I love audiobooks, because I can listen to them while doing chores around the house and garden — and there are always a lot of chores. Over the past couple of months I’ve mostly been listening to non-fiction. These are books on history and environment that really captured my attention:

Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles C. Mann
1493 by Charles C. Mann
The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow.

For biology nerds, I can heartily recommend: Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake (about fungus), and the mind-blowing The Vital Question by Nick Lane, which looks in detail at his theory of how life got started on this planet — and possibly on others.

The two science fiction novels I’ve listened to are:

Semiosis by Sue Burke — a very smart and engaging story about colonizing and coming to understand the biology of an alien world.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — excellent narration and a very clever and entertaining hard science fiction novel about saving the world from a very unusual invasive species.

If you have any audiobook favorites, let me know!

Mostly as a way to help me plan, I’ve made it a tradition to list my writing goals for the coming year in a January 1st post. I used to be ambitious and list a lot of goals, but I’ve learned since to keep the list short. Here goes…

1. FINISH & PUBLISH THE CURRENT NOVEL
This is the third book in the Inverted Frontier series. I’m maybe 70% done with a solid draft. There is hope.

2. START A NEW NOVEL
I’m sixty-one years old, and I don’t know how long I’m going to continue writing. Right now, my only real ambition is to finish the Inverted Frontier series. I’m anticipating five novels in total. In 2022, I hope to make a good start on book 4.

3. WRITE ONE SHORT STORY (OR NOVELLA)
I’m recycling this goal from 2021. I want to write one original story that I can include in my third short-fiction collection — maybe a Zeke Choy story, or even something from The Red story world?

4. PUBLISH A THIRD SHORT-FICTION COLLECTION
Another recycled goal! I’ve got eight stories and the cover art ready to go now, but I need another story or two to round off the collection.

That’s my plan. Wish me luck!

Don’t Look Up and The Matrix Resurrections

Is the Netflix film Don’t Look Up worth watching? Yes! As an extinction-level asteroid heads for Earth, humans deny the threat and essentially twiddle their thumbs. As you’ve probably heard, Don’t Look Up is really a story about our pathetic response to the existential threat of climate change. There is an excellent review of the movie at Forbes of all places:
“Why Sneering Critics Dislike Netflix’s ‘Don’t Look Up,’ But Climate Scientists Love It”

I also enjoyed The Matrix Resurrections. I don’t think I ever saw the third Matrix movie, but Resurrections was fun, clever, good, and relevant to our times. Also, I loved the meta. Here’s a smart review of the film, at The Washington Post: ‘The Matrix Resurrections’ captures the real crisis of our post-truth era

Wow. Writing blog posts is so much easier when I just link to stuff. 😉

Every January I put up a blog post listing my writing goals for the coming year. At the end of the year, I check back to see how I did. That assessment is the subject of this post.

I’ll admit straightaway that 2021 was a tough year for me on the writing front. Politics, the pandemic, the insurrection, the ongoing disasters due to climate change and our inability to address it — it all saps my creative energy and distracts my focus. It hasn’t helped knowing my 2020 novel Pacific Storm, published just over a year ago, failed to catch on despite positive reader feedback. At this point, it’s earned less than $5,000 over production costs — and given that I put a year of work into it, that’s discouraging.** And when I get discouraged, it’s hard to write. Even writing this post has taken absurdly long! 🙄

So yeah, this was a tough year, though not entirely unsuccessful. Here are the specifics on how I did, with the goals I set for myself in January in all-caps:

1. WRITE AND FINISH A NEW NOVEL
I’m writing it, but I did not finish it. This is book 3 of the Inverted Frontier series. I’m well into it, and I think it’s a strong draft, so far. I am disappointed it’s not a complete draft.

2. PUBLISH THE WILD TRILOGY
Done! The Wild is an older epic-fantasy novel that I revised extensively in 2020, and then divided into three short novels. All three volumes were published last spring. I love these novels and I feel like I’ve finally done right by this story.

3. WRITE ONE SHORT STORY (OR NOVELLA)
Doubly done!
A few years ago I resolved to take a long break from writing short fiction to focus on novel writing. But this year I wanted to write one short story to include in my third short fiction collection. Instead I wrote two stories on commission. “Ride” has already been published. The second story is still with the editor, but should see publication in 2022.

4. PUBLISH A THIRD SHORT-FICTION COLLECTION
Maybe next year…
The downside of writing two commissioned stories is that I still need to write another story or two to round out the new collection — but that task will have to wait until after I finish the novel.

I’ll be posting my 2022 goals on January 1. I suspect that list will look a lot like this list. 😉

**In hindsight, I should have delayed publication until early 2021, and invested more time and money in advance promotion. A costly lesson.

“Ride” is a short story about climate change, AI, and social credit. It’s set in Hawaii, in the same story world as my novel Pacific Storm.

“Ride” is part of the Future Tense science fiction series at Slate—and you can read it for free online!

Find it here.

Writing this one was an interesting experience, different from anything I’d done before. It’s a commissioned story. I was asked to submit ideas to the team at Future Tense on the general subject of transportation. For me, story ideas don’t come easily. I need to work out most of the plot and have a general impression of the character before I know if I have a workable idea. So I ended up submitting an outline for this story. Fortunately for me, the team approved it. I wrote a first draft—of course it was too long—and then worked closely with editor Joey Eschrich to trim the length and better focus the story. This was fun, because with short stories, I usually write and revise on my own, with just minor edits once I turn it in. This felt a bit more collaborative.

I hope you enjoy “Ride”!

This post first appeared in my September 9th newsletter. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

The Wizard and the Prophet: Two remarkable scientists and their dueling visions to shape tomorrow’s world, by Charles C. Mann, read by Bronson Pinchot.

I usually listen to audiobooks while doing chores. This is one of those audiobooks that inspires me to do more chores, just so I can listen to it.

The Wizard and the Prophet starts off by asking: Can our Earth support a population of ten billion people—a number we are predicted to reach before too many more years—and if so, how?

The book is structured around the competing philosophies of two twentieth-century scientists. Norman Borlaugh, who launched the “green revolution” represents the technological or “hard” path. William Vogt, whose philosophies still energize much of the conservation movement, represents the “soft” path. There are many subtleties, but the hard path generally involves large, expensive, earth-changing (or gene-changing) engineering, while the soft path involves adapting ourselves and our lifestyles to live gently with the natural world.

Charles C. Mann—author of 1491—is a fantastic writer. I especially enjoy the way he looks at each of his subjects in a historical context. He does not hide their faults, and he looks at both the positive and the negative aspects of their contributions to the world.

Mann also looks in detail at what he sees as the four key challenges of our future: food, water, energy, and climate change.

The book was first published at the start of 2018. Mann lays out the unknowns of climate change at that time, including the question of when we will begin to see direct and undeniable effects. Of course here in 2021, we are seeing those effects, and it’s up to us, as a society, to respond responsibly, to ensure a livable world for future generations.

I planted a white sapote tree thirty-plus years ago, not knowing anything about the fruit, only that it sounded perfectly adapted to my mountain home. A good decision! The fruit is delicious, and for many years now we’ve had an abundant crop every fall. And the fruits are getting bigger every year!

The fruits ripen in a wide range of sizes, but these large ones are more and more common — and the fruit quality does not diminish with size. Oh, and never mind the rough-looking skin. The fruit is beautiful on the inside: creamy and very sweet.

(We need more neighbors to give away fruits to!)

The fruits are fragile, with optimal flavor just at the point when they are ready to fall off the tree, or just after they have dropped. One of the challenges of the season is keeping Xena Rose out of the garden. White sapote is her favorite! She goes crazy for it.

This post first appeared in my August 12th newsletter. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

I think of my Puzzle Land novels as grimdark fiction. Wikipedia defines grimdark as “a subgenre of speculative fiction with a tone, style, or setting that is particularly dystopian, amoral, or violent.” Stories of the Puzzle Lands probably falls at the lighter end of the grimdark spectrum. It’s meant to be darkly humorous. Nevertheless, there is a lot of spontaneous killing going on, among other things.

So what is the appeal of truly violent stories? Part of it’s the action, sure. And maybe there’s some satisfaction in seeing a protagonist ruthlessly take down anyone standing in the way. But it’s one thing for an author to set up bad guys/enemies/antagonists for the hero to mow down, and something else when the protagonist starts slaughtering innocent bystanders because it’s convenient. It’s as if no one’s life has value except the protagonist…or do I take my fiction too seriously? 🙂

Two titles have inspired these thoughts. The first is an Amazon Prime TV series called Hanna. I watched the first episode because I was bored. Honestly, it didn’t sound like something I would like—a teenage girl with extraordinary abilities is being hunted down by nefarious government forces—but from the first episode, I was hooked.

The show is brutal. It’s a coming-of-age science fiction thriller in which teenage Hanna fights (literally) to find a place for herself in the world. The character of Hanna is often emotionally flat, which feels appropriate, given her upbringing and experience.

The series is well-written, well-acted, and has a startlingly high body count. It’s usually guards and soldiers who die and no one stops to ask if they deserve it. But it’s that kind of show. If you’re into this sort of thing, I recommend it.

The second title is a debut novel, The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu by Tom Lin. I think it’s fair to say this is a literary novel. It’s beautifully written, with fantastic descriptive passages of both nature and people. It’s set in the American west, as the transcontinental railroad is being built. The protagonist, Ming Tsu, is on a quest to kill everyone involved in the destruction of his marriage. Call it a grimdark western revenge fantasy.

The story follows Ming Tsu through three parts. In the first he’s traveling with a mysterious old man who is endowed with a supernatural ability that is very useful to a revenge-seeking gunfighter. In the second part Ming Tsu hooks up with more very strange characters with special abilities of their own, and in the third he is on his own again and experiences additional supernatural episodes. I don’t think the story entirely hangs together, and the ending is not what I would have chosen. Nevertheless, I recommend The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu as something different and fascinating. I’m looking forward to seeing what Tom Lin does next.

Oops. I’ve realized I haven’t posted anything here since June. Have I been distracted? Well, yes. A lot going on! I have been keeping up with my newsletter. If you’re not subscribed to that, please do! It’s every four weeks, except for those rare times when I have a time-sensitive announcement.

One of the big events of the summer–announced in my newsletter–was the birth of my first grandchild. He lives in Honolulu with his mom and dad. Ron and I have already flown over several times to see him. 🙂

In other news, I was commissioned to write a short story. That is now finished, and is scheduled for publication later this fall.

I’m now working on a second commissioned short story. Yes, a couple of years ago I said I was done with writing short stories, at least for the immediate future…but time has gone by, and both these opportunities were too good to pass up.

Work on the third book of the Inverted Frontier series is progressing in fits and starts, but more on that later.

I’ll try to be a little more active on this blog!

This news first appeared in my June 9th newsletter. If you haven’t yet signed up for my newsletter, you really, really should. It’s fun, it’s once every four weeks (with an occasional special issue), and it’s the best way to stay in touch. Sign up here.

Did you know that my novel Memory is a companion novel to the Inverted Frontier series?

Memory is not on the main sequence, but if you’ve read Silver, you’ve met Jubilee. Memory tells her story in the time before she encountered Urban.

In my April newsletter, I held a simple survey asking reader opinions on Memory‘s then-current cover art. Results were mixed, but I did receive a brilliant suggestion: Why not commission a new cover in the style of the Inverted Frontier series, making it clear that Memory is a tie-in novel?

Why not indeed! I immediately acted on the suggestion, and here is the result, courtesy of artist Sarah Anne Langton, who also designed the covers for all the Inverted Frontier books — whether published, underway, or still vaporware. 🙂

I like the expansiveness expressed in this cover, and the way the stone arch echoes the curve of the world as seen in the cover art of Silver. As well, the swirls and the lighting give it that “out there,” science fiction feel. I hope you like it too.

Visit my website to learn more about Memory.