you might expect, and I’m not ready actually to use it on them.  They would probably make a really annoying amount of noise.  And then, of course, they might join the Guardians of the Galaxy or something, I don’t know.  Anyway, the cats I try to feed are hanging around less often these days‒maybe they’re finding food that they prefer somewhere else, and seeing me is certainly not a good enough reason to come to the yard.  If I had any choice in the matter, I wouldn’t even see myself.  So, let the raccoons eat a bit.

Oh, well.  Try to have a good day.

*This despite the fact that the English language is a quite redundant code.  For instance, you will almost never see a “q” that is not immediately followed by a “u”.  When it does happen, you will probably be inclined to notice it, precisely because it is so rare, and so, a q without a u is probably even less common than you imagine it is.

**Apart from in the head.  I feel quite sick in the head, honestly, but I haven’t been able to find any way to treat that.

by

“Check it and see…”

Well, I’m writing a post today, again, for some unknown and unholy reason, and I’m doing it on my smartphone, because I did not bring my laptop computer back to the house with me last night.  I was not up to carrying it.

I’m writing in the back of an Uber that’s bringing me to the gas station near the office, because I am feeling quite under the weather and do not want to face any train travel today.  I spiked a fever overnight‒not a huge one, but my pulse really raced for a bit there (about 136 at rest).  I don’t have much in the way of specific symptoms, other than a general achiness and malaise that is different from the general elevated pain I’ve been having lately.  Also, I feel just a slight sense of breathlessness.  It’s not literally difficulty breathing, but just a feeling as if I were exerting myself even while sitting still.  My pulse ox is fine*.

You may wonder why I am going to the office at all, if I am sick, and you are not foolish to wonder this.  Unfortunately, my coworker who shares some of my roles was out yesterday because his wife and baby are both sick, so I had to pick up the slack, such as it is, despite exacerbations of chronic pain and being suicidally depressed.  And I don’t know if he’s going to be out again, today, but by the time I find out, it will be too late for me to get to the office on time from where I “live”.

I feel just a little bit queasy, now, also.  It’s not like I’m in danger of throwing up, as far as I can tell.  It’s just a bit unpleasant.

No matter what, I swear I am not going to switch and fill in tomorrow, even if my coworker cannot make it.  The boss will just have to figure something out.  Or he’ll have to close the office.

Sorry, I know this is all boring.  I don’t know what you’re hoping for from me, but this is probably not it.

Oh, I took delivery yesterday of a four part book collection compiled from the writers of the Less Wrong website.  Collectively, the set is called The Engines of Cognition, and their individual titles are: 

Trust

Modularity

Incentives

Failure

In the inside front of each book, on the first page, there is a little quote from some famous thinker, such as Richard Feynman.  This is particularly fun because, in the first volume, the quote is uncredited, but I knew right away Who had said it.  The quote was, “If I always told you the truth, I wouldn’t need you to trust me.”

That quote is from the 11th Doctor, in series 5, episode 5, “Flesh and Stone”.  I think it’s cool that the luminaries from Less Wrong chose a Doctor Who quote for the inside of this book.  There’s a bit of a spoiler associated with the quote in the show, so I won’t get into it any further.  Maybe some of you will eventually want to watch Doctor Who, and I wouldn’t want to mess you up with spoilers‒though that’s always a potential part of any time travel adventure, I guess.

Here’s a related thought:  I don’t understand why more of the companions in Doctor Who don’t ask to learn about the science of the TARDIS and the Time Lords in general.  The TARDIS is “bigger on the inside”’ thanks to “dimensional engineering” but how is that actually accomplished?  How does time travel work?  If the past can be rewritten, what does that say about the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics?  If the past can be changed and have within-universe consequences, just rewriting reality, then why (and how) are there parallel, nearly identical universes, such as the one to which Rose was sent?

I know, the writers have no idea of the answers to such questions.  But why aren’t the characters curious about them?

Anyway, that’s enough of that.  I’ll just close by mentioning something related to health insurance.  My sister said (in a comment on Facebook instead of here‒I’m not sure why) that she would very kindly help me with filling out forms.  Unfortunately, the forms aren’t my issue, really.  It’s the actual starting of the process, the picking up of the phone and the calling of the insurance broker.  That’s the main barrier, partly due to social anxiety‒though that feels like too mild a term‒and partly just my resistance to taking care of my health.  I mean, think about it:  how hard would you work to help protect the worst person you know, your least favorite person in the world?

Those are rhetorical questions, of course.  But I would like to remind people that I prefer it if they leave comments here rather than on Facebook or other social media.  For one thing, it apparently helps boost my blog via whatever the WordPress algorithm is.  And I don’t really need my personal Facebook page boosted.

I suppose it matters very little.  Maybe this illness I’m fighting now will end up killing me, and everything else will be moot.  🙂

I doubt it.  It just feels like an ordinary virus.  But who knows?  Maybe I’ll get lucky.  And, as part of that, maybe all of you who read my blog out of kindness and/or obligation, will get lucky and not have to do so anymore.  It would be appropriate for it to happen on the weekend of New Year’s.

Fingers crossed!

*Of course I have my own pulse oximeter.

by

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are blog’d of in your philosophy.

Hello and welcome!

For those of you in the United States, I hope you had an excellent Independence Day yesterday.  Earlier in the week, I wrote a blog post on Iterations of Zero encouraging Americans to remember the meaning behind the holiday; you can read it here if you so desire.

My fiction writing (and my reading/promoting of already existing fiction) goes well.  I’m almost done recording chapter 5 of The Chasm and the Collision.  It’s slightly longer than the previous chapters, so editing it may take more time, but I still expect it to be available for your listening pleasure* by the end of next week, or perhaps by the middle of the following week.  Reading for audio seems to take much less time than editing; this is in contrast to the process of writing a story, where the composition takes far longer than the editing process, even when that editing is thoroughly draconian. Continue reading →

by

Oh, that this too too sullied blog post would melt…

Okay, once again I’m taking a week-long break between author’s notes, just to give those who are interested a brief update on my doings.  Next week, I will post the author’s note for The Death Sentence, the first story in my collection Welcome to Paradox City, (unless, for some unforeseen reason, I decide to write it about something else).

As you know, if you follow this blog, I’ve taken a short break from working on Unanimity, my upcoming horror novel, to complete the editing and rewriting of Hole for a Heart, an earlier version of which appeared here.  Like its predecessors, I for one welcome our new computer overlords, and Prometheus and Chiron, the story is benefiting greatly from the process, at least in my eyes.  Hopefully, anyone who ends up having read both versions will agree with me.*

It’s always nice when, upon rereading his or her own story, an author finds himself or herself excited and moved by that work, and this has been true in spades on Hole for a Heart.  I’ve experienced brilliant moments when, going through the rewrite/edits, I found myself getting mildly creeped out.  This is a good thing; it is a horror story, after all.  Of course, it helped that I was doing the work in the early morning, while it was still dark outside, and I was alone.  But still…obviously, I knew what was going to happen in the story, but still found myself at least mildly chilled.  It’s nice that the atmosphere I’d tried to create worked, at least on me.  Whether it will work similarly on other readers remains to be seen, but I have high hopes.

On another subject:  I’ve struggled to find the time to work on my non-fiction-related blog, “Iterations of Zero.”  I did write a brief post there earlier this week, detailing some puzzlement I have about the nature of gravitons, and how they might interact with an event horizon, because I felt compelled to get those thoughts out into the meme-pool, but it’s difficult for me to get all that I want to get done there.  I have three partially written articles languishing in my computer, as well as two full files in the memo app of my smart-phone, stuffed with ideas about which I want to write, issues I want to address, questions I want to raise.  When I say full, I mean it.  The files are as large as is allowed by the memo app…or at least the first one is, and the second is within a hair’s breadth of fullness.

By comparison, the file containing my story ideas (admittedly it’s not the only location for such recorded inspiration) is only one, nearly-full, memo file.**

The main reason that I have trouble getting IoZ as productive as I want it to be is time, that limiting factor on all things, so beautifully lamented by Andrew Marvell in To His Coy Mistress.  I work eleven out of every fourteen days, full time, and my commute is an hour to two hours in each direction.  This transit provides a wonderful opportunity to listen to podcasts and audio-books, but otherwise, those are unproductive hours.

Obviously, I can’t just write while I’m at work.  My boss is about as pleasant and understanding as it’s possible to be while owning and running a business, but his patience would be strained if I were to spend a significant amount of my work time doing things that had no relation to my job.  More pointedly, long before I would reach the threshold of annoying my boss, I would be curtailed by own conscience.  It’s simply not in my nature to be able to freeload while earning a paycheck, and I’m glad that it’s not.

So, my time is limited, and if sacrifices have to be made in my writing, I must regretfully choose to sacrifice the non-fiction, since fiction is my primary calling.  Of course, if enough people buy my books, I may make enough money to write full time, which would not break my heart.  If you’d like to see that happen, please feel free to buy them, and encourage others to do so as well!  ^_^

On yet another note, rewriting my short stories, and listening to audio books has re-ignited my desire to post my own audio recordings of the three short stories I’ve been working on recently.  There’s something special about a book being read by its author; at least there is for me.  I know it isn’t always workable for everyone, but I have a pretty decent reading voice, and I’m frequently told that I sound pleasant on the phone, so I’m not worried about my words grating on the listener’s ears.  Also, it’s just wonderful fun – for me – to read things out loud.  It always has been.  I’ll read books out loud to myself, if I’m enjoying them enough, especially when the dialogue is good, and it’s nice to think of sharing that enjoyment.  I don’t really foresee recording any of my novels, at least not in the immediate future, and definitely not just for posting on the blog.  That kind of work would require remuneration.

On yet another other note:  I don’t recall whether I’ve mentioned this here before, but in recent times I’ve had a real block on reading fiction, which is quite new for me.  Forget finding new stories to read; even stories that I love deeply have been unable to grip my attention, and I am one who reads and rereads his favorite books repeatedly, in true geek fashion.  I read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince seven times between the midnight when I bought it and the time Deathly Hallows was released…and it was by no means the only book I read in that time.  But lately, no fiction, either familiar or new, has been able to hold my attention for long.  My sister, however, recommended the Rick Riordan novels as uniformly enjoyable, and I know that my son loved the ones he read, so I purchased the Kindle version of The Lightning Thief, and so far – admittedly less than a tenth of the way into the book – I’m enjoying it.  I’ve been seriously worried, because I even had to force my brutal way through rereading the first four books of Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series.  Frankly, I skipped a lot of book four, and then I just hung up on book five.  If Stephen King’s magnum opus can’t keep my attention, I’m in trouble.

Reading nonfiction, though, has not been as problematic; I love science books of many kinds, and have recently become enamored with more philosophical, political, and historical works as well.  Interestingly enough, some of my best story inspirations come to me from reading science books rather than as part of reading fiction.  Many of the ideas that appear in The Chasm and the Collision were triggered by my reading of The Fabric of the Cosmos, by Brian Greene.

Well, this post has gone all over the place, and has by no means remained as brief as I expected it to be when I began.  That’s okay, though.  Technically, this is a blog, and as such can function almost as a public diary.  In closing, I repeat that the work on Hole for a Heart is proceeding well, and the story should be available for sale in e-book format within a month, probably sooner.  It’s longish for a short-story, but that seems to be just how I roll.  (At least you’ll know you’re going to be getting your ninety-nine cents worth.)

Then, once that’s out, I shall return in full force to Unanimity, which is getting close to the end.  This is reassuring, since it’s already much longer than I had expected it to be.  These things do happen, I suppose.  Again, it just seems to be how I roll.

I welcome your feedback on this posting, on any others I have written, and even on anything else that might be on your mind.  The comment section below is open, and my Facebook and Twitter accounts are public.  I am a bit socially awkward, but nevertheless, I welcome you to contact me, at least regarding matters that I’ve discussed publicly.  And I also both encourage – and even beg – those of you who have read my work to give reviews, or at least ratings, on Amazon.  It really makes a difference.

Be well, all of you.  That’s an order.

TTFN!

*As part of this editing process, I’ve noticed, or discovered, a fascinating fact and trick:  Changing the font of your writing between edits can help you notice things that need fixing, and which you hadn’t noticed before, in the original font.  This is a fascinating psychological fact, at least about me, and now that I’ve discovered it, I mean to put it to full use from this moment on.

**  I actually posted one of those entries on my Facebook page recently.  It’s the opening paragraph for an eventual story, the trigger for which I can’t currently recall, and for which I have no idea what the story will be.  I like that paragraph a lot, though I can see a few edits that I’d make in structure and wording if I ever do write the story, but first that story has to reveal itself to me.

by

Once More Unto the Breach, Dear Friends…

Once more

Okay, I’ve been putting off doing a post, because I kind of thought I wanted to have something profound to say after not having been around here for a while.  Then I decided, “What the heck? There’s no need to be so serious.”  I want to celebrate being back, and being able to post something, by actually posting something.  It’s not as though I haven’t been writing this whole time, in any case.  In fact, while I’ve been away, I’ve written two complete novels, gotten most of the way done on a third, and I also wrote a very long “short story”.

Those of you who’ve been paying attention (both of you!) will have noticed that chapters of my books have been published on Amazon for Kindle even while I’ve been away.  For this I owe thanks to my amazing and incredibly supportive sister, Liz, who showed breathtaking courage and tenacity by wading through my handwritten–often in cursive!–writing to retype it and publish it to Amazon.  But now I’ve been able to take that task off her hands.

Those of you who may not understand just what an undertaking that project was will do well to learn this:  Before I started using it, cursive was simply called “script” writing.  Only after people began to try to decipher my writing did it come to be known as “curse-ive”…and for good reason.

Okay, maybe that’s a mild exaggeration.  But it is only mild.

As for just why I have been away for such a long time…well, there will be more on that to come.  Suffice it to say that, like Gandalf, I was delayed because I was held captive.  I will be writing about that experience, about the things it has made me realize about the society in which we live, and the things which we so readily and thoughtlessly accept, which we should not, in the near future.  I’m sure you can’t wait.

There is going to be a shift in focus on this blog–one might actually say that it will be less focused going forward, in the sense that I am not going to attempt to tailor it narrowly about one particular topic or subject matter, nor even to keep it focused around narrow ranges of material.  Of course, I expect that I will continue to write about scientific and medical topics; these are two of the loves of my life, after all, and as the great Carl Sagan pointed out, when you’re in love you want to shout it to the world.  But another love of my life is writing fiction, and I am going to be discussing my ongoing fiction writing a fair amount, since it is the single most dominant fact of my life at the present moment.

I have been writing at least a thousand words a day (and usually more) at least six days a week for the past two years or so.  Thus the two and two-thirds completed novels and the seventy-five page “short story.”  I will publish the latter–called Paradox City–on Amazon as soon as it’s in shape to do so, and I am going to continue to publish serially the chapters of both Mark Red and The Chasm and the Collision as I get them in shape to do so as well.  I will begin to publish the third novel, Son of Man, the same way, as I get it ready.

I am doing this under the imprint of my own publishing company, which is called Chronic Publications, a company which I envisioned at least as far back as high school.  I am soon going to be incorporating it (as a Florida corporation), and carrying out my intention of giving half the after-tax proceeds to literacy charities.  As a writer, how could I do otherwise?  Without written language, civilization would not exist.  For anyone at all to be deprived of the joy of partaking in that fact in the modern world is unforgivable.

So that’s a little hint of the shape of things to come, at least as it pertains to this blog.  I hope to keep you entertained, perhaps to provoke some thought, and in any case, to indulge myself here.  If you like it, please share it (you don’t need to put a ring on it, though).  I really am going to try to make a difference in the world from here on in, so the more people I can reach, the better.

In the meantime, thank you for reading, if you are reading.  Well, if you aren’t you can’t experience my thanks, anyway, so I guess it goes without saying.  Trees falling in woods while no one’s listening, and all that…

TTFN:  Ta-ta-for-now!