Monthly Archives: September 2025

689. Birth of a Blog

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I started the blog you are reading on the twenty-ninth of August, 2015. I took a hiatus in 2020, because of covid. Here is what I said that day.

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Yesterday, here in California, the Governor requested that all people over 65 self-isolate. That makes sense to me, and I passed that milestone seven years ago, so my wife and I are going to hunker down and become temporary hermits. That isn’t too much of a hardship since we live in the country and keep a well stocked larder anyway.

This change shouldn’t bother my blog, but it does. I’m not worried for my wife and myself, but worrying about the rest of the country and the world beyond weighs on me. It has also been getting harder lately to come up with new things to say, especially on subjects that don’t call for hours of research for a post that will be read in three minutes. This is post 678, after all.

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Actually, A Writing Life had more than 678 posts. From day one it was a double effort, a website called A Writing Life with almost daily entries in a blog of the same name (causing some confusion) and a secondary blog on the same website called Serial which provided many of my fiction writings in serial form.

According to WordPress who handles my blog and keeps track of such things, I had 1280 posts when I restarted this blog.

During the hiatus, seven posts trickled through, so make that 1273 posts in less than five years. I know I was working my tail off during that period, but it still boggles my mind.

I made a lot of friends during that period, but after six years off most of them probably don’t even know I’m still alive.

I am.

I disappeared but I never went away. During those years I finally put the last period on a five book series of novels I have been working on since 1972 called The Menhir Series (fantasy). I completed two new novels The Cost of Empire (alternate universe) and Like Clockwork (time travel), and am fighting with another called Dreamsinger, a sideways sequel to Cyan which won’t quite come to heel yet.

You will be seeing all my works, old and new, in e-book format in the next few years. The Cost of Empire and Like Clockwork won’t be published for a while, so I won’t name their release dates. Too many possibilities lie between now and then.

688. Another Assassination

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Another Assassination

9/11 was last week. Most years I have at least acknowledged the event in this blog, but life moves forward. I had a blog in the can for last week, and was working on others that will appear around the New Year, when another event took over the news too late for me to have anything to say. I had a different post planned for this week, but it will have to wait.

On September 10 Charlie Kirk was assassinated. So much for leaving politics aside for a while.

The truth is, I had never heard of Kirk. He was deep in the MAGA movement and I am not. If I knew more about him, I am sure I would disagree with much of what he believes. I would probably agree with a lot as well.

If you are deep into MAGA, you don’t have to think a lot. You may — but you don’t have to.

If you are a committed liberal, you don’t have to think a lot. You may — but you don’t have to.

In either case, if you are far to the left or far to the right, you would never vote for the other guy, even if you didn’t like your own guy. I’ve been voting for over five decades, and I never felt like that — until Donald Trump came along.

When Biden came slowly to the podium in the infamous debate, my heart sank. He was clearly unfit for the office, and everybody knew it. But I would still have voted for Biden because Trump was also unfit, and evil besides.

Evil is a word that requires explanation, and I will do that in a moment.

Since I live in California, I already knew Kamila Harris from her debate on the way to winning a Senatorial seat. I was not impressed then, and that never changed. But I still voted for her because of Trump.

I called Trump evil. Evil is losing a Presidential election, lying about it, fomenting rebellion, and attempting to overthrow the Constitution. Evil is the attack on the Capitol. Evil is pardoning the guilty. Donald should have — and still should — stand trial for treason because of those actions.

But he should not be assassinated. And neither should Charlie Kirk.

The people spoke in 2016. They spoke again in 2020. They spoke yet again in 2024. The people decide.

So much for Donald Trump, in my opinion. Insurrection is unforgivable.

But that doesn’t make Charlie Kirk evil, and it doesn’t make any of Trump’s other followers evil. It doesn’t make them crazy. It doesn’t even make their ideas wrong.

I can understand why people follow Trump, both Republicans and Independents. He is persuasive, despite his lies. And he is just humorous enough to pass his lies off as exaggerations. He is also the first Republican president since Bush Two left office in January of 2009. That counts for a lot.

Extreme Republicans will vote for a Republican he doesn’t like before he will vote for a Democrat. Even though I am independent, I get that.

Extreme Democrats will vote for a Democrat he doesn’t like before he will vote for a Republican. I get that, too.

The people who voted for Trump — with the possible exception of very young voters — already had their opinions long before Trump came down the escalator. Most of them were already conservative. Most believed in limited government. Most of them believed that America was going to Hell.

(Actually, most people over 50 have always believed that the country is going to Hell. Liberals and conservatives just think it is true for diametrically opposite reasons.)

When Trump started selling MAGA hats, most of the people who wore them hadn’t been converted to anything. They were just following a man who seemed to be saying what they already believed.

There is no excuse for insurrection. Beyond that, if somebody is doing something you hate, then organize, protest, file a lawsuit, or scream at the top of your lungs.

But assassination? No. Never.

As for me, I am wringing my hands and grieving for America. Again.

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That is not all I have to say about assassination. Science fiction uses assassination as the starting point for a lot of stories, particularly ones in the alternate timelines sub-genre. It will be coming up again when we talk about that in a few weeks.

687. Irritated Independence

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WELL, I’M BACK.

This renewed version of A Writing Life will primarily be about supporting the publication of my novels, giving hints to young writers, and telling my story. But nothing in 2025 can avoid politics.

If I am also going to complain about the new iteration of Donald Trump — and I am — I have to declare my place in the argument for those who don’t remember me. Anyone who reads what I write deserves that much.

I am not a liberal, particularly. I am not a conservative, particularly. I listen to both sides and find both positions full of wisdom and stupidity. Most of the time, it’s about a fifty-fifty toss-up.

I was raised to be a proud and loud Republican. Like many other things my father taught me, it didn’t take.

I didn’t become a Democrat in reaction either. When I first registered to vote, I chose Independent. Or, as they call it here in California, “no preference”. I hate that term. I have a preference on pretty much everything. My preferences just don’t line up with everybody else’s.

I am fully in favor of a woman’t right to abortion. I am equally supportive of the gun rights spelled out in the second amendment. If I tried to join either party, neither one would want me.

On the liberal side, political correctness seems to have been pushed to the point that telling the plain, unvarnished truth is out of fashion. Not quite illegal, but not acceptable in polite company. I’ve had enough of that.

On the conservative side — actually I don’t know. Where have the conservatives gone? I can’t find them anywhere.

Trump isn’t a conservative. He isn’t a Republican, either. None of the conservative Republicans of my father’s generation would have accepted him. None of the Republican former Presidents support him, and the dead ones are turning in their graves.

And yet he won the last election. We’ll have to talk about that — even though we will talk mostly about science fiction and why it is so hard for writers to get published.

They say we live in unprecedented times. Maybe, but American politics has always been a liar’s game, so that overworked word unprecedented doesn’t quite fit. It’s just that Trump is just so damned convincing that it changes the whole situation.

But mostly this blog is going to continue to be about writing.

686. It Was Fifty Years Ago Today . . .

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It Was Fifty Years Ago Today . . .

If you are my age, music from Sergeant Pepper just popped into your head in honor of that title. But you probably aren’t my age — 77 — so it probably didn’t.

Today, I’m throwing myself a digital anniversary party. I’ve earned it.

Today is September 2, 2025. It’s also the day after Labor Day.

In 1975, on the day after Labor Day — also September second — I sat down at a home-made plywood desk, in the tiny back bedroom of a rented house, in front of an electric typewriter to try something new. I was going to find out if I could write a novel.

I didn’t doubt my intellegence, nor my skill with language. What I doubted was whether I could sit down day after day and think of enough interesting things to say to fill up a novel.

I was going to give it my best shot.

At the time, I was reconsidering my plans. I had always intended to be a scientist, initially in ecology. The problem was that I was a decade too early. No one had heard of ecology in 1966. Michigan State University had only two classes even close to the subject when I arrived and they were both in Fisheries and Wildlife, not Biology.

I switched to anthropology and spent five years pursuing that goal. I loved it as long as I was studying work done by other anthropologists, but the idea of field work (sitting in a mud hut recording local gossip, to be snarky about it) did not appeal.

I had never considered writing novels. I had started a dozen, just for fun, but inspiration always ran out about page ten. Now,  I had a little time on  my hands, so . . .

To my amazement, between September and Christmas, I turned out a novel. It was simple and short — a hunter gets lost in the wilderness and, after many adventures, finds his way back to civilization. I used the local Sierras which I knew well and kept my hero so lost that I never had to worry about absolute accuracy in describing his surroundings.

It was unpublishable, but that isn’t unusual for first novels. The important thing was that in four months I had neither stalled nor stumbled as I worked my way through 45,000 words, which was just long enough for a novel in 1975.

I could write a whole novel! Who knew? Certainly not me.

After Christmas I started doing the research and world building for a novel of science fiction. It was finished by the end of 1976, sold by 1978, and published in 1979. The title was Jandrax, from Ballantine under the Del Rey imprint.

Now I was a published writer. Who would have believed it. Certainly not me.

I’m still working at my trade after fifty years, so it’s happy anniversary to me.

I am also using this anniversary as the starting point for a rebirth of my blog A Writing Life. Keep coming back, mostly on Wednesdays — we still have a lot to talk about.