Astrogator's Logs

Faced with a few shoals in my sea of life, I know I’ve reneged on my wish/promise earlier this year to reactivate my blog. If the latest round of ordeals leaves me standing, I will try to remedy that. At times like these, I always think of how much I haven’t done or seen yet…but also how lucky I have been in my friendships and experiences.

As age inexorably overtakes us, our intrinsic abilities get blunted: memory, stamina, input from the senses. All these changes weaken, isolate us and encroach upon both calmness of mind and ability to experience pleasure. What we once achieved effortlessly becomes difficult or impossible. But athletes and dancers learn this hard lesson much earlier in life—as do sufferers of incurable chronic or progressive diseases.

Too, if we’ve opined on many things—as I have—it feels redundant to discuss them again unless we’ve had a major change of mind/heart. This results in further isolation and an ever-growing sense (and bona fide status) of irrelevance. And the fact that so much of my fiction lies half-finished, put aside while I’ve been running my tiny indie press single-handedly, has been haunting me nonstop.

Vows made to ourselves during a crisis are often forgotten when we enter calmer waters. But I made two today, and will do my utmost to honor them if I’m granted the leeway. I’ll catch up with my precious friends, and stay in touch thereafter. And I will revisit the universes I created, where I spent long spells of unclouded bliss. My heartfelt thanks to the beloved companions who shared portions of this journey.

As our time and stamina have been consumed by attempts to survive the increasing instability in our world, social media have also shortened our attention span. Things change fast online, and it’s possible that the constant rapid scrollings and headline browsings are making our behavior revert to gatherer-hunter fight-or-flight reflexes.

With the advent of Tumblr and Medium, long entries on WordPress blogs were deemed passé, TLDR. Many bloggers fell silent, went communal, or funneled their content into paywalled Patreons and Substacks. However, the recent implosion of Twitter has made longer writing come somewhat back into fashion — though “longer” usually means the 500 characters allowed on Mastodon, rather than essay-length musings.

In my case, the avalanche of tasks in the last three years as well as an infrastructure-mandated overhaul of my entire website led to mostly silence on my blog in 2021 and 2022. My readers, understandably, wandered away. I also found myself wondering if I still have anything worthwhile to say: I started the blog in 2006, wrote slews of posts on the fleet of subjects that interest me, and I’m now firmly in my third youth. It’s harder to get excited (or annoyed) sufficiently to craft lengthy articles and find fitting accompanying images.

But I missed writing on the blog sorely, just as I missed the small but wonderful community that had grown organically around it and around the constellations of subjects it explored. So I’ve decided to see if we can once again gather around this hearth and share stories until the time comes for the long sleep.

It has been too long since I wrote a blog post. 2021 was a stressful year and the difficulties persist: the continuing pandemic ordeals, the increasingly disquieting path of the US. I haven’t seen my family in Athens for nearly three years now.

But things got accomplished in 2021, too. Exciting highly-praised books got published; flowers flourished in porch boxes; the Copper Yeti and I managed to briefly visit the Outer Cape in early summer, when things were briefly looking hopeful; there was incremental progress in writing the launch of the Reckless, a cornerstone in my fictional universe and the name of the novella imprint of my small but intrepid press.

One high note of 2021 was the interview I gave to Gareth Jelley, the engine behind Intermultiversal. He asked informed questions and, as a result of his astute probing, I found myself plucking at all the threads that I’ve woven into my life tapestry—science, writing, science fiction, myth, history, linguistics, walking across cultures & down starry lanes. If anyone wants to know what fuels my own dreams, as well as my eliciting & nurturing of the works of others, you can find all that in this interview.

“They did more than wish. They wrought tirelessly to make it come true.” — Athena Andreadis, “Planetfall”

When you move, boxes that remain unopened for more than a month often never get opened. When we settled into the cozy cottage in 1998, I shoved several leg-bruisers as heavy as boulders into the closet of my study (aka home office). These contained much of my writing: drafts, sources, correspondence.

Since then, I reorganized the study after my cancer bout and after I left academia, but piecemeal. This time, I decided to go all the way to the roots so that I’m ready for the grand venture slated to officially start in a few days (T minus 10 and counting). I took this opportunity to not only organize and streamline my study, but to also tuck straggler books into niches that make sense. It took about a week, with stops to accommodate the grumblings of the fibromyalgia, and four huge sacks of paper hit the recycling bin.

It’s done now, and I feel inordinately pleased about it. I deem it fitting that I finished on the year anniversary of the publication of the Mixon report, another milestone in organizing science fiction for the greater good. The new configuration is airy, functional and hip-friendly. Entropy will make its steady stealthy inroads. But small achievements count, and I can finally cross off the longest-standing item on my to-do list.