I’ve always loved books. My parents read to me from a young age, and once I learned to read I devoured one voluminous young-adult fiction series after another. K. A. Applegate, Jude Watson, J. K. Rowling, T. A. Barron, Lois Lowry, and Madeleine L’Engle each had a sizeable impact on my developing imagination. I began writing early. I didn’t write well, or often, but I wrote: always fiction, usually fantasy. The power to create new worlds captivated me long before I understood the power words had to shape the real world, and long before I had any pretensions of doing so. I discovered other passions and I stopped writing, except to satisfy the requirements of coursework. I met the love of my life. I graduated, I sought a career, and I met dead ends. All the while I held somewhere in the back of my mind the possibility of being a writer. I had children, and my free time evaporated. At the encouragement of my parents, I returned to school, seeking a technical writing certificate. In their minds, it was the perfect marriage of my language skills and passion for science.
It wasn’t for me.
My day job afforded me the luxury of being able to write at work; a little bit here, a little there, and I had pieced together a manuscript for a science fiction novel. It was around this time that I first started seriously entertaining the idea of trying to make a living by writing. I had become a vocal, opinionated adult, but I was unsatisfied with screaming into the void of social media. Anyone can write a savage tweet, but what do those accomplish? Telling stories gave me a way to articulate what I was thinking and feeling, a means of conveying complex ideas and conceptions of reality.
Sometime in the last decade, the story of the world, the one America tells itself at least, stopped making sense to me. We all experience our own lives as narratives, for good or for ill, and we understand the world around us as the biggest story of all. There are winners and losers, heroes and villains, tragedies and happy endings, but that simplistic paradigm had broken down for me.
So what did I do? I started reading again.
I discovered new ideas, new ways of understanding the world, and the appeal of storytelling as an occupation, not merely a hobby, became overwhelming. For the first time in my life, I had a real dream: to support myself and my family with my writing. Writing became both my escape from reality and my way of reconciling its brutal truths. It was my creative pressure valve and I did it solely for myself, but with the knowledge that someday, I would share it with the world. That day is close, now. I intend to publish my writing here on a weekly basis, exploring ideas in science, technology, and politics, with a focus on reaching a clearer understanding of the future of humanity on a planet our species is rapidly changing. If you like what you see here, tell your friends and family. If there is enough interest in what I have to say, I’ll post more often. I’ll make time. I’ll quit my day job and write full time. I’ll post passages from whatever I’m working on for subscribers. This is the beginning of a new phase of my life, and I’m committed to it. Life is short, so, so short, and I’ve waited long enough. I may fail—most aspiring writers do—but I’m going to give it everything I have anyways.
The future is unwritten.
Best of luck, I look forward to reading more as it comes available!