It’s October, 2020, an election year. As is the Republican tradition, they try to launch an “October Surprise” against the Democrat running for president. Well, here it is, so let’s go through this (Note that while Joe Biden is from Delaware, Hunter Biden lives in California.):
According to Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Guiliani, Hunter traveled to Delaware to get his computer fixed. We’re to believe that there’s no one in all of California (home to Apple) who can fix a MacBook.
According to Rudy, Hunter, the son of the Democratic candidate, chose a very explicitly pro-Trump shop to repair his laptop.
The store owner, who is legally blind, swears it’s Hunter who dropped the laptop off (could you identify Hunter Biden if you happened to unexpectedly meet him?). The store’s video surveillance for that day has been erased, so there’s no evidence to confirm or refute his claim.
Later, the store owner changed his statement to: “couldn’t positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunter’s late brother.” The Beau Biden Foundation is based in Delaware and is popular. It’s not unusual to see stickers for it on laptops.
The store’s owner either gave the laptop to the FBI, who immediately asked him to hack the hard drive because they couldn’t. OR he hacked the hard drive then gave it to the FBI. He keeps changing his story on this point. Why exactly he would give a customer’s computer to the FBI is a fair question, not answered.
He then gave the hard drive to Rudy (so what did he give to the FBI?) OR he gave a copy of the hard drive to Rudy. OR he gave printouts of some emails and some pictures to Rudy. Again, his story changes depending when you ask.
Side note: somehow, indicted felon Steve Bannon also has a copy of this stolen property.
Rudy, a lawyer, who, if he’s telling the truth here, knows he is in possession of stolen property, does not turn it over the police, but instead starts shopping it to news outlets. BUT he wants an outlet that won’t be critical or dig too deeply into the story.
Rudy settles on the NY Post. Rudy says, “nobody else would take it, or if they took it, they would spend all the time they could to try to contradict it before they put it out.” So no one else would take it without fact-checking it. The NY Post (a Rupert Murdoch paper) would.
The NY Post’s own journalists won’t touch the story, so a former producer for Sean Hannity’s Fox News show is credited with the byline. A second name is added to the byline, a Post journalist who didn’t know her name was being assigned to the story. She isn’t happy about her name being attached to it.
President Trump is saying that any journalist who doesn’t report this story as 100% true is a criminal.
The FBI is now investigating whether the source material originated in a foreign power’s disinformation campaign.
Rudy says there’s only a 50/50 chance he was working with Russian spies on this story.
I’ve written perhaps thirty short stories, at least as many dribbles (100-word stories), three full-length novels (in excess of 100,000 words each) and somewhere in excess of half a million words set within my own fictional worlds. Add on top of that my years as either a journalist, a copy-writer, or a fundraiser, and I’ve written a lot.
I want to tell you about three of my short stories and how their existences have been different from what I would have predicted. The stories in question are “Last Breath Day”, “Graceful Degradation”, and “The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir.”
When I wrote “The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir” five years ago, I thought it was the best story I’d ever written, and up to that point it may have been. I’ve submitted it to perhaps fifteen publications since then. (Each submission ties a story up for months).
This was the first story I wrote that got personalised rejections. What this means is that the magazine editors read it and seriously considered it. Then, when they decided not to use it, they still gave free editorial feedback on it. This is rare. But with Novyy Mir, it happens a lot. People like it, just not quite enough to publish it.
Three years ago, I wrote “Graceful Degradation.”
This story is such departure for me. It’s not easily categorised as science fiction. It’s a short story about a man reluctantly breaking the law in an attempt to honour his dead wife while living in a repressive society. I love this story. It’s still my favourite.
Just like Novyy Mir, it gets held for consideration and ends up coming back to me with kind notes from editors. The last time it came back to me, the whole editorial board (5 people) had offered individual feedback because they felt moved enough by that story.
Still, neither of those stories has sold.
In between these two, about four years ago, I wrote “Last Breath Day.” This is a very short story, about 1,300 words long. It’s good, but not my favourite by any stretch. Three years ago, in the autumn of 2017, I submitted it to an open call from a UK publisher.
They bought the story. It became my first professional sale and appeared in the Alien Invasion Short Stories anthology, published in March 2018 by Flame Tree Press.
Shortly after that, it was picked up and record for a podcast, Tall Tale TV. (It’s episode 64).
Just today, it’s been accepted into another anthology, this one supporting literacy during lockdown.
That one short story, the middle child of my greatest hits (to date), has done so much for me:
It’s my first qualifying story for membership in the SFWA (Science fiction & Fantasy Writer’s Association).
It got me listed in the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
Sixteen years ago, I arrived in Seoul, South Korea to begin teaching English in a hogwan (after school institute). I recently found hard copies of the first two email I sent home describing my earliest experiences.
A lot has changed since then. Korea was my first experience living in a foreign country (I’d traveled a bit around Europe and the South Pacific, but S. Korea was my first experience living by myself in a foreign land.
Here’s what I captured of the experience:
1—-
Subject: Where the streets have no name
Hey all,
So I’m in Korea, possibly firmly entrenched for a year or two, and there’s a lot to tell (so this is long).
I’m living in a city called Bundang (pronounced poon-dong, slight emphasis on “dong”) about 20 km south of Seoul (two mountain ridges south) and it is beautiful in a very modern way.
The city is clean, and designed for a much higher population density than it has. The major streets, the only ones that have names, are 8 and 10 lanes wide, making a grid of rectangles about 1 km x 0.5 km. Instead of street names, these grids are numbered. My apartment, for example, is 44-10. Only large or famous buildings have names, and they are often used as reference points for deliveries and for directions. Somehow they managed to deliver mail here, but from what other teachers have said, they don’t do it well (except for bills, which arrive alright somehow).
These large residential blocks have their own wide pedestrian concourses and green spaces. The blocks are filled, for the most part, with high rise apartment buildings — each block’s buildings painted a distinct pattern. This painting makes it much easier to navigate around the city on foot, as you simply have to know the pattern of where you started and where you want to end up.
There is very little crime here (or anywhere in Korea) with the exception of break and enter, which is apparently common. The lower floors of my building have bars on the windows. There’s some problems with alcohol abuse also, moreso than we’re used to seeing.
My apartment is small, but clean and modern. When I moved in, the school (who found and are paying for the apartment) had a number of additions waiting for me – toilet paper, bottled water, new kitchen pots and utensils among others. I had to wait almost a week for my dresser and dining table to arrive, but that’s fine. Nothing here happens fast.
Bundang is an affluent neighbourhood, a place where families who are on their way up live. These are also the people who are the most enamoured with all things American. So, this means that I am continually surrounded by many American icons. I live two blocks from Pizza Hut in one direction, and two blocks from a 7/11 the other way, and there’s a Domino’s Pizza around the corner from the 7/11. On the way to work I pass a Subway, McDonald’s, Baskin Robbins, Paris Baguette, Haagen-Daz and another 7/11.
Oh, and across from my school is a “Canadian Coffee House” an imitation Tim Horton’s without the donuts. Interestingly, the Koreans are crazy for Italian-American food – with pizzerias and New York-style Italian eateries dominating the landscape. The Korean word for an Italian restaurant is “eatery”. There’s a “Tex-Mex” restaurant near the school, one of it’s specialty is Calzone. I have no idea if they think that that’s Tex or Mex, but when I really crave cheese or tomato sauce, that’s where i go (I’m overdue)
There is a major American presence in South Korea, as both countries are still technically at war with North Korea (in spite of the fact that there hasn’t been combat in 50 years). We went to one of the inner neighbourhoods of Seoul, Itaewan, and it was just crawling with U.S. soldiers.
We have many American TV programs here. Law & Order, CSI, Jay Leno, David Letterman, Survivor, Alias and many American movies appear daily, usually with Korean subtitles. Unfortunately there is very little news, and until I get the internet in my apartment, I’ll feel completely out of touch (I have discovered that BBC World News does show here daily, but very early in the morning).
The TV ads here are interesting. They do have regular TV ads, but often commercial breaks become 10 minute home shopping channel segments. What’s more interesting are the ads on the American Armed Forces Network. Many of these ads are about how to vote, and while they don’t endorse any one candidate, they do talk about how you have to make an effort to make a change…
I’ve only actually eaten Korean food a couple of times, the first on a school luncheon. As much as I tried it before I left, it is much spicier here. I think the Korean school staff got worried when they saw my face go red over the Kimchi, but now that they know that I cook for myself (something that most Koreans — and most teachers — do not do), they’re less worried.
Grocery shopping is interesting. Every Korean who passes you feels that they have the right to examine the contents of your shopping cart. If you stop and compare two products, by the time you move on, there are three or four people behind you watching to see which one you chose. It gets to be annoying at times. In some stores, the staff will try to remove items from your cart and replace them with others (they do this to Koreans as well as to foreigners, but it’s still shocking the first time, especially since the Korean shoppers passively allow this to happen. I just walk away and pull my basket with me.).
Even within grocery stores, there are competitors trying to get your attention. as all of the seafood is fresh daily, there are (blood covered) butchers walking around shouting out about what they have in stock and trying to get you to buy from them. Even though I don’t eat seafood, i did watch fascinated as a butcher carved up a massive fish (possibly a tuna? It was bigger than me) and sold various cuts.
Things that are hard to find would include chicken (but not duck. I thought i was buying a roasted chicken, [takgawgee], but I ended up buying a roasted duck [awreegawgee]), vinegar, (real) teriyaki sauce, bar-b-cue sauce, white bread (but not whole wheat or peanut butter, which is everywhere), salt and vinegar chips (but not sour cream or bar-b-cue), junior mints (but not M&Ms – they’re everywhere too), or almost any cheese except cheddar or kraft slices. I’ve heard rumours of a store that sells goat cheese.
But then again, we hear a lot of rumours here. More on that another time.
Steve
p.s. Even though I’ll miss the Run for the Cure this year, I am doing the Seoul edition of the Terry Fox run this Sunday.
2 —
Subject: Rumours of Glory
The thing about being here is that I feel like I’m out of touch with the world. Slowly but surely I’m changing that, but it is taking longer than I’d like. I’ve discovered the International Herald Tribune (published daily by the New York Times) which is very informative. But you can’t buy it in Bundang, only Seoul, and subscribing for home delivery is expensive (about $75 per month). There’s no point in reading the Korea English language papers unless you’re playing a game of “find a real fact” as they appear to be rather rare. the papers are no more than press release for the government and larger corporations.
At some point I’ll get my own internet here (maybe next week – I live in hope) and then maybe I’ll feel like I can keep up on what’s going on around me. In the mean time, I get sporadic access to the internet, and tons of rumours of news from those around me.
Some examples:
1) There was an explosion in North Korea last month. We heard rumours about it for along time, then it finally hit the news. It was a nuclear test – no it wasn’t – yes it was – no it wasn’t. It was an accident – it was on purpose. They blew up a mountain, They made a hole for a dam. Who knows. Then there were photos, and denials and somehow the British are involved in explaining it all, but we still don’t know what it was. Or even if this is something that we should be worried about.
2) This past weekend was a holiday weekend here – Chu-seock. On the US Armed Forces TV channel, there were all these notices that a) US troops are to avoid public transit and b) all US troops have a curfew – 9 p.m. I have no idea why, but it sounds like there’s been a threat to their (and through association – my) safety. I wish I knew for sure. the weekend passed uneventfully, and the curfew has been lifted, so who knows.
3) Apparently the Canadian embassy is sponsoring a thanksgiving dinner next weekend in one of the larger hotels in Seoul. Turkey! My favourite food, and you can’t find it here (except as processed deli slices at Subway). No one seems to have the exact details… just rumours.
4) Kim Jong-il’s (possibly first or possibly only) wife may or may not have died. He’s the leader of North Korea and generally seen as an unstable wingnut. If his wife has died, he might be more unstable. I’d like to know these things.
Add onto all of this is the fact that every day we have any number of military helicopters (Apaches) flying over (usually in 2s and 3s) and you definitely get the desire to keep yourself informed.
Of course, the students are too young to be really news-oriented, although all the older kids know who Bush is and dislike him (they call him “bushie”). But you can’t ask them about news because they don’t follow it.
But not everything is about the news.
A couple of us went hiking this past holiday weekend. There are trails all around in the mountains, you just need to find the access points. the trails themselves are quite crowded. The mountain that we climbed was 344 metres tall, and tree covered the whole way around. It had a well-worn trail. It was quite pretty and relaxing.
I work directly with a “counsellor” who filters parental feedback to me and passes on information about the students to their parents. How old is this counsellor? Well, that depends. She was born December 19, 1979 and as such, according to our ways is 24 going on 25. But that’s not how Koreans do it. The day you are born, you are 1 year old. The following January 1st, you become 2, and every January 1st you gain a year in age no matter when your birthday is. So, she was never less than one year old, and become two years old thirteen days after she was born. According to the Korean method, she is 26 going on 27.
The kids can be fun, although I don’t have a lot of stories about them. With my junior class, i read a story called “Simon and the Spy” as part of the book, I taught my kids how to write coded messages (ROT 13 and a simple swapping of numbers for letters). After finishing the book, each student who had written me a coded message got a “certificate” from my spy school. Three students refused to take it. I asked one of my older classes what they thought of this and half of them said they wouldn’t take something that said that they had been studying spying.
So now with my seniors, I’ll often call one or another of them a spy. It usually gets a laugh. They’ve caught on and will sometimes call each other that when one gives a wrong answer.
I had a bit of a laugh with that same class earlier in the week. One of their stories had a bit about a science experience where plants were exposed to various types of music to see if it would impact their growth. So we got talking about classical music. Many of them study piano. I asked for a list of their favourite composers. They mentioned most of the usual ones – Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and one that I had never heard of, “Poe.”
I finally had to get one of the students to write it on the board, figuring it must be an oriental composer I hadn’t heard of. So she got up and wrote it on the board and sat back down and triumphantly said “Poe” – On the board it said “B A C H”
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a recently-retired English teacher and a writer with an aggressive plan (I intend to publish 10 books between now and Christmas 2022).
Like many of you, I’m not thrilled with Facebook. They’ve taken too much information, too much control, and not shown enough restraint. I’ve read about the ways that Facebook radicalizes QAnon followers, supports racist groups and generally does not act like a good local or global citizen.
More and more, I’ve come to the conclusion that the world would be a better place without Facebook.
And yet, I’m still there.
Why?
Well, that ‘author’ part is a big reason why. There are too many resources that exist on Facebook alone. Facebook has gained a monopoly on certain communities, and I need three of them for my career.
There’s a group that’s specifically about how to market your writing when you’re an author. The group is run by authors for authors and is a great example of the philosophy that “A rising tide lifts all boats.” They offer so many free resources and lessons, help anyone who has questions … it’s an amazing resource for a new author and one that I’d want to contribute to once I’ve got some successes to draw lessons from.
There’s another group that’s specifically for my genre of writers. All it does is track which short story markets are seeking submissions. Now a lot of this information can be found elsewhere, and I know a few places that it appears in, but this group has the value add of writers who have worked with those markets before telling of their experiences. Again, a great tool for an ‘emerging writer.’
There’s another Facebook group for my genre of writers that’s solely focussed on craft. This is an essential tool for a successful writer. Again, there are other places, Codex may be one of them, or Scribophile or the Online Writers Workshop (the latter at least is a paid membership group).
The combination of these three resources, not available in any one other place, but probably replaceable across a broad spectrum of online communities, is one of the main reasons I’m still on Facebook.
The other is advertising. If you’re a writer, there are (too) many options to attract new readers. The two most impactful options are advertising on Amazon and Facebook. You can’t advertise on the platform if you’re not a member.
You’ll notice what’s absent from this list of reasons to stay – the personal social reasons. They’re fading rapidly.
Yes, I have many social contacts on Facebook it’d be hard to keep in touch with through other means. First, I’m an ex-pat, living on a different continent from my family. Second, I’ve taught students from well over a hundred countries, and met people from many more. Facebook is the standard way to keep in touch with these people.
But it’s the economic potential, the stranglehold that Facebook has on my career, that keeps me there.
As much as I may try to limit my interactions with the Facebook group of companies, they’re planning ways to force me to play by their rules.
Have you noticed anything odd about the new redesign? There are a bunch of functions that have become less than what they were, unless, and only unless, you are using either the iOS or Android app.
So on my desktop, I can no longer control what shows up in my favourites list (now called shortcuts). I can if I’ll download the phone app and give Facebook access to my phone. I won’t do that. I can no longer see which of the few visible favourites have had recent activity, something especially important for following story submission markets. Those counts have disappeared. Facebook controls that.
I won’t allow the Facebook app on my phone, nor Messenger. I’ve getting wary of the Instagram app and just waiting to hear the bad news about the WhatsApp app. On my desktop, I can still maintain some control, by installing the FBPurity and Fences plug-ins. This somewhat hinders Facebook’s ability to gather data on me, or push their unrequested content onto my screens.
But that doesn’t feel like I’ve done enough.
As part of my developing marketing strategy, I’ve purchased a few domains. I’ve seriously considered adding the Open Source Social Network plug-in as a sub-domain and starting my own little echo chamber, free of Mark Zuckerberg’s minions. But everyone I’d invite to use it would also want others there; others I don’t know or don’t like. Pretty soon I’d have to bear the costs of running a full social network, or start losing the attention of my desired members as they sought interactions with people I hadn’t allowed in.
So I’m here for now, biding my time, watching for alternatives, building routines that don’t include Facebook.
_ _ _
Stephen G Parks is the author of A Godless Man, due in December 2020, and the soon-to-be released short story collection, The Maiden Voyage of Novyy Mir. He lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia with his wife, his cat, and too many fish to name. You can learn more about his books at Skrap Books.
There’s this idea, called the great filter, that is used to explain why we haven’t found alien civilizations yet. The basics are this: The universe has existed long enough for any early-developing intelligent species to have populated the galaxy by now, even with slower than light technology.
Basically, we could almost do it with our level of tech, and can see the engineering challenges that would be needed to make it practical. It’d take thousands of years, but that’s nothing on the galactic scale.
It’s doable.
There’s also this idea that we’re kind of late to develop in the galactic time scale, so someone should have beaten us to it. The fact that no one apparently has suggests that there’s a ‘great filter’ an insurmountable problem that any growing civilization must face and can not overcome. (This video gives a good overview)
There have been many candidates put forward as to what that great filter could be – the technology to build nuclear weapons, pandemics gaining access to whole populations thanks to transportation efficiencies, some kind of genetic lethargy, even the Internet’s ability to destroy logical/scientific progress.
Here’s a candidate that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. Maybe the great filter is the absence or abuse of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels are a limited resource. Technically they are renewable, but not on our time scale. To have fossil fuels, a planet has to be of a certain age, sustained multiple periods of life and had the geological process necessary to develop them.
Perhaps early Civilizations were too early and there weren’t fossil fuels available for them to use to industrialize. Perhaps, like us, these Civilizations squandered their fossil fuels on immediate needs instead of thinking long term for the greater good of their species.
What role does fossil fuel have on the development of an interplanetary civilization? Our industrial revolution was driven by the use and adaptation of fossil fuels to industrial production. Coal, the first fossil fuel utilized on a massive scale, launched the revolution, with oil and gas coming along soon after to make even better energy sources for the production of fidget spinners and other much needed plastics (sarcasm kids). Prior to that, transport had to be done in slower and smaller ships, reducing the capability of factories to produce goods, thus slowing the growth of economies, and reducing economies of scale. Things were more expensive and innovation was slower.
Oil, along with natural gas and the various industries that can produce oil-based products added not only greater speed to the whole economic cycle, but allowed for greater possibilities -air transport became feasible, space travel became achievable. But what happens when the fossil fuels are gone?
That’s my idea of the great filter. Civilizations as a whole discover and use up their fossil fuels before they achieve interstellar travel. Not that fossil fuels would take them there, but that fossil fuels are a step on the path, a step that many civilizations either don’t have access to or fall off of.
To use an analogy that might be too on point, think of civilization as a rocket ship. Before fossil fuels, we could build the ship, but only dream of launching it. With fossil fuels applied, our economy can now lift off and make orbit. But to get to greater heights, we need something better than fossil fuels. We may not discover that answer before fossil fuels run out, plummeting us back to the ground and breaking us for a long time if not permanently.
This article contains spoilers for Jurassic Park, The Rise of Skywalker and The Last Emperox. You’ve been warned.
There’s a trope that appears in fiction that drives me crazy, but I’m not sure I don’t violate it myself. So let’s deal with some examples, then I’ll let you know what I’m trying and you can decide if I’m being hypocritical.
Many years ago, I read Jurassic Park before I saw the movie. There’s a mid-point in the story that everyone knows: the T-Rex attacks the jeeps for the first time. In the book, the narration keeps shifting perspective so that you never see the attack from the person being attacked, but from the eyes of someone else present. Because of this slight of hand, Crichton appears to have killed off four or five people, including the children.
At that point in the book, I thought, “wow, what a brave writer, killing the kids!” Of course they weren’t dead. He spent the next fifty or so pages revisiting the scene to explain how just about everyone you thought he’d killed actually lived (except the lawyer).
I was so disappointed.
Fast forward to 2019 and what would turn out to be a very disappointing end to the Skywalker saga. The Rise of Skywalker contained a scene at around the forty minute mark where we believe that Rey has accidentally killed Chewie.
Hey it was the last episode in the series, and Chewie had been killed once in Star Wars canon already (now “legend” and no longer canon) so why not be bold and do that? I was thrilled to see that moment with all its emotional impact on both the audience and Rey. Not two minutes later we learn that was on a different ship. Yep, he was dead, not dead.
I love Chewie, and feel that The Force Awakens was the best presentation of him as a character, but killing him in The Rise of Skywalker would have given so much more weight to the fact that this was truly the end of the journey, that everything was on the line (Esquire agrees).
To the present: So I’ve been reading John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox, the final book in the Interdependency trilogy. I honestly haven’t enjoyed it as much as the first book, and have been struggling to complete it. Then, Scalzi “kills” the second female lead. I was skeptical. He doesn’t often kill off characters, they tend to have too much plot armour*.
Sure enough, two chapters later, she’s alive. Her enemies have conspired to fake her death and kidnap her, although exactly why doesn’t seem to be clear or sensical.
Now, a little further into the book (I haven’t finished it yet) Scalzi appears to have killed off the lead female protagonist. I’m skeptical about this one, too**. She’d just been talking with a shape-shifting AI about giving it a more prominent role in the current crisis. Her funeral was a closed casket, Scalzi makes sure to emphasize this.
Yeah, I’d bet dollars to donuts that she’s not dead either.
And I’m getting tired of this.
– – –
Now let’s look at what I’ve done and see if I’m not the biggest hypocrite going.
Two of my second tier characters, let’s call them T and M, get kidnapped by a ruthless enemy. One, M, is graphically tortured in front of the other, T, dying gruesomely for the pleasure of said enemy. That enemy then looks at T and says, “you’re next.”
We never see or hear about T’s fate after that. Nobody even claims that he’s dead. He’s just missing, lost, presumed dead. However, in the sequel we learn that he was never tortured, but kept prisoner to be used as a bargaining chip.
I don’t think this fulfills the “Dead Not Dead” trope because he’s never seen as dead, just threatened with a very powerful existential threat of death by torture.
What do you think, am I being a hypocrite?
——
* Plot armour is the trope that you can’t kill the star of the show, no matter how grave the danger appears to be. It’s very common in episodic TV shows, and when violated, like the death of Lt. Col. Henry Blake in M*A*S*H, can be shocking.
** I’ve finished the book. No spoilers for this ending, as the book’s only been out a few months. The more I think about it the less I like the twist.
I’ve been writing for most of my life. That’s a number of decades, if you can’t tell from my profile picture. In grade school I told my teacher I wanted to write and direct a play. She gave me the go-ahead, but I never finished the play and it never happened.
In secondary school I started drawing my own comic books – more vignettes than full fledged stories. Our school didn’t have a newspaper, and frankly yearbook seemed less about creativity than sentimentality, so I avoided that too.
Then came university… Our newspaper wasn’t particularly open or inviting to people who weren’t part of the clique. So I started my own very sarcastic one-page newsletter, published whenever the mood struck me. That might be once or three times per week. It turned out that the school newspaper was making enough enemies that another group started a second newspaper, and one of the founders sought me out about joining it, as he’d enjoyed my one sheet newsletter. So I became an associate editor of a new newspaper, wrote sarcastic editorials, news stories, short fiction, and learned all about desktop publishing, back when it was new. Eventually I became the editor. Along the way, I also wrote and directed a play (finally). It ran for five or six performances over four days (I’m not sure if there was a Sunday matinee). It sold out the Friday, Saturday and Sunday night performances. And I started two different novels, both conceived as epics, one fantasy, one space opera.
So I must be a writer, a real writer.
I’ve written a play, some short fiction, many editorials and a poem or twelve. I’ve got two trunk novels in my desk and a bunch more under development. After university, I went on to be the editor of a weekly entertainment newspaper, a copywriter for hire, and a communications manager for an educational charity. I’ve had big name clients (think pharmaceutical companies, expensive cars, large financial institutions).
So I must be a writer, a real writer.
I’ve had six very short stories published on a curated website, and one longer short story included in an anthology published in the UK.
So I must be a writer, a real writer.
So why do I keep saying this? Because I suffer from imposter syndrome as much as the next writer. And it sucks.
I don’t feel like a real writer. I feel like a wanna-be. A friend of mine recently said of my writing career, “It’s really more of a hobby, isn’t it?” I don’t think she knows how much that hurt.
For sale in my favourite bookstore!
I can counterbalance that with an experience I had last year. The UK anthology that contains one of my stories showed up for sale in my local bookstore here in Malaysia. There it is, a book with my story in it, for sale to anyone who walks in. I almost cried (seriously) it was such a re-affirming experience. Hell, that one story also got me entered into the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
I never thought I was going to get flying cars. I never thought I was going to get a jetpack.
But I did think I was going to get a future in space.
Why?
Of all the things that we were promised in the 1950s and 1960s, space flight, especially within our solar system, was the one thing that was actually within our reach. Continue reading Whatever happened to the future?→
I used to keep a travel blog called Vicarious Vistas. It was the first site that I attempted to port over to WordPress and I was frustrated by the process so it remains far from complete. There’s a shell of it still alive – basically just a front page – that you can see here. It was mostly active from 2004 to 2009, a timespan that saw me living in first South Korea then Namibia. Some day I’ll get it up and running again. Recently, I’ve been contemplating renewing the site – digging up the old content and posting it along with newer content from my year living in South Africa and, more recently, Malaysia.
Along the way, I’ve been going through thousands of photos. From my time in Namibia, I started to notice a theme. I had a lot of pictures of abandoned cars. This isn’t all of them, but it’s the majority. These were almost exclusively taken in Ohangwena, Namibia between 2007 and 2009.
Ladies and Gentlemen, may I introduce you to the abandoned cars of Ohangwena:
And one bonus, an abandoned fishing vessel north of Swakopmund, Namibia (AKA the Skeleton Coast)
Yes, an odd spot to start. I was the recipient of that surgery. Afterwards, lying in the ICU recovery room, a very uncomfortable tube stuck down my throat, I started dreaming, perhaps hallucinating.
In this dream was a young man, looking like a cross between Harry Potter and Matt Smith’s Doctor Who.
Tonally, it was kind of Peter Pan for twenty-year-olds. It was innocent and playful, and just a little bit naughty. Other stories that I could compare it to would be The Magic School Bus and Carmen Santiago, with some Terry Pratchett mixed in.
He was walking on air, feet not touching the ground, spouting weird little limericks and other poetry-stubs. A lot of them were about how Meghan Markle is misunderstood. Some of them were about her blonde friend. I tried to remember them, I did, but I had no writing utensils, no digital tools to record what was unfolding in my mind.
The tighter I tried to hold onto the memories, the more they slipped away (or were replaced by a new one). The common denominator was that they were irreverent and fun. As much as I can’t remember the details, I remember the feeling it gave me.
And in my head, there was a word: Spybrarian.
One of the first things I did after being discharged from the hospital was to register spybrarian.com. Then I started writing down anything I could remember, but so much of it was lost.
I may not be a good enough writer to capture the fanciful tone and fantastical elements of my fever dream, but I hope I am a good enough writer to recreate, as best I can, what it made me feel. And, of course, they won’t be about Meghan Markel. Instead they will be about his interactions with two women, a blonde historian and her friend who has a passing resemblance to Meghan.
There’s a trope that appears in fiction that drives me crazy, but I’m not sure I don’t violate it myself. So let’s deal with some examples, then I’ll let you know what I’m trying and you can decide if I’m being hypocritical.
Fast forward to 2019 and what would turn out to be a very disappointing end to the Skywalker saga. The Rise of Skywalker contained a scene at around the forty minute mark where we believe that Rey has accidentally killed Chewie.
To the present: So I’ve been reading John Scalzi’s The Last Emperox, the final book in the Interdependency trilogy. I honestly haven’t enjoyed it as much as the first book, and have been struggling to complete it. Then, Scalzi “kills” the second female lead. I was skeptical. He doesn’t often kill off characters, they tend to have too much plot armour*.
I’ve had six very short stories published on a curated website, and one longer short story included in 
Whatever happened to the future?
I used to keep a travel blog called Vicarious Vistas. It was the first site that I attempted to port over to WordPress and I was frustrated by the process so it remains far from complete. There’s a shell of it still alive – basically just a front page – that you can see 
Recently, I’ve been contemplating renewing the site – digging up the old content and posting it along with newer content from my year living in South Africa and, more recently, Malaysia.
It all started with open-heart surgery.