While you have been getting regularly scheduled posts on my blog, I have not been writing here much at all. My months-long queue is the only thing keeping things alive for right now; it’s a struggle to get through my day job, much less summon the deep cognition necessary to speak about craft.
Thankfully, I’m a freelance writer so I can take as long as I need to every day, but this often means I spend half the day staring blankly at my screen and then work late into the night.
I’m tired. Very tired. And I think most of us feel exactly the same.
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We live in a time of overlapping monsters.
There are about a thousand reasons for my ennui, all of which are valid. We could start with the fact that the US federal government is threatening to invade a sovereign state because a federal agent shot an innocent queer woman in the face for blocking him from kidnapping people of color.
And also the fact that the president of the United States is threatening to invade another member of NATO, which would, quite literally, start World War III. And that said president is suffering from dementia, which is why he decided to send an incoherent letter to another member of NATO complaining about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize.
I know many of my readers are international, so you’re seeing this from the outside, perhaps complaining that Americans aren’t doing enough to stop him. As I mentioned in my post about interculturalism in the Eirenic Verses … there’s really not much we can do. Our government doesn’t respond to the people in the same way that a European government does.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now has a larger budget than most entire countries do for national defense. We’re being occupied by one of the most well-funded militias in the world.
Other branches of law enforcement are militarized to the point of being long-standing armies that have embedded themselves in our communities. Our police literally walk around with surplus military gear like they’re in an active war zone … all the time.
The US police kill around 1,200 people a year, giving a rate of around 33 deaths per 10 million. India, which has over a billion people, has a rate of around 12.5 per 10 million.
Around seven people per day die at the hands of police in the United States, which is more than most officer-involved shootings in entire countries.
So much. It’s so much. And it’s now inescapable thanks to the magic of social media.
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Modern life has made it impossible to evade the misery.
I surround myself with kind, smart people, and I know most of them are equally paralyzed by fear. I’m not unusual in feeling stuck.
Social media doesn’t help, given that I can blast my eyeballs with all the worst news on the planet at any time of the day.
Before the internet, news existed “out there,” beyond your office, and arrived at regularly scheduled times. You could switch off the TV, which stayed in one room in the house, and could set the newspaper aside until you were prepared to read it. The radio, too, was stationary, and it was not combined with your workstation.
Even during wartime, those not in an active war zone could reset because they weren’t constantly surrounded by the news. They could take a walk and know that the Bad Things weren’t in their pocket. The horrible things were externalized and had to be actively accessed in a set location.
I work entirely on my computer, meaning that all the horrible things happening in the world cohabit with all the things I need to get done.
Yes, we could say I need better discipline, and I do try. I use Cold Turkey to block certain websites when I need to focus, but I often end up clicking it off in between writing articles or proofing chapters, just for one last look.
Knowledge feels like a type of control for me: as if should I know what’s happening, I can somehow change it or protect myself. I can’t, of course, but my brain refuses to accept that.
Even if I’m not getting a full-frontal assault from the news, it’s still there. I’m still thinking about it. I’m still aware that beyond my reach, terrible things are happening that I cannot control nor escape.
And this gets me thinking. What’s the point of creating anything? What’s the point of sitting down, writing my blog articles about craft, or editing my books about fantasy people who don’t exist?
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Fiction has always been a way to metabolize and process pain.
Whether that is personal pain, such as my own life history in Funeral of Hopes, or larger international pain, artists around the world have always poured whatever they’re feeling and thinking about it into their process.
The long and celebrated history of war literature proves how some of us are driven to document, examine, and release the worst possible feelings by getting it onto the page.
It makes perfect sense, of course. Once you put it out there, beyond yourself, it loses much of its sting. The same mechanics behind talk therapy, but placed in dialogue with your own thoughts.
That’s likely why I haven’t been able to focus on the more technical facets of writing that I discuss on this blog; I’m too busy writing short stories or think pieces about victimhood that center around current events.
In that way, art matters because of how it heals us, the individual creator. We can place the pain in a tidy container and so lessen its grip on our hearts. I know that I was able to let go much of my resentment about my past through writing Funeral of Hopes, and I made immense progress in therapy after that experience.
I’d like to think that most writers, especially in the modern era, write because we can’t not do it. Writing doesn’t pay as well as it used to, so there’s not much monetary reward by doing this, and only the most neurotically market-minded individuals are going to make it big. Even traditionally published authors cannot expect to live comfortably on their earnings.
This is our coping method, our escape or our therapy. But it has value for those outside us, too.
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For readers, fiction offers solace and camaraderie.
It’s no secret that modern life is lonelier than ever. Many people admit that they have only a handful of good friends, whom they may not be able to see on a regular basis. The “male loneliness epidemic” may be overhyped (and partly the men’s fault) but it does demonstrate that even though we can now meet thousands of people, we don’t get to know them very well at all.
I was a lonely child, so I’m painfully aware of how fiction offers friendship in a way that real people can’t.
To the empathetic reader, well-crafted fictional characters do exist: they operate in a liminal space between real and not-real. They’re amalgamations of someone we could know, whether we hate them or love them. The character lives beyond the page, and we can imagine them in new places or situations.
The “life beyond the page” is the whole premise of fanfic, where thousands of individual writers envision their blorbos doing magical things. I wrote over 1.6 million words about fictional characters killing monsters or almost destroying history several times over.
Or fucking each other senseless. I had a lot of that too.
While writing my Bizenverse, there were soft moments that made my eyes melt and tense moments that made me cry. I know my readers also inched to the edge of their seat, gritted their teeth, or let the tears fall. They bought stuffed animals that existed in the series, made memes of the characters, psychoanalyzed my decisions, and even riffed off my premises in their own stories.
In such a lonely, scary, empty world, why wouldn’t we want to offer this comfort and friendship to our readers?
Fiction is something else to think about, someone else to meet. Unlike a real person, a fictional character can live everywhere all the time: in your head, in your pocket, in your conversations, in your heart. They can never disappoint you – or if they do, you can conveniently edit that out of your memory and rewrite it in your own version.
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Fiction documents the modern moment in a more visceral way than historical archives.
I have a Bachelor of Arts in English, and my specialty was British Literature, specifically Victorian literature. The thing is, if you asked me to name historical events that happened in the Victorian era, I’d have jack shit to say. I was never good at history because I have dyscalculia and can’t memorize dates.
But I can tell you how the Victorian era felt. I can tell you about the stink of the streets, the pressing fog against the glass, the guttering gas lamps, the faint scent of swooning salts and the rich swirl of port. Damp, tattered silk turning brown because it’s been washed too many times. Perfectly manicured lawns and rambling country mansions stuffed with random people who have overstayed their welcome.
I’m not a time traveler, but the many Victorian novels I’ve read have given me a coherent sense of how it might have felt to live in that world. This, combined with pictures and historical reenactments, offers a more tangible way to experience a bygone era than memorizing dates.
We often laugh at the trends in mass-market paperbacks from certain time periods, because many of them started to sound eerily the same due to publisher’s demands. But still, they help us feel a time we can never experience, that someone else did.
My books are second-world fantasy and so they don’t have the same journalistic flare of books set in our world, but they still evoke our time and place; they can’t help but do so. I wrote them from my own worldview, from a desk in a certain country and on a certain date.
In fact, you can see the real-world political circumstances woven into the Eirenic Verses if you look closely. 9 Years Yearning was written in 2023, when much of the turmoil in the world felt distant; I was trying to distract myself from the scary things on my screen. Pride Before a Fall came around the same time.
Once we get to What Is Cannot Be Unwritten, you can feel the real world’s ominous atmosphere infesting my writing. It’s curt. Blunt. Sharp. Unpleasant. Ugly. Bristling with morbid humor trying hard to cope.
The disgusting climax mirrors what many Americans feel right now: something we loved so deeply has turned into a monster, and we can do nothing to make it stop.
Absent All Light, coming June 23, 2026, jumps deeper into this, with grotesque political machinations that write their violence onto peoples’ flesh. The uncaring politburo abandons its loyal soldiers to die, and only interpersonal devotion saves the day.
At its heart, my next book is about how we keep each other safe. Rebellion is love. Resistance is romance. Nationalities are meaningless when a fellow human is bleeding. These are concepts I want every reader to remember and apply to their own lives.
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We don’t write just for our current audience, but for a future one, too.
And here’s the final reason why art matters. Because it lives on long after we die.
Many of my favorite authors are dead now, but I still feel like I understand them. I can live in their heads for a little bit, and research their lives, and consider how their experiences influenced what they put on the page.
For example, Fall of the House of Usher has stuck with me for a long time because of the omnipresent sense of decay. The house is rotting, and its inhabitants are in ruins. I often read it thinking about how oppressive and claustrophobic the house feels; I try to imagine it as a single place detached from a normal world, but the text refuses that comfort.
You simply cannot picture anywhere away from this marshy, repulsive locale, can’t think that the protagonist can simply walk away and go somewhere better. Nowhere else seems to exist, and that’s the scary part to me.
If something written nearly two centuries ago can affect me so strongly now, in a world that is brighter and bigger and louder, what could our work today evoke for future generations?
Of course, I don’t delude myself into thinking my work will ever be famous. I want paperback copies mostly because then they will be forced to exist somewhere outside of Amazon’s servers, tucked into a bookshelf somewhere, ready to be discovered long into the future. If anything else, the Library of Congress will have a copy. The files will live on.
And, someday, maybe someone will pick it up and live in the world I created. They’ll see all the anxieties of 21st century America threaded through the series, and they’ll consider what made me write in just such a way. I will have documented something. I’ll have pressed my brain into the page.
For a moment, someone I will never meet can know what I felt, and they’ll understand, if imperfectly, how society looked today.