In the last week I was reading about some government sponsored fiction that was designed to give real life to what the effects of a nuclear bomb might be on the civilian population, and it also mentioned a similar piece spun out by The St Pete Times, which imagined what it might be like if the bomb dropped on St Pete. St Pete is not that far from me, and I have worked there, and I have friends there – so it concerned me. Donald Trump and his exchanges with North Korea, and the fact we moved a minute closer to midnight make all this scarily relevant. And then Time Magazine drop an issue about Trump and his nuclear policy and I find myself falling down a hole into imagining the worst possible scenarios.
Fiction as design is something that i have paid a lot of attention to in the last five years – having started a whole series that explored the notion, and then built into a more science fiction model.
But that isn’t even where my focus has been for the last few days – I have been digging into my own frozen momentum as far as writing goes, and I have been debugging that. Know what I discovered? That the writing issue is merely a mirror held up to frozen conditions in my life, and that I had to unstick those. How do you do it? You have to confront it and handle. So that is what I did, and I have been moving towards completing writing a lot quicker.
I wrote a newsletter, I have been digging out old unfinished books – I have been working.
And part of it, to loop back to that first paragraph is all the bad news and the promise of destruction that comes with it – handling how much I saw and how I processed that. More signal and less noise definitely is the aim, and it has been hard to maintain in the past … but it becomes increasingly obvious how necessary it is to survive and keep on keeping on. I haven’t used the nuclear option on the social media, but the dialback i have in effect and how much better it makes me feel suggests that is actually an option now. Good.