Looking Back

The World That Was and The World That Is

All of my professional life, from late 2004 until now, I’ve kept a blog. Blogspot, Wordpress, now Substack; that’s hundreds of articles — quite often about nothing — and tens of thousands of words. I celebrated my first reviews, chronicled my side-step into fantasy from historical fiction (and back again), dispensed a little advice, played a small role in introducing the New Edge of Sword and Sorcery to the world, reviewed some stuff, groused a fair bit, and indulged in a little self-promotion.

I’ve started blogs that never left the hangar, redesigned the blogs I have to fit new perspectives, and tried to maintain a constant internet presence (like they told us to do back in the early days of the internet-for-writers).

I go through lulls. I run out of things to write about. Or, the opposite is true and I’ll post for days on end. We seem to be in the end-stage of the Old Internet; it’s stopped being text based and has moved on to short videos, reels, animations, and the like. At the risk of sounding like a dinosaur, I don’t like it. I miss the long, thoughtful articles and the deep dives. I miss the reliance on text over the snap and sizzle of video. I have, as the saying goes, a face for radio. Another grizzled old dude who likes to reminisce about the Good Old Days: about Blockbuster Video on a Saturday night and mass-market paperbacks, about SASE’s and snail mail rejections. About the world before Amazon or TikTok, when the mall had a B. Dalton’s where you could grab a book for under five bucks and still have some left for Defender at the arcade and a snack.

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Join me for an ice-cold sarsaparilla?

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This new-fangled world? Yeah, I don’t like it. But, what do you do? It’s the world we have. The world that was shaped and created for us by forces beyond our control. All we can do is make the best of it, and keep making art. Keep making words. Because even though a book is now a mass of data that’s squirted into an e-reader, it’s still made from 100% human-created words (because the machines can only copy; they can’t create whole-cloth). Words that matter. Words that will join the human conversation with itself . . .

Twenty-two years I’ve been at this. Longer than some of you have been alive. And in that span of time, the only constant wisdom I’ve gleaned is this: words matter. Math might be the architecture of the Universe, but words lend it color, texture, depth, and meaning. If this world is getting you down, keep creating. Keep drawing or writing or singing or playing an instrument; keep going down research rabbit holes and sharing your findings with the rest of us. Keep being weird.