“You know, we used to believe that trees competed with each other for light. Suzanne Simard’s field work challenged that perception, and we now realize that the forest is a socialist community. Trees work in harmony to share the sunlight.”

…the best two fiction books I’ve read this year are The City We Became and The Fifth Season.

What I’ve been thinking about lately though is this: there’s a strange fine line between not being able to write and writing quite a lot.

To quote the giant in Twin Peaks, “It is happening again.”

But it’s a strange thing when you’re level 30, and tasked with defeating the end boss, but the guardsmen are all level 40. Why can’t one of them save the world? They’re wasted guarding the streets of this city with abilities like those.

My younger sister died last week. It was sudden and I’m still in shock and maybe I’ll write about that later, but right now I’m thinking a lot about grief and its effect on creativity.

It turns out I’m a sucker for gamification, and it seems this is a good thing.

2020 has been a hell of a year and I’m not about to take for granted that it doesn’t have something horrible in store in the last month, but we keep trying to move forward, because collapsing on the floor is not an option. Although, maybe I better not say that while 2020 can still hear me, the bloody year might take that as a challenge.

For a few months now I’ve been on what I call the Stop Making Sense exercise plan. Put simply, I put a concert on the TV or on the YouTubes and dance about the living room like an addled muppet.

Indeed in addition to the main deities, there is an entire pantheon known as the Bastard Gods.

From Grimble Crumbol’s The World of Olkhar Volume IV, “On the Heroes of the Third Age.”

Much must be said about heroes, our world owes so much to them, and yet they are a topic of much complexity.

During my university years, my main focus was ancient-medieval history, and the subject of my thesis was the fall of the Roman Republic. As such I’ve spent the last decade wondering if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing or just experiencing the world’s worst case of confirmation bias.

It might be time to acknowledge I have a problem. I can’t stop building new worlds for stories or even entire series of stories to be set in.

Having written three novels that range from dystopian to outright apocalyptic, I’m trying hard to write more optimistic science fiction and fantasy these days. Skipping right past my fear that optimism isn’t really in my wheelhouse, I have a couple reasons for making this switch.