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Dear Reader:

There’s nothing like a global pandemic to focus your mind on the important stuff. And there’s nothing like being in your 70’s with a target on your back and a generally-bad-prognosis if you get sick to stick an exclamation mark on that thought.

I decided to blazes with it all. And I retired.

The first thing a writer acknowledges is that he won’t really retire to golf. He’ll simply write when he fells like it and not to deadline.

A retired writer doesn’t stop writing. Oh no – writers seldom stop.

But my so-called retirement frees me to write whatever strikes my fancy without regard for genre or audience.

On Merlin And Other Fantasy Stories

The Merlin stories started right here and it was only a marketing decision that moved them to their own website and readership.

I’ll continue to write about Merlin and other fantasy topics here.

See the new menu heading “Fantasy.”

But Yes, There Will Be Other Darker Stories

Let me suggest you pick the stories you want to read and ignore the rest. I’ll do my best to separate them out.

It’s a cloudy, stormy day out my office window today and that matches the world’s political situation.

But in my office, at this moment on my word processor, there’s a ray of sunshine and energy I haven’t felt in a very long time.

Being retired means I can write what I want. And that’s the new adventure here – sharing the words that work for me right now. There will be stories of the light and the dark and who knows what shade between.

I hope you’ll stick around to see what happens next. Subscribe here

A Quick Final Note

The website is back to “under construction” as I move stories and links around to reorganize everything as well as add fantasy stories.

Slowly, my friends, slowly it will all take shape in a story teller’s time-frame.

Once upon a time…

I posted this on Facebook and I do believe it says everything I need to say at this time.

Sunny, cold mornings in the midst of summer don’t stir memories as do the fires of fall or the stirrings of early spring.  Fall days bring reminders of chores to be done, of days lost to staring at computer screens and trying to make some sense of the world. The spring days brings a renewed sense of hope and fresh air to my world.

I sit trying to understand a world where the old ways have begun to accelerate their demise – cracked in the world wars of the last century, and the incessant smaller conflicts. Chunks of our humanity have been removed in the technology explosion of the late century, the chip-driven, world we live in is far removed from those days of slow Sundays and pleasant parks.

It is a walled world; a world of fear on one side with immense but unusable power and the pounding of the mass outside the gates looking on.  Gates don’t last forever, particularly electronic ones, and this one is crumbling under the pressure.  There is a rush to get in on the final days of the empire – to get enough to protect oneself and family and to grab a taste of the good life while it still exists in all its excessive glory.

I don’t remember mornings like this from my childhood. I was blessed in that my childhood was gloriously normal, spent doing childhood things like building tree houses and fording swamps on the way to conquest and adventure.

It’s all a blur of things that children find important – that the neighbor farmer shot a crow every year and hung the carcass in one of the fruit trees to keep the crows away from the corn.  That his wife was up every morning at sunrise to weed the endless rows of vegetables by hand – one elbow on her knee supporting herself as she bent over pulling weed after weed from the spotless fields of plants.  Of carrying water from their well to our house before my dad dug our well by hand. Of my brother falling, fracturing his skull but living for another 30 years and being so proud of his bandage-hat. The horseshoe scar was a forever-reminder of that adventure.

I remember hot days beside the swimming pool playground (it cost a quarter to go swimming – big money in those days) and we’d sometimes swim in the pool and sometimes swim in the creek beside it.  The creek had currents to float on (until you hit the shallows and bumped painfully across the rocks) and the pool was chlorine crystal-clear to hurt your eyes.

I remember those days and marvel at the end of them; lost in the progress of the chip. And I mourn that lost innocence.

But the wonder of these days entrances me.

• How fast we all move.
• How far our horizons could be.
• What separations we’ve created in our lives and societies.

If the printing press brought on a hundred years of civil unrest in politics, religion and society, how long will this computer impact last?

And more to the point, who will survive afterwards? And what will this world look like?

Even more to the point, what are you doing to make it more human?

When you need to write a big story, you need a good storyboard

It seems as if it’s been quite a while since I posted here. I’ve been working in several other genres and getting some projects launched and cleaned up.

But there’s this story that’s been gnawing away at my mind, never quite coming together and never quite right, but always there. And then, this weekend amidst a rare May snowstorm, the idea crystallized. And now I know what I want to write. (It may have been one of the few really good things to come out of a May snowstorm.)

I started the storyboard (below) this weekend to bring the story to the visual arena and pin down some of the key points.

The storyboard is a chunk of blue, rigid foam house insulation I screwed to the wall. The pink note-card at the top says, “Take the big steps!” as a warning to be big and bold and make the story the same way.

In the middle, the blue cards have characters and suggestions for plot.

The small single blue card at the bottom is the story ending. And yes, you write the end at the beginning so you know where your story has to end up.

I rather like this ending – it’s been one of the most consistent parts of the story since the story introduced itself to me. It also promises more stories on this theme.

As soon as I get a bit further along, I’ll introduce you to a few of the story line and characters (maybe in a new bit of software I’m messing about with that might be perfect for this purpose.)

It seems I’ve been missing in action almost forever with this site and words in my word processor. Let’s just say it’s been a hectic personal summer with losing my mother – and the resulting professional wasteland of writing and sorting out stories – amidst all the stuff that accompanies a death (mostly emotions but toss in the requisite paperwork etc as well.) I’m sure many of you have experienced it so it won’t come as a surprise.

One of the other problems is summed up nicely in a “bit of education can be a dangerous thing.” 🙂 I took some courses, did a ton of reading about the future and predicting it, and then sat back and did the unexpected. I actually put some of the things I’d learned into practice. (Who knew that’s what you were supposed to do with education? Right!)

That produced some interesting story ideas and project notes.

Links Articles

I’ve been totally remiss in not sharing some of the articles I find interesting across the Net. I’ve made a note to myself to do that in the future so (hopefully) you’ll see those coming semi-regularly.

New Books?

Well, yes and no.

The yes part is I’m maintaining and developing a file of book and series ideas so it’s possible I’ll launch into one of those in the near future. (The summer is mostly over and my big writing and productivity season is almost here.)

Hey – I’m of an age where my contemporaries are all out on the golf course so if I slow down and take some time – I don’t feel at all guilty about it.

The no part is because I’m in the middle of a rather large writing project in another genre that’s taking up an incredible amount of time and learning. I’m several hundred thousand words into that one with no end in sight.

All The News That’s Fit To Print

And that’s the honest truth folks.

I’m involved deeply in another writing project and I’m learning a ton of stuff about writing large series. This will/should make it easier to write something interesting here in another few months.

So now you know what’s happening and why you haven’t heard from me here.

Thanks for reading.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay