2025

It’s really here. We’re a quarter way through the century, and it’s disconcerting sometimes how very quickly it all happened.

I’m still a little kid–tall, lean, buck-toothed…my knees constantly skinned and my voice always too loud. I could fall down right now and rip a hole in my jeans on the basketball court. I could dive into a swimming pool and swim the length of it underwater, holding my breath. I could hit the bull’s eye from twice as far as any other kid, and keep on going until they dragged me away from the archery range with a bruised forearm from too much fun. Fifteen cartwheels in a row? Try and stop me.

That’s me, isn’t it? Planning on taking over the world someday…at least a part of it. Teaching folks, reading books, helping people understand things they couldn’t have or wouldn’t have put together on their own. I didn’t want or need to be famous, but a certain amount of professional success was almost certainly on the horizon.

Politics, family issues, and health concerns never entered the picture. As a kid holed away on the floor next to her bed reading fantasy novels and listening to the radio, the future was always some kind of perfect waiting to happen. A technicolor sunset that it would be an uncompromising joy to sail into.

And now it’s 2025? The time when robots or apes or robot apes are supposed to be running the world, I think? So far in the future that I can’t even imagine it, because I will be very old by then, indeed. Very, very old.

And here I sit, my hair still mostly brunette, only about 30% silver according to my new hairdresser. I’m losing weight and improving my work habits, taking more medicine for unimagined ills that I never dreamed would afflict me. I’m writing more than ever, probably, except for the year 2011 when my youngest daughter was a babe-in-arms and didn’t need companionship in the same way she requires it now. Goodness, Tim worked from the office back then, too. He didn’t snore in an easy chair three feet from me, as he does now, nor did he video conference day-in and day-out with other problem solvers, saving the world through one hospital interface at a time.

That first year of selling and publishing fiction seriously, rather than journalism, was so exciting.

2011! So far in the future! My goodness, I’ll be so old by then!

But there I was, homeschooling three little boys who I dearly loved and wanted to only nurture and encourage. Nursing a beautiful daughter–something I never thought I would have. And that first year, I published something like 25 ebooks, I think.

The total now is much higher.

Don’t freak out–not all ebooks are 800 pages long. Some are more like articles or short stories. It really all depends on how long it takes to produce the thing you need to make, really. How many words it takes to teach someone something, to explain the thing they wouldn’t have put together on their own.

Other books are long, sure. And, some are compilations and box sets. I’m published in over a dozen anthologies, and I don’t even count those, because they aren’t on my dashboards. I simply forget to add them in.

So, yeah, in a way, I am doing the thing that I thought I’d do. The fiction aspect of writing is the bigger part of my work these days, and that’s not always as obviously teaching as journalism or non-fiction, or freelance editing and the like. Fiction teaches in different, more subtle ways. If you’re doing it right, people think it’s just entertainment. They don’t realize until weeks, months, or even years past the consumption of the material that they learned something from it–that it changed them somehow, or simply opened their mind to another way of thinking.

And heaven knows that many writers actually have no bloody idea that they’re teaching something to someone else. They’re just trying to make ends meet.

I once told a fellow writer (CD Reiss, if you’re interested) that I thought we all write our truth. We can’t help but write what we know deep down to be true–especially through fiction. I think she agreed with me at the time. She’s an amazing writer–even if you think you’re not into that kind of book, just give one of her books a try. You’ll be glad you did.

But the other side of the coin of writing all that good truthiness is that we live in this ever-changing, chaotic world of the future where nothing is what we thought it would be, and the things that are must be strategically leveraged to attain the next goal–just to survive. I’m not talking about billionaire shit. I’m talking about real life. You need to do X to get Y so your kid can afford Z. Wash, rinse, repeat. In a world like that, every little personal indulgence is so precious. The manicure, the Wild Blueberry White Mocha latte, the new tiny sweater for the dog.

This isn’t the way I thought the future would be. I’m definitely not the person I thought I would be in 2025. The world…well, people say it burns, or that it’s a dumpster, or whatever, but the truth is, it’s just difficult. Human nature has always cycled through its crises, and it will keep doing so long after my generation is forgotten. We make a chain of love, and hopefully it lasts a few years beyond our lifetimes, and what more can you ask for?

Okay, so I hear it now. That^ doesn’t sound like the ten year old who just discovered Piers Anthony. That^ up there sounds like the middle aged mother of four who she became.

I love my life. I love my life and my work. I love my life and my work and my family, even if some of my kids aren’t my biggest fans.

I do my best. I write my truth.

And sometimes, I teach people things, whether I mean to, or not.

(This has been a blog entry a la the days of Xanga and eFairy! If you want to read something lighter, I recommend anything from this page.)

Have an amazing year, and watch out for those robot apes.

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