Welcome back, folks.
It’s been a few weeks. I’m quite excited by having a book out on Kindle, though I know it’s the long game here getting people to find and look for Man From The East. I can’t tell you why I write detective novels set in a multiverse of time-travelers, other than I enjoy writing them. My ideas come to me from the place where all ideas come from; maybe my subconscious, along with a lifetime spent reading good science fiction and playing role-playing games.
Man From The East as a concept came from an image I had in my head, of a man and a Khaid in a jungle looking through the trees at a Meso-American temple with Olmec stone heads dotting the clearing before it. It took a while to wrap that around what essentially became a detective story, as well as developing the protagonist’s character in an early part of his career as an Agent of the Hypertemporal Security Agency.
I don’t have a ‘process’ for how I write, other than just writing. I don’t have to operate on a deadline, so it progresses in fits and starts, usually long periods of research and just working on other stuff–and attending to other aspects of my life–followed by shorter periods where I might lay down ten thousand words in a week. There are notes, and I spend time consulting and adding to them as I come up with new concepts for the HSA Universe. Some of those Notes are featured on the website.
Most of my writing is novella to novel length fiction; it took me a long time to ‘learn’ how to write readable short stories. Some of those short stories might end up on this website for people to read free, though I’m now concentrating on getting novellas and novels out on Kindle with the able assistance of my free-lance editrix and all-around facilitator, Suzanne.
I need to pause here to give thanks to all of those folks who have read my stuff over the years (sometimes under silent protest; ‘here, read this, tell me what you think!’) or who just helped me bounce ideas and scenes around until they made sense for what I was trying to add to a story. I won’t mention their names here without their permission, but they all deserve a heartfelt ‘Thanks, guys!’
In closing, I’d like to draw attention to the fact that we all live here in the best time and circumstances the human species has ever had thus far. There are still horrible iniquities, and privation, and injustices. I am neither blind nor ignorant of them. Nevertheless, despite dire and accurate warnings, as a whole we all live at the current pinnacle our species has reached–so far–and though I write about characters who live with technology we can only merely dream about, their worlds are not as free as ours is. It is up to us, wherever we are, to strive.
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