Running Twice as Fast to Get Ahead.
I’ve been runnin’ a long time
On this traveling ground
Wishin’ hard to be free of
Goin’ round and round …
This Traveling Ground.
Cat Stevens’s “Bitter Blue” (1971) recalls a scene in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass (1871).
In Carroll’s story, Alice and the Red Queen race full tilt through an unchanging landscape, going faster and faster just to stay where they are. “It takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place,” the Queen explains. “If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
The world we live in is like that too.
Moving Forward.
Six years ago, during the chaos of 2020, I posted a piece titled “Moving Forward: Life in a Science Fiction Novel,” which dealt with how the world seems to be changing too fast to comprehend. And now, despite all the intervening changes, here we are, six years later, once again contending with chaos.
In the words of Kurt Vonnegut: “And so it goes.”
The Wisdom of Robert Pinksy.
A quarter century ago, in another time of upheaval, the poet Robert Pinsky spoke of being unable to write in the aftermath of 9-11. “I would love to be the kind of person who responds immediately with eloquence and penetration. I’m not,” he said, speaking to Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air. “I tend to write about things after they’ve happened by quite a long time.”
Eleven years later, his poem “9-11” appeared in The Washington Post Magazine. You can find it here.
Into the Future.
As a science fiction writer, I spend a lot of time thinking ahead. Not only because I write about the future, but because writing itself involves creating things that will not be released for months or years after they are written.
Later this year, my story “Embers” will appear in Asimov’s Magazine. It was written in late 2024. Beyond that, Minute Men 2: Sixty Seconds to Die (the novel I am writing now) will likely be released sometime in 2027. And perhaps sometime after that, the Minute Men film that my brother Christopher has been developing for over a decade may yet make it to the screen.
We just have to keep moving.
Also coming soon is an essay titled “Last Words: In Defense of Unfinished works.” It’s about Edgar Allan Poe’s last work of fiction and the folly of using AI to finish the incomplete works of dead writers. The essay will appear in an upcoming issue of the UK publication Dissections: The Journal of Contemporary Horror.
Podcast News.
Following the podcast tour that brother Christopher and I did to promote the release of Minute Men: Execute & Run, I sat for a couple of interviews that focused more broadly on the writing life.
The first one I recorded will be released March 29 on Miles Beyond the Page with Michelle Miles.
The second, Chats & Chapters with Caitlyn Howarth, came out in January. You can watch that one via the player below.
Click play. We’ll meet you there!
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