Monthly Archives: December 2025

705. The Year That Never Ends

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The Year That Never Ends

Once upon a time, in tenth grade, they force-fed me Dickens in the form of Great Expectations. No one should do that to a teenager. It put me off of Dickens for thirty years.

Then I discovered A Christmas Carol, and Dickens rose to the top of my pantheon. I loved the book. I loved the other four Christmas books he wrote in subsequent years. I loved the movies made from the book.

I wanted to write the next great Christmas tale. (Don’t we all?) Instead I wrote a novel that was half Dickensian and half dystopian. It centered around the Clock That Ate Time and the Great Babbage, but it did take place in a variant Dickensian London.

The immediate call to write was both visual and visceral. It was a scene from the musical Scrooge, drawn from the book and repeated in most movie adaptations. Bob Cratchit’s children are waiting for him to finish work on Christmas Eve while staring through the window of a toy shop. And what a toy shop, filled to the rafters with all the kinds of toys that rich Victorian children might be given, but which were forever out of reach of poor children like Tiny Tim and his sister. There were even mechanical wonders like the clockwork strongman who suspends himself horizontally using only one hand.

Who was the man who ran the shop? He was nothing in the story that Dickens told, but I wanted to know. Who built the mechanical man? I wanted to know. What possessed the owner to set up a shop in the poorest part of London, where none of the children staring into his windows would ever have a chance to buy his wares? I wanted to know that, too.

Yes, writers are like that. They are likely to stare at a potted rose and wonder what kind of soil is in the pot.

The novel I wrote is called Like Clockwork. The toyshop is there. It is also called Like Clockwork, and it is overfilled with mechanical wonders all created by the man who runs it. His name is Snap. He is the man who built the Clock That Killed Time, although he has lost all memory of building it. He, and everyone else in his pocket London, will live forever — but at a cost. Every Midwinter Midnight, the citizens gather around the Great Clock to watch the year 1850 end — then begin again, invariant forever.

What follows is the Prolog to Like Clockwork, in the form of a note written by Snap’s wife, Pilar of the Sorrows, as the old year closes.

— << >> —

Prolog. (Or is it an epilog?)

“Tonight Snap has gone down to the Clock for Midwinter Midnight. In just a few minutes, the reversion will occur and I will forget writing this note. It will be midnight of January first, 1850. Not next year, nor last year, but the only year there is.

“It isn’t a bad year and it isn’t a particularly good year, but if it is to be my only year, I want more.”

Pilar laid down her pen and listened, straining to hear the song they always sang at midnight:

The year that ends, but never ends,

That ‘ere again unfolds,

We live that year forever and

We never shall grow old

It was probably her imagination. Surely voices could not be heard over such a distance. She rose to move closer to a window and as she did the note she had written ceased to be. All her memories of the past twelve months ceased to be. Her body sloughed off a year of age and it was January first of the last-this-next-only year.

Again.

— << >> —

You’ll get a chance to read Like Clockwork, but not for a while. There is strategy and pacing in how I intend to release my novels, and that grand plan calls for Like Clockwork to be published no sooner than 2028.

This isn’t intended as a mean tease; its just that I wanted to acknowledge Midwinter Midnight as, unlike Snap’s world, 2025 rolls over into 2026.

704. No Room in the Inn

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No Room in the Inn

[Don’t even expect even-handedness here.]

In English we call him Joseph, in Italian he is Giuseppe, in Basque he is Joseba, in Spanish he is just plain Jose.

In English we call her Mary, in Hebrew she is Miryam, in German she is Maria, and also in Spanish.

In English he is Jesus, in Cornish he is Jesu, in Italian he is Gesu, and in Spanish he is Jesus again, but pronounced Hey-sous.

We are going to walk with these three this Christmas season.

And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed. And all went, every one into his own city. And Jose also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem, to be taxed with Maria his espoused wife, being great with child.

Of course that could be written as Joseph and Mary, but surely they are the same couple, in any language. Jose was a carpenter. He built things out of wood to feed his family, and he paid his taxes like everybody else. All the world was to be taxed, and he had to go back to the place from which his people came.

Where would that be today? Perhaps a land with cities named Sacramento for the Holy Sacrament, or maybe Atascadero, Alameda, Camarillo, El Segundo, or Escondido. Perhaps cities like Fresno, La Mesa, Madera, or Mariposa show where his people once lived. Certainly they must have lived in cities like Los Angeles, Merced, Paso Robles, Salinas, or San Francisco. Even if his people no longer own the land, certainly the city named after him, San Jose, must once have belonged to his people.

And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

I think Luke shortened this a bit. Was there only one inn in Bethlehem? We can see the young couple, going from place to place, Jose leading, Maria on a burro since she cannot walk so late in her pregnancy. Everywhere they are turned away. Are all the sleeping places truly full? It may be. Or perhaps something about the two of them, perhaps the color of their skin, makes the innkeepers turn them away. Luke does not tell us.

I see migrant housing everywhere I go in California and I think, perhaps, a manger was preferable.

Now they are in a place where their people once lived, but to which they are no longer welcome. And here, their son is born.

Donald Trump would call Him an anchor baby. I wonder what He will call Trump, when they finally meet.

And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And, lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people.

To all people. ALL people. Imagine that!

703. No More Little House

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No More Little House

I wrote the story of Lupe after Donald Trump won in 2016, but before he took office. I presented it in fear of what might happen. I present it again knowing what is happening, now that he is back for a second term.

Ramon came in, stamping the snow from his feet, and shook the snow from his jacket before closing the door. The sun was low in the eastern sky behind him as Lupe moved up and hugged his leg. He smelled of sweat and manure and soured milk, but she didn’t mind. She had hugged him this way every morning for as long as she could remember, and he always smelled the same. For Lupe, the smell was as familiar and welcome as his cold fingers on the top of her head.

Every morning Ramon rose before the sun was up, and left the house. His daughter greeted him when he returned hours later, and saw him off again in the afternoon. She was usually asleep when he came home at night.

It is hard work milking cattle twice a day, and the pay is low. The cattle march in from the muddy lots to take their turns in the stalls, where fast moving men attach the milking machines. The cattle resent the process and the workers have to move quickly to avoid having their hands caught against he stanchions. It goes on for hours, in heat or cold, beginning every morning before daylight, and continuing again every evening until after dark.

Lupe stepped aside to make room for her mother. Today she seemed worried; her voice was unusually sharp as she asked, “What did he say?”

Ramon replied, “I didn’t tell him.”

I translate, of course. Every word was in Spanish.

“You got your money for the week?”

Lupe’s father nodded, “I told him I needed it today, to buy things for Christmas. I was afraid to tell him the truth. He is a good man, but it seemed best that he should not know.”

Lupe’s sister came out of the single bedroom with a cardboard box in her arms, tied up with twine. Lupe looked up with interest. It was not wrapped in paper, but any box is interesting so close to Christmas. Carmella put the box down on the floor and returned a moment later with blankets and bedding, also rolled up and also tied up with twine. Lupe asked what she was doing, but Carmella ignored her.

Her father carried the box and roll of bedding outside. Her mother came out of kitchen with a box of food, and that began a procession of boxes, coming from various parts of the house and out to the car. Lupe’s mother and sister had gathered up their possessions during the pre-dawn, while Lupe slept.

Now Lupe dragged at her mothers leg asking questions, but she was ignored until Carmella pulled her aside and said, “We are going away.”

“Where?”

“I wish I knew Lupita. I wish I knew.”

“But why?”

“It’s only a month until he becomes President. Everyone here knows who we are. We have to go away, somewhere where people don’t know us.”

“But why? I was born here. This is home.”

“So was I, Lupe, but mother and father were not.”

When they pulled out an hour later, Lupe stared back at the little house where she had spent her whole, short life, until it disappeared around a bend. Then she looked out the windshield, past her mother and father’s silent heads. It was a long road, wet with melted snow. Her father would not leave the house tonight before the sun went down and go to the cows. There would be no more money, no more warmth, no more little house. It would be again as it had been, before the job at the cows, before she was born. Lupe knew what that was like from hearing her parents talk. Now it would be like that again.

— << >> —

Is Lupe real? She was born from the hundreds of little Mexican-American girls I taught over twenty-seven years. How many were undocumented? I never knew. I never asked. I didn’t need to know.

Is she real? She is as real as heartache. She is as real as fear. She is as real as dislocation, cold, hunger, and injustice.

702. Reaching Cyan

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Reaching Cyan

The year was 2086, the place, half way to Procyon. Stephan Andrax wrote in the log of the Starship Darwin . . .

There are two chronometers on the bulkhead. One forges forward at the speed of Everyday, ticking off seconds and minutes and hours and days that make sense to the body and soul. The other races. Seconds flitter by. A new day is born every three hours and twenty-two minutes. Einstein told us this would happen, a century and a half ago; when an object approaches the speed of light, time slows down.

Beside the chronometers is a viewport and beyond it are Dopplered stars which sweep through my field of vision as the ship spins. We are nearly six years into our journey. Halfway through our journey. Yet, for me, only a year and a half have passed.

And through all the years and hours of our journey, the smaller, fleeter chronometer will rush ahead at Earthtime while our time is slowed. All those I knew and loved, except my companions here on the Darwin, are aging seven times faster than I am. When we return, my agemates could be my parents, and my parents will be dead.

The mind perceives what the heart cannot comprehend.

— << >> —

Obviously, one of the joys of writing near-future extra-solar exploration is dealing with the delicious complexities that come from working in a relativistic universe. Thank you Albert Einstein.

The novel Cyan opens with the words of Stephan Andrax, but he will not be the main character. He is the great great (I never figured out how many greats) grandfather of Jan Andrax, who gave his name to the novel Jandrax. I wanted an obvious connection between that novel and its sequel (prequel?), but I kept Stephan mostly in the background by making him the captain of the Darwin.

Imagine that you are planning a ten person expedition to an unknown extra-solar planet. Assume a giant starship, designed for travel only in space, and a landing craft to carry the explorers down to the surface. That seems like how things would actually be arranged. What would happen if all the explorers were killed while going about their business? What if the landing craft were damaged beyond repair leaving everyone marooned on-planet?

Contingencies are what planning is all about. If everyone on the ground were killed or stranded, the knowledge obtained up to that point would still need to be transported back to Earth, so the planners of the Procyon expedition arranged to always have one crew member on board the Darwin. They selected an astrophysicist who would be best positioned to study Procyon’s system of planets by staying in orbit, and made him Captain. He would stay with the ship, just like one astronaut stayed in the CSM while two others descended to the surface of the moon in the Apollo program. That made Stephan important but mostly off camera, which is just what I wanted.

The groundside leader was the character I chose be our eyes for most of the action. Stephan Andrax was Captain in space; Keir Delacroix was “captain” on the ground.

Everyone except Keir had one or more Ph. D.s and was at the top of his or her field. Keir was also highly intelligent, perhaps at the next level down, but his skills came from a life spent in the outback of Australia. He was a rarity on overcrowded Earth, a man who had spent his time in one of the few places that was still wild. Each other crew member had a scientific specialty to bring to the study of Cyan. Keir was there to keep them all alive.

I chose the name Keir Delacroix in tribute to the actor Keir Dullea who argued with the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Here is the list of the Darwin‘s crew, alphabetically, with their specialties and their alternate fields of knowledge.

Stephan Andrax    captain (spaceside) – astrophysicist
Debra Bruner        microbiologist – astronomer – medic
Petra Crowley       geologist – soils scientist
Keir Delacroix       groundside crew leader – generalist
Viki Johanssen      anthropologist – paleontologist
Gus Leinhoff         zoologist – biochemist – medic
Leia Polanyi          paleontologist – geologist
Ramananda Rao  meteorologist – cartographer – geologist
Tasmeen Rao       first officer (spaceside) – pilot (starship and landing craft) –  engineer
Uke Tomiki           botanist – biochemist – medic

— << >> —

I have a lot of things to do in this rejuvenated version of A Writing Life, largely having to do with upcoming releases, but I won’t forget Cyan. I will return to talk about how it came to be, perhaps once a month. You can get a jump on all that by typing Syd Logsdon Cyan into Amazon and reading it now.

next week there will be Christmas posts on Tuesday and Thursday

701. Approaching Cyan

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Approaching Cyan

Cyan is the name of a novel and the name of a planet.

I’ve been writing science fiction for fifty years, but I’ve been reading it even longer. When I began, NASA didn’t exist and the word astronaut hadn’t been coined. I was ten years old.

In the science fiction novels that filled my childhood, I rode on a thousand spaceships or starships to explore a thousand planets, but there was one novel I could never find. I never read of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of a planet — all the phases of what would actually occur — under one cover.

I really wanted to read that book. Eventually, I had to write it myself.

The kind of science fiction I prefer — and write — is based on reality, humanity, and scientific accuracy. The key question I continually ask myself is, what is likely to actually happen when the day comes. And the day that interests me most is something past tomorrow, but not too far past.

I can imagine 2050, but it really doesn’t interest me. It will look too much like today. I prefer to look forward a hundred years or so.

The novel Cyan opens in 2086, which seems a contradiction to what I just said, but I began writing it about 1980. It just took a long time to complete.

I also had to keep changing the year dates on what I was writing. Real world manned space exploration had slowed to a crawl. Who could have predicted in 1972 when the last astronaut left the moon, that fifty-three years later no more humans would have gone beyond low Earth orbit? Certainly no science fiction writer would choose to imagine that.

So what planet would I want to colonize? Mars? Of course not. Half the fun of science fiction is world building, and Mars is far too well known to be of interest. It would have to be a planet around another star, and if it was to be colonized in the next hundred years or so, it would have to be nearby, at least in stellar terms.

Actually, any extra-solar colonization in the next hundred years requires a major stretch of the imagination, but science fiction writers are in the imagination business.

So what are out near neighbors in the galaxy? Here is a list:

Sol, our sun, as a starting place.

Alpha Centauri, about 4.3 light years away.

Sirius, about 8.6 light years away.

Epsilon Eridani, about 10.5 light years away.

Procyon, about 11.4 light years away.

Epsilon Indi, about 11.8 light years away.

Tau Ceti, also about 11.8 light years away, in another direction.

Other than specks and oddballs, that is the full list of star systems within five parsecs of us. I will add two more, just beyond five parsecs, because they were part of Gordon Dickson’s writings in his Dorsai novels. You’ve read them, right?

Formalhaut, about 16.6 light years away.

Altair, about 16.7 light years away.

— << >> —

Click here (or type in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars ) for a Wikipedia article that will list 56 of the nearest stars, including some very small ones, and tell you more than you ever wanted to know about them.

— << >> —

Jandrax, my first published novel, was a lost colony story. The FTL ship Lydia malfunctioned during a jump, stranding colonists and crew so far out that they would never return.

The novel Cyan would be a prequel, taking  place hundreds of years earlier in the same imagined universe. It was intended from the first to be one of a group of novels, so I wasn’t just choosing a star and planet for a single story, but deciding what to do with the whole nearby neighborhood.

It seemed during my youth that every author of a novel about early extra-solar exploration landed on Alpha Centauri. I didn’t want that, so I made the planets of that star system barely habitable. Alpha Centauri lives in the backstory, but I don’t plan a novel about it.

Sirius, on the other hand, is 23 times as luminous as the sun. It struck me as a perfect place to put a colony of humans who were quite satisfied to live in space habitats, with no desire to take up planetary life. That became the setting for Dreamsinger, a novel which I have been sparring with for several years now. I offer no predictions about when it will be completed.

As the novel Cyan opens, limited colonization of the planet Cinder, around Alpha Centauri B, is underway. Explorers have not yet returned from Sirius. When they do, half way through Cyan, they will tell of a system unfit for colonization. Later, a group of dissidents will prove them wrong, leading to Dreamsinger.

There are three starships waiting to leave Earth. One is the Darwin, scheduled for Procyon and the as yet unknown planet Cyan. The other two will head out to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti where they find prime, Earth-like planets.

Writing a story about the exploration and colonization of a prime planet would be a dead end for me. Something not related to the actual colonization would be needed to jazz up the story, and that was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Cyan, on the other had, had plenty of challenges on its own. It was — and was designed to be — a place to tell a story about how exploration and colonization might actually take place.

I’ll tell you more about Cyan next week, but if you don’t feel like waiting, just go to Amazon and type in Syd Logsdon Cyan and you can buy the novel today, as an ebook or as print on demand.

more about Cyan next week

700. Double Lives

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Double Lives

By 1984, I had published and perished (see the post from November 12th), but I wasn’t about to give up writing. Nevertheless, things were getting tight and something had to change.

I hadn’t left academia because I hated it. I just couldn’t find my place. I missed out on the popularity of ecological studies by just a few years, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I had wanted to study the beautiful symmetry of animal interactions in the wild, but today ecologists study how fast Earth is going down the toilet.

There was one field I had an interest in, but had never studied, and that was History. I was about to change that, for three reasons.

First, I was writing every day, and making progress slowly, but it wasn’t making me any money.

Second, I was able to make a full day’s progress in a few hours. At that point, the well was dry. I had tried to push on past my limits, and that didn’t work. If I forced twice as many pages as came naturally in a day, the next day I was empty. I could write nothing until the well of imagination refilled.

Third, I really missed college. I had always planned on a Ph. D. and I felt empty sitting alone in a room with a typewriter.

And I still had most of my GI Bill.

The original GI Bill was generous. I had used some of it getting my first masters at University of Chicago, but if I worked things right, there was enough left to get a second MA in History. There was a school in easy driving distance, California State College, Stanislaus. A few years later it became California State University, Stanislaus. I was a California resident, so tuition was low. If I took just enough classes to be a full time student, it would take longer to get my new degree, but that was part of the plan. There would be enough GI Bill money left over after books and tuition to fill in some of the blanks in my personal economy, and I could work all day again — half on novels, half on getting my History degree.

The plan worked for several years. I had something new for my brain to chew on in those dead half days when my novel writing had run dry, yet I was still able to make progress on my novels. I wrote fiction all but the few months near the end when I was writing my thesis.

That thesis would be The Crisis in American Shipping and Shipbuilding, 1862 – 1914. Yes, I started out as a dry land Oklahoma boy, but my grandfather in Florida was in the Coast Guard auxiliary. From him I inherited a fascination with all things maritime.

Plan B worked for about three years, and now I had a second MA. But to twist the words of the old country song, even though I wasn’t completely broke, I was still badly bent.

Plan C was more permanent.

I had worked as a substitute teacher and found I really liked middle school kids. No one else seemed to, so there were plenty of jobs available. I went back to school again at the University of the Pacific — my fourth college — for a summer session, took a one year internship, and worked my way into teaching by the back door.

For a while, there was no more writing, but there was money. Teachers don’t make much, but writers often make nothing, so my salary seemed like a fortune.

Most of my effort in the first few years went to learning my trade. You see, what they teach you in Biology is useful, what they teach you in Anthropology will broaden your mind, what they teach you in Social Science is enlightening, what they teach you in History is wonderful. I know. I’ve been through all of them.

What they teach you in teachers school is pure BS, so the first thing I had to learn was how to teach. Fortunately there were plenty of people to help me, experienced teachers who had learned it just like I was, in the classroom.

There was also a lot of delayed life to be lived. Being a writer is a lot like being a monk, and the pay is a lot like being unemployed. When I was a writer, I couldn’t afford a computer. Now that I wasn’t a writer, I could.

After a few years, I was writing again, now part time. My wife and I finally made it to Europe, and that brought about the novel Raven’s Run. Then I wrote a novel about teaching called Symphony in a Minor Key. The Menhir Series kept limping along, slowly growing, book by book. Before it was completely finished, I wrote a sequel in the same world with a different main character called Who Once Were Kin.

I finally solved the conundrum of Cyan, and the second half became a pleasure to write. When Cyan was finished, it sold to EDGE of Canada.

In support of its release, I started this blog.

More about that next Wednesday.