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Dear Reader:

I decided a full cleanup of my office and the filing system was a perfect task.

You know what that means don’t you?

I have paper everywhere. Some of the shredded files, stuffed in green garbage bags, have been taken to the compost pile and yet, countless tiny scraps are embedded in my office carpet.  I have created a mess of epic proportions and there is no end in sight as I write this note.

I have books, literally thousands of books. Some are old favorites and others collectibles that are well over 150 years old. The double-shelved overflow in my office goes downstairs to a room lined with bookshelves.

I  noted these things this morning while I was searching for my Dictionary of Imaginary Places (yes, there really is such a book) these downstair shelves were beginning to be double stacked as well.

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This is the long lead up to a decision I made this morning and why I really needed that dictionary.

A creators life is rather “interesting” now, and in the midst of the ongoing culture wars, I’m being proactive.

Even though I grew up in a Scot’s household (my mother was born in Aberdeen Scotland) and we spent a great deal of time with my Scottish grandparents – indeed lived with them for a while- I am proudly Canadian.

Being Canadian, and writing a book about a UK cultural icon leaves me open to charges of cultural appropriation. So as much as I grew up with these stories and love them, I’m being proactive.

The Merlin books have been unpublished at Amazon and stories on the website removed. I have completed several searches on my website to remove any links or references to these stories.

That is the long story about why I needed my “Dictionary of Imaginary Places”. 

What’s Next?

My next series of fantasy stories are going to be based somewhere where there are no appropriation issues – and this is yet to be decided. 

I have absolutely no idea how that’s going to turn out or what I’m going to write about. But yes, magic and magical beings are springing to life in my mind and I’ll share those with you when I get them all sorted out.

Thanks for reading folks – we do indeed live in in interesting times and I’m doing my best.

Take care out there and be kind to each other.

D

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 Fantasy Stories

My fantasy stories started right here – and I’ll be reuploading and resharing them after this site rebuild. It was only a marketing decision that moved them to their own website and readership.

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.

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?