I’ve taken a bit of break from blogging for a lot of good reasons. Finishing my fifth novel, d4, turned out to be more of an overwhelming experience than I expected, and the timing overlapped with producing a new version of my first novel x0. This mild rewrite was designed to better use the books interactive links in the electronic version, and to be smoother without them in the paperback version. I’m proud of all my efforts but, as I keep learning the hard way, you can only do so much, and if you try to do more, then your head is likely to be lost in the clouds while you are doing it.

In the real world, life moved on. I started a new job and went on a vacation and looked up only to discover that one of my own Texan congressmen was busy likening refuge children from Central America to the Normandy invasion. Fellow Americans were screaming and waving signs at busloads of youngsters, in at least one case too angry to notice that it was a bus full American children on a field trip. Another Malaysian aircraft was missing. This one turned out to have been shot down by mistake, by people too angry to know or care that they had blasted a group of uninvolved innocents out of the sky. Meanwhile teenagers of all faiths seem to have become the latest casualties the ongoing dance of fear and revenge in the Gaza Strip.

In fact, every news channel I turned to was using the word “crisis” although they were applying it left and right to all manner of things. A world in crisis. Great. Do we love our screaming and our shooting and our anger that much?

I’m picking up my pen again and I’ll be starting the last book in my series soon. While I write it, I hope to finish editing d4 and get it published, and also to give y1 the bit of a rewrite that x0 just got. It’s too much to do at once and I know it. I’ll be distracted and lost in my own world. I suspect that is why I will be doing it.

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