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.