Flights of Fancy

So, what’s happened since that last novel ten years ago? Quite a bit, actually, just nothing involving words on a page. I had a long-nurtured writing habit of rising early to work on whatever project was the conte du jour, but though it was still easy enough to sit down at the desk, the words had ceased their flow. At first, I thought it was simple writer’s block, the thing that nearly all writers experience from time to time. But as the weeks turned to months, and the months to years, I came to realize that it wasn’t that at all. It began to feel more like a geologic shift, like the last words had really been the last words.

I’ve had many hobbies over my long life, from model building to off-road exploring, and each time one of them burned out to be added to the scrap heap of history, it went the same way. It was like a candle burning out. You’ve seen it. It burns high for a second, then gutters low, barely above the wax. It cycles rapidly between these two extremes, flickering dramatically, until finally it loses the fight, disappearing below the wax never to be seen again.

Thus my writing. It faded from interest until I no longer saw the point. So I fell back on the activity I had begun in the early eighties to bond with my sons. They were seven or eight when I sprung for an Atari 2600, and we began to spend time together playing such classics at Space Invaders and Centipede. Those were good times spent together at an age when your kids still think you hung the moon, and it wasn’t until years later that they realized that the old man was the most hopeless of squares and not worth paying the slightest attention to. But the genie was out of the video game bottle, and I followed it faithfully wherever it went, from the primitive pixels of Castlevania through the side-scrollers like Duke Nukem and Super Mario Brothers to the modern classics of The Witcher and Skyrim. I’ve taken the ride from mindless blasters to the convoluted storylines that rival any book or movie, and it’s no coincidence that the modern gaming industry generates more revenue than movies, TV, and music combined. That’s where I’ve been for the last decade.

But it was never that I didn’t want to write. I’ve tried to jump-start the process with decks of card prompts from the StoryMatic decks for sale on Amazon, to several of the Story Engine decks available on their own website. Just Google The Story Engine, and prepare to be amazed. There is a possibility that the Story Engine is going to provide the breakthrough, as I have a promising story in progress as I write this, but I’m not going to get all hysterical just yet. But that’s where I am, May the 13th, 2026, just possibly on the verge of a return to the page. Wish me luck, and if you’ve had a similar experience, we’d love to hear about it. Feel free to jump in and join the conversation. I won’t bite… unless you want me to!