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Harris

It has now been a couple of weeks. We were on vacation and pointedly ignored newscasts, so when we returned on that Sunday it was to the announcement (just made; I suppose they were waiting for us) that President Biden is stepping aside and passing the torch.

Politics as usual was never much of a thing, only to those who pay too little attention to what actually goes on and respond only to the surface, but this is one for the history books. Biden won all his primaries, so everyone assumed it was a done deal (forgetting of course that primaries and caucuses are not part of the Constitution, were in fact Party devices that were not formally adopted at a national level until after the 1968 election season, and then only as an attempt to avoid the kind of messy floor fights that were hallmarks at the national conventions. Even afterward, it was assumed that a Dark Horse might emerge at the regular convention. Point being, none of this was built into the system originally and those feeling that something fundamental has been overturned are not as informed as they might believe.)

What Biden did, then, is in no way illegitimate, just startling, but hey, we could use a little shock just now. 

I did not feel Biden had cause to do this. A poor performance at the debate was not indicative of his ability to govern. He was governing, he continued to do so, ably. But we are very much wedded to Performance Politics—not in how well the office might be managed but in how our representatives look while doing their jobs. Poor appearance has become deadly, regardless of actual ability, a factor in our politics which I abhor. We have for too long elected politicians based not on their ability to run an office but on how well they campaign, and while raw skill may have a lot to do with both, they are not the same skillset. But Americans have always responded to glorious bullshit more readily than actual ability, a trait that has only become worse.

That said, it was becoming clear that Biden has lost the confidence of many in the Party, and regardless of actual accomplishments and ability, he can’t do his job with that kind of disaffection. It would get overly complicated and ugly and he risked damaging the very thing he has worked to build, namely the kind of selfless dedication to service that ought to be the hallmark of our politicians. This is something his opponent seems constitutionally incapable of understanding. 

So he bit the bullet, as it were, and did what he thought best for the country. However one may feel about the circumstances that put him in this position, his decision cannot be criticized but only applauded. Whatever the outcome, he did this for the good of the country.

Barring any kind of blindsiding floor fight at the convention, Kamala Harris is our nominee. She has been pulling support from all quarters and for the moment looks to be a lock. It seems that people were waiting for someone to vote for, not just someone in opposition to the other guy. With only a few months left in the campaign season, this has left the GOP scrambling. They honestly seem not to have considered her a threat. That’s bad planning, but what do you expect? Harris is a woman, nonwhite, something of a progressive, three factors the GOP have spent a lot of time dismissing as irrelevant. How could a progressive black woman possibly beat the Great White Hope?

Stay tuned.

It doesn’t matter to me, I intended to vote in opposition to Trump no matter what. For me this is simple. We have a candidate who states clearly his intentions to do away with our democratic system. Only by the most contorted of mental gymnastics can one take him as being anything other than a wanna-be dictator. The kool-aid was spiked with everclear and perhaps some psilocybin for those who think he is in any way going to preserve their rights under the Constitution. It may be that he could face a Congress arrayed in opposition, but why should we have to go through that kind of a fight when we have a sane alternative? 

But I confess to being just a bit more hopeful than before. I like Joe Biden, I appreciate what he has done, what he tried to do, and I wholeheartedly approve the general direction he was taking the country. The other guy’s constant assertion that Biden has destroyed or is destroying the country flies in the face of dozens of facts and metrics that show otherwise. But Trump is fully immersed in Appearance Politics and substantive change doesn’t play well on his stage. He’s a jingoist and all he sees is how he looks on the Jumbotrons. Making America great for him is entirely a matter of what can be covered up beneath a veneer of bombast. If the crowd is cheering, he’s been successful.

But then they all go home and none of the problems that nibble at their lives like ducks have been fixed. Blaming it on the Democrats only goes so far, especially when a Democrat has actually overseen real solutions to many of those problems.

Nothing happens in this country at the national level quickly, but a large segment of the electorate seems to think it should. Solutions to problems that took 50 years to create will not be solved in a year or two. But we have no patience, it seems. Especially when the lives too many take for granted feed into the problems. The great problem of the American voter has always been a demand to Fix It But Don’t Change Anything.

Harris comes from a generation that may well believe otherwise. Regardless, this is what handing it off to a new generation looks like.

Back in 2015, Harris was one of those contending for the nomination I rather liked. Of course, Clinton was anointed. Now it’s Harris’s turn.

Let me be clear: I pretty much reject nearly everything the Republican Party has come to represent. You cannot have their program unless you’re willing to strip rights and privileges from certain people. Too many of their number seem to think that granting equal rights to those they have traditionally disdained means losing those very rights for themselves. They want to feel in charge, not equal. They feel, perhaps, that the largesse of our nation should be theirs to dispense as they see fit, not share as a matter of basic human dignity. The people the current GOP seems to speak for are people who want to hurt my friends.

We will not see a decent future in the hands of racial and political elitists who are afraid of anyone who does not resemble them.

Lastly, we need to pay attention to the down-ticket races. The only way substantive change can happen is if we purge the statists. In my own state, we have two senators neither of whom speak for me. (Hawley has made something of a name recently trying to gain compensation for victims of nuclear waste left over from WWII. In this he’s positioning himself as a champion of the people. I agree, compensation needs to be made, but a broader look at Hawley shows that, in my opinion, the chief benefit for him in this position is that it is another way to make the federal government look bad, and these folks are all about that, because they wish to limit the broader protections that attend to federal laws. Nothing else he supports is consistent with any kind of “man of the people” mantle.)

So again, I urge you: vote. In this election, sitting it out is, to my mind, a betrayal. 

We’re working to keep Sauron out of the White House. We can debate the merits of who actually tossed the ring into the fire afterward.

Art

Louisville

Many years ago, Donna went to Louisville, Kentucky, on a business trip. The company she worked for sponsored a workshop and put them all up in the Brown and she raved about it ever since. We finally got to go together last weekend, in company with friends, and my first reaction is—we need another week.

The Brown Hotel is one of those landmarks that has been kept up to snuff and is redolent with the charm of a past that clings here and there and is easy to miss unless you’re looking. We stayed three nights. We will do this again.

The excuse (as if one is needed) was a distillery tour, the Woodford Distillery, which is in Versailles, near Frankfort. I had not realized that bourbon can only be called bourbon if it comes from Kentucky. Like champagne, it is a regional hallmark. We have long since discovered Woodford and have yet to taste anything better. Comparable, sure.

The place has been there since 1812 and the original buildings are still there and in use. Beth, our guide, gave a great lecture while taking us through the facilities. Old stone, the odor of baking bread, a heady wheat and corn aroma, and in some ways the quiet of a church.

It has only been Woodford since 1996, but the continuity has apparently never been broken. (Not sure what they did during Prohibition, but whatever, lots of old distilleries survived somehow.) At the end of the tour we of course spent far too much on the product, bringing home some specialty bottles which we intend to savor carefully.

The grounds as well are beautiful. I could spend a week there photographing. Picturesque is both accurate and a cliché. The two things that hold the imagination of folks there seem to be bourbon and horses.

After the tour, we drove into Frankfort. Frankfort, along with being the state capitol, is also the public art capitol of Kentucky. Lots of murals and street sculpture. We didn’t have the time to really go through it. (One thing, the only Frank Lloyd Wright house in Kentucky is in Frankfort, but it is privately owned and not open for tours. Still, it would have been cool to see it.)

We returned to Louisville and later had dinner at one of the local “famous” watering holes, Jack Fry’s Bar & Grill. Fry was a boxer and opened the restaurant and it is one those “everyone has eaten here” kind of places. The food was excellent, but it was too loud to really carry on  any kind of conversation. (I had lamb chops, Donna has a pork chop.)

We Ubered. I don’t usually, but it was not my choice. Watching Maia navigate the rides prompts me to rethink my attitude.

A lot of upgrading seems to be going on. The confluence of neglect and revitalization is everywhere, and walking down to the river into the museum and bourbon crawl district was a treat.

We toured the Frazier History Museum. Again, a great deal of display space allocated to bourbon, but there’s a lot of early Republic history there. George Rogers Clarke has a statue overlooking the Ohio, and the Frazier had an elaborate Lewis & Clarke section.

On Saturday we walked around a lot, which only made it obvious, despite the pleasure, that we didn’t have enough time. So clearly a return trip is in the future.

We lucked out with the weather. Mid-80s most of the time and very cool evenings. We ended with dinner at a place called Proof (you can interpret that as you will) which turned out to be attached to a 21C Museum Hotel. So after dinner, we toured their current art show.

All in all, as near perfect a long weekend as could be had.  I’ll add a few more photographs below

 

 

 

 

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Root Division

In all the debate and analysis and angst over what those behind Project 2025 are doing and why, it is easy to get lost in the bog of details and motivations. A better question is why do so many people who would suffer under these proposals support them. When you look at the list of things they want to end, it boggles the mind that anyone who has to work for a living, who is dependent on a weekly paycheck, many whose expenses outstrip their income, and those who otherwise would wish to give their children an edge for the future would want any of this.

Let me step back from the details and indulge a little speculation about the deep motivations behind this otherwise bizarre conflation of working class reality and the dreams of oligarchs. What underlies the desire to do this much to destroy entire sets of dreams and undermine the ability of so many people to have something even close to a stable life?

Go back several decades. Look at the 1950s and 1960s, at the almost complete overhaul of social relations. Everything, from the civil rights movement to the counterculture to the sexual revolution to all the spin-off movements all demanding a seat at the table, all shared one basic interest in common. One could reasonably show that all of those movements—those revolutions—were about one thing: freedom of association.

Class boundaries, ethnic boundaries, gender boundaries, educational boundaries—the order of the established norms were all challenged and largely overturned. The common thread was people refusing to be kept in “their place” anymore. All the equal access challenges, the educational reforms, the equal employment opportunities, all of them—freedom of association. For a time, the assumed walls keeping groups of people apart became porous to a degree they had never been before.

Freedom of association. When you think about it, the lack of such freedom underpins the basis of all segregation sentiment. People refusing to have anything to do with people they consider “not my tribe.” People, frankly, frightened of having to interact with strangers.

The entire conservative movement since the Sixties has been a desire to put those barriers back in place, to keep all the disparate groups separated, to somehow prevent the possibility of their children being exposed to those they consider undesirables or bad influences or simply foreign. All the programs that are targeted in Project 2025 are designed to bridge those barriers. Programs that provide a basis and, in some cases, the means to enable people to cross boundaries.

All this upheaval over immigration is nothing more than the same fear of mingling that kept people segregated before the civil rights reforms. People in one corner looking with fear at people in the other and saying “We don’t want to have anything to do with them!” Panicked at the thought of their kids attending school with kids from the “wrong side of town.” The advent of private schools to make sure no mixing happened.

The thing is, such group isolation results in a loss of resources for many groups. It has a physical cost. But it starts there, with an unadmitted (or not) desperation to Keep Them Out.

This is neurotic. 

But this is what has to be recognized and addressed if there is to be any hope of this ever being healed. So many people feel threatened by having to be in the same room as people they don’t know, don’t like, don’t trust, in fact hate because they’re different.

That’s the basis of the economic divide. It drives the cost of higher education, I have no doubt. It informs the absurdities of policy positions which admit to no solution because any solution will not give them what they want, which is to shut those people (whoever they are) out.

Fear.

If civilization is to be saved, if we are to go into a brighter future, we have to end the arbitrary assignation of people into enclaves designed to keep them apart. This is not airy idealism, this is survival. We’re going to destroy ourselves to enable a small group of people to keep themselves apart from those they see as inferior. 

Look at this time and these issues. That is the basis for so much insoluble polarization. But we don’t talk about it, not that way, not so nakedly. Every divisive issue we have, I believe, has its roots in that marrow-deep fear of having to cross the boundary and know about people we think will harm us.

One party right now is doing everything it can to establish the old ghettoes. The other needs to work to end them, but it seems not to be able to articulate it clearly enough. Well, for what it’s worth, there it is.

Keep this is mind when you listen to the rhetoric and good luck.

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Take A Breath

The Debate. Capital D. Everyone is undergoing meltdowns about it. Too many people are reacting as if this is the death knell of, well, Everything.

Chill. Firstly, read the transcripts. Right here. Then, for one interpretation, here’s an analysis from The Hill.  And just to round out some of this, here’s some Fact Checking from AP.

(Back in the 1960 presidential campaign—some of you may remember this—Nixon and Kennedy had a debate. At that time, a large segment of the population got most of their information from the radio, but this was the dawn of television, so the debate was both broadcast and televised. Those who listened on the radio thought Nixon had won the debate. Those who watched thought Kennedy had. Style over substance? Despite what Nixon later proved to be, the fact was they were not so terribly far apart on issues, so this was a question of nuance and detail. This time, thought, nuance has nothing to do with it, but people who read will likely have a better grasp of what happened than those who watched.)

Now, one thing to keep in mind: the people who are enthusiastic about a Trump second term care virtually nothing about facts. It has been demonstrated for several years now that Trump holds the record for lies in office of any president and his supporters do not care. Trying to impact his campaign by pointing this out has had very little success because his support has nothing to do with What Is but rather What Is Desired. Going toe-to-toe with one over what the facts are gains virtually nothing because that is not the important thing to them.

Which is to say that we have a situation in which the problem is not so much with the head guy but with the foot soldiers. Our fellow citizens.

As for the rest of us, we should just take a breath and look at our priorities. Biden had a bad night. Yes, he is 81, and he’s been working his ass off and he had a cold and, lest we need reminding again, this is a man with a lifelong struggle with stuttering. So the takeaway here should be on the content of his words, not their delivery. Of course, we have come to accept that performance matters more than reason, and by performance I do not mean how well the job is done but how good one looks while doing it. I’ve been railing against our obsession with this whole “inspiration” thing for years. Stump preachers who bring crowds to a boil and get them rolling around and speaking in tongues are “inspiring” but I wouldn’t want them run anything important. We missed a bet in 2016 by not electing one of the most qualified and competent administrators in our lifetime because she didn’t thrill us with inspiring jeremiads, while the guy with nothing to say and who said it in such a way to make people think he was a leader got the job and proceeded to dismantle—or try to—70 years of progress. Stop it, please. Look at the qualifications and track record.

But these calls for Biden to step down for someone else are ludicrous. Even if you’re not a fan, you must see that this would simply enable Trump. The practicalities and logistics aside, exactly who might be able to pull that off? In four months? The names floated so far carry too little national weight. And we’re talking about a political landscape that presently suggests that RFK Jr is a viable third party candidate. The judgment necessary to switch candidates now, it seems to mean, is a bit lacking.

Which is beside the point. Stick to the issues, the biggest one being the Project 2025. It runs to 900 pages, so let me just link to a synopsis from the BBC (because the BBC is one of the most nonpartisan sources available, for a number of reasons). Read it here.  Among other things, it calls for the destruction of our civil service. Trump tried this in his first term. Pink slips were floating around D.C. like confetti during his first year. He was stripping departments of personnel, rendering them dysfunctional, then claiming they didn’t work. The tax cuts called for are absurd. The entire project, in capsule, is designed to produce a permanent oligarchy. It seeks to curtail if not eliminate social security. Now, whether this could all be done would depend on Congress, but we have close races there, too. Point is, the GOP has become a party seeking to wreck the social programs which most of us depend on because…

Well, I’m not sure anyone has an explanation that doesn’t sound like something from a James Bond spy thriller. Whether it would succeed, as I say depends on Congress, but the fight would be a bloodletting (figuratively) that could lead to a collapse of the thing they claim to want to preserve, restore, or create, depending on who is speaking, which is the tremendous prosperity that is fast becoming national folklore.

Trump has stated his intention to establish an across the board 10% tariff. He claims this would result in foreign countries paying a price to sell goods here, but from the first time he imposed one we know that the direct result is a rising cost on Americans. If you think inflation is bad now, wait for that one.

His whole thing about turning abortion rights back to the states is a dodge.  It is literally the equivalent of saying slavery should be up to the individual states. This is not hyperbole. If we here ascribe to the idea that as Americans, regardless of state, we have rights as people and citizens, then dividing up those rights by state and asserting that some states are more equal than others is an absolute rejection of American rights. For the anti-abortion movement, this is a divide-and-conquer tactic. With a national standard and federal protection, where you live does not diminish your rights. States Rights is one of those shibboleths that sound good to certain people, but only those who would never be directly affected adversely. And it is unfair.

And as to the entire right wing obsession with LGBTQ+ rights, this is where the hypocrisy seems most evident. If as they like to claim they support the principle of Individuality, then why curtail that right when it runs counter to their collective prejudices? It seems obvious that historically for any fascist regime to gain traction they must create and demonize a group of Outsiders with which to frighten everyone else into giving the power to “control” the “subversives.”

Now, as to Biden’s fitness to run, that will be established by his actual campaign. Concerns over his health should he win are, frankly, a lesser concern, because what he brings to the task is what he has already brought, which is a team of people most of whom are presently doing their jobs quite well. They don’t go away. And should he falter over the next four years, they’re still there, and those who are touting Kamala Harris now would get their wish, and the country would have four more years of the major repairs this administration has been doing, regardless. Cold? No, practical. Any president could die in office.

As for those policies of which I speak, we have seen the most remarkable and underappreciated recovery since the end of WWII. Some of this is bounceback from the pandemic, but what matters is the handling of such bouncebacks. George W. Buch inherited a marvelous economy when he took office in 2000 and he mismanaged it, which led to the 2008 crash and burn.

Our standing globally is on the rise. Trump oversaw our lowest period of international reputation. He simply doesn’t know what he’s doing.

But I am concerned about those behind the scene backing him, like the Heritage Foundation, which is a think tank obsessed with strong leaders (as in dictators) and which exhibits a class disdain for ordinary people that makes Scrooge look like a liberal.

A note on economic nonsense. We cannot keep giving money to billionaires expecting results the billionaires are not interested in. Trickle down does not work. And we have seen across the ocean the results of a 14 year experiment with austerity that has caused the fall of the conservative government in Britain. Simple thing: you cannot save your way to prosperity. You have to spend. We’re seeing that at play now here. The conservatives are wrong about that. But that’s not what they’re interested in anyway.

But for the time being, stop panicking. Vote for the administration. Vote for self-interest. For for the people who support the principles you want to see hold sway. Above all, though, I repeat: stop panicking. Keep the oligarchs out of office. These people will only hurt the vulnerable.

What good would it do to secure the borders and then see everything within them crumble to ash?

Lastly, why give the narcissist a chance to once more prove his lack of  redeeming virtue?

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Freedom and Its Contingencies, Part Two: Liberty

Abraham Lincoln pointed out in a speech that we have never had a good definition of Liberty. That most people used the word to mean different things. At base, we can perhaps agree that two meanings offering potential conflict are (1) Liberty from and (2) Liberty to. The war of independence was a major demonstration of the driving force of the first—separation from England—while once established the subsequent political struggle from then till now has been of the latter. Because we use the terms alternately—Freedom and Liberty—here perhaps more intently, it behooves us to come to grips with what they mean. Are they, in fact, the same idea?

I would suggest, like other such pairings that become entangled and carelessly deployed, that they are absolutely related, even connected to some degree, but distinct ideas requiring a bit more observation than common usage suggests. (For instance, Truth and Fact. While certainly related, a full understanding reveals distinctions that can become vitally important in practice.)

For the time being, allow me to offer these distinctions: Freedom is ultimately a sense of personal agency in the unencumbered pursuit of Self. Liberty is the ground on which such pursuit is enabled by and within a community.

In shorter terms, Freedom is personal and Liberty is political.

Lincoln’s point in his 1864 speech was that some people hold that Liberty is to give them volitional power over themselves, while other people feel it is to allow them power over others. That one man’s sense of Liberty is to be allowed to do with and for himself unencumbered while for others it is to allowed to bind others to his desire to act in the world, also unencumbered. At the time Lincoln was referring to slaveholders. The slaveholder position was that the Liberty of a white man was the only thing that mattered.

In any discussion of Freedom, it is important to distinguish between an abstract concept of personal agency and the political field of enabled action by a self-defined group. 

In this sense, Liberty and Freedom are distinct.

This should not be a surprise to anyone. Any more-than-cursory look at history shows it to be true, and not capriciously so. Freedom to self-define is fundamental. If such self-definition comes with restrictions, this is to be expected, since “absolute” freedom in the sense of available choices to act in the world is a fantasy. We cannot choose what we cannot do by virtue of organic or conceptual limits. (See Part One) We may well imagine having powers to act contrary to nature (and in certain ways we may eventually find ways to seem to do so) but we are not sorcerers. As well, some of what we may imagine doing usually comes in conflict with those around us (and even our own selves). For functional freedom, responsible conditions must be acknowledged. In order for fulfilling action and what we might call Life Satisfaction to be realized, we must establish the groundwork within which to operate.

Such groundwork becomes the functional purview of Liberty. Liberty is political.

Which means it is a matter of negotiation and the establishment of limits. 

Because these questions impinge directly on matters of personal self-conception, there is a constant tension between what is and what one feels. 

Lincoln also said that those who deny freedom to others do not deserve it themselves. But it is clear that they themselves thought they had a perfect right to deny freedom to those they considered their inferiors—or just different—and reserved the notion that they did not deny freedom to others by defining those others exclusively as their social equals. The work to expand a personal concept of mutuality to those they thought unequal is perhaps a personal struggle, but one which had real-world consequences. Thus the confusing mingling of concepts of Freedom with the practicalities of Liberty.

How does that apply today?

Liberty can be likened to architecture. We design and build the house in which we seek to exercise our Self. In this instance, the ordered structure that enables the coherent expression and exercise of Freedom. How we then define Freedom becomes a question of agency. We can say we are free if such exploration and discovery of that agency is unchallenged. (Which is why privileged classes under almost any system call what they have “freedom” even when to an outsider it clearly is not.) But each community attempts to construct that framework so as to support the practice of its concept of Freedom. The differences then are determined by who—what part—of that community is defining Freedom.

So when change is demanded by those not sharing in that definition, it requires a rearrangement of that architecture. When the walls and floor plan change, those who have been inhabiting that structure comfortably often react as though threatened. Why, if their actual range of action has not changed? Of course, this is open to a certain degree of interpretation. If the structure has changed, why wouldn’t some people’s choices also change?

Choices to do what, though?

If among such choices is one’s assumed right to bar certain people from actions presumed to be an exclusive privilege, then we have to redefine both sets of definitions—Freedom and Liberty. (For instance, keeping children previously excluded from certain schools out of those schools based on criteria rooted in a concept of privilege.) 

But more fundamentally, the discord may be based on a misalignment of concepts. A look at our current suite of political anxiety suggests that many people mistake Freedom for Liberty and misidentify Liberty itself. In others, they invest their sense of Freedom in the structure, not in what they are free to do within it. The assertions by certain jurists over the question of Originalism are, in my opinion, indicative of a failure to see the structure as little more than the lines drawn to organize, say, an optimal range of expression. Instead they seem to argue that any alteration in that structure is a de facto curtailment of actual Freedom. Perversely, supporters of this point of  view at times demand a virtual discarding of the structure altogether because those they seek to bar from its benefits seem to be able to use those structures effectively.

At some point it has developed that what happens within the walls of our Liberty cannot be limited ethically and the only recourse for those seeking such restrictions is either the obsessive defense of those structures in accord with the original concept or an abandonment of them. What is happening in terms of accommodating actual Freedom is dismissed in this argument because it inconveniences certain groups. While certainly this can be understood as a fundamental misapprehension of what Freedom and Liberty mean, both separately and in concert, it can more pertinently be seen as a cynical insistence on a rejection of those meanings on behalf of those who never accepted them in the first place, at least not as universal ideas meant to apply to everyone equally.

I suggest we need to sort these questions out, sooner than later. In the meantime, thoughts to ponder.

Art

The Past In Black & White

In 2001, Donna and I took a meandering road trip from Oakland to Seattle. It was an amazing trip and I made a lot of photographs. The other day, having some downtime, I fired up the scanner and worked some of those over. What follows are from some side stop in Oregon.

 

 

 

I’ll be doing more of these. I have quite a lot of color from the trip, too. Once again I am amazed at what these negatives can produce through Photoshop. The detail floors me every time. Of course, there are those times when the flaws are magnified, and that’s embarrassing, but in general…

I think I need to get myself an auxiliary hard drive to store these. I have far too many negatives, going back to 1971 or ’72, to just keep on my desktop, and I don’t really want to spend all the money on the Cloud. Anyway, the next thing to take care of.

Thanks for visiting.

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Unwritten Novels

Over the last several months, things have moved, publishing-wise, that have given me some optimism about the future.  I can’t talk about them yet, since I do not yet know how it will all come out, but I am not sanguine. I’ve stumbled over too many obstacles over the last 35 years to start celebrating before the check has cleared, so to speak.

This morning, as I write this, I am about as unmotivated as I’ve ever been. It will pass, I’ve been here before: a combination of disappointment, weariness, and frankly disinterest. I have projects, certainly, but I just can’t muster the energy to give a damn.

There are novels sitting here, in my files, waiting for an opportunity to be published. Let me see….seven, I believe, all complete and ready to go. From time to time I have to deal with the possibility that they will never see the light of day. But what I want to talk about here, now, are the novels that might have been, ought to have been, written had The Career gone in a better direction.

When the first publisher of my Secantis Sequence went under back in 2005 or so, we had been discussing the next book after Peace & Memory. I was enthused, I felt flush with ideas, and I wanted to do a direct sequel to that one, called Motion & Silence. I had ambitions.  There was also talk of doing a short story collection of tales set in the Secant, the anchor of which was a novella I had been working on which later I developed into a complete novel (one of those now sitting in a file). At that time I expected to continue writing in that universe for at least half-a-dozen or ten novels. Then the bottom fell out. I won’t go into details, those involved know the story, but it pretty much, as it turns out, buried my chances of having any kind of major breakout.

I had a few notes for Motion & Silence, but I got pulled away from the Secant by other projects, most of which never materialized. There was an element of desperation attendant upon all this which muddied my thinking. I was casting about for some way to salvage something from the wreckage. I made a few poor choices. One of the goals at the time was to reach a point where my writing could support my working from home. Alas, I couldn’t manage it and had to continue working a day-job to pay the bills. Now, as you may know, this was not all bad, as I landed at Left Bank Books and spent a decade at one of the best jobs I ever had.

But it cuts into your time, day-jobs. Anyway, I had projects and made the time to write them. As well, I continued trying to find an agent.

But it is those unwritten projects that sometimes haunt me. I had a large-scale one way back, a historical thriller, jut barely SF, set during the Reconstruction Era. As originally conceived it would have been huge, six or seven hundred pages, and I duly set myself to acquiring the knowledge base to write it. Unfortunately, I burned out on the research before chapter one was done, but that novel continues to haunt me. I will write it.

I’d still like to write Motion & Silence, but as time passes and the Secantis Sequence recedes into the fog of  might-have-beens, the devil of “what would be the point?” natters at me.

There is a historical quasi-fantasy I wanted to do, set in ten or twelve thousand B.C.E. That one is still just a vague set of ideas.

I have, somewhere, about eight-thousand words of a dark contemporary mystery about the occult I wanted to do. Also, a contemporary love story built around music.

I also have an idea for the next novel following the alternate history trilogy that is sitting in the files.

And now, possibly, I’m looking at having to write the sequel to one of ones that has been waiting in those files.

For the first time in my life I am troubled by the idea of having too little time. No, there’s nothing wrong with me, I’m in ridiculously good health for my age—hell, for any age—but that’s just it. My age. I’m 69. Realistically, I might manage ten more really good years. I’m looking at the list of unwritten novels and starting to do a kind of calculus.

I published my first historical novel last year, a bit more than 12 months ago,  Granger’s Crossing. When I wrote that—more than a decade ago—I conceived a series of perhaps ten novels, covering a specific historical period.  Then it seemed very doable. Now? Do I have time to write nearly a million words, along with all the rest? Frankly, whether I even try or not hinges on how well the first one does. Assuming it does well enough for my publisher to ask for the next one, what about the others?

And then there’s the short fiction. I’m just shy of 80 published stories. I decided a few years ago to stop working on novels and concentrate on short fiction, and that has worked well. I declared my desire to publish 100 short stories before I can’t write anymore. So, 20 or so to go. It’s doable.

But is it doable along with the novels?

I have no idea. I decided to lay this all out so I can look at it in one piece and try to assess. With a little encouragement, I think I can manage it, but lately I seem to be struggling uphill against…myself.

And those unwritten novels tease me. I think about them and how cool they could be.

Thank you for indulging me. I needed to get some of this out of my head so I could clear the air and maybe see where and how to go next.

Meantime, the battlecry of all writers bids you assist: BUY MY BOOKS!

Be well, everyone. I’ll let you know what happens.