As I sit here in Minca, Colombia I sit here on the backs of giants, of every trekker, of every climber, of everyone who has ever walked, who has ever crawled. I just sat and watched Meru, a documentary film about their climb up the Shark’s Fin. I am not a climber, I am human, I am a type 1 diabetic, I am flawed and fucked up.
I am as hopeful as I am stupid. I look up and wonder if I can set foot on a spot where none of my kind has ever looked from. That is what it means to live, to be, to took upon the mountain and wonder can I. Here’s the thing I am not special, I am no better than any that may come across these words. I am no better than anyone that will ever read this. There was probably already a half dozen mistakes in my writing already.
It isn’t about what I can do, or what you can do on your own because we do not sit here, read, write, walk or run alone. We do so on the backs of every single person to have done the same. I am no less a human being than anyone else. We are all here based on the awful, hard, destructive, challenging and painful work of ever other person to take a breath, who has dreamed, who has fought to reach for whatever that is for each of us.
The world has seemingly gone to the edge of the health care cliff as COVID-19 and this novel coronavirus has driven most of the world to shut down, eliminate crowds and focus on social distancing all in the homes of keeping the virus from causing their health care systems to get flooded with too many patients that they can’t help.
The world has never seemed so fragile as it does now, as countries have shutdown and travel has been suspended for the vast majority of people. Mother Nature is reminding all of us of how easy it is for everything to change. As we wander, we find a new way, that the world looks so much different than it did just a few months ago.
The pandemic has changed the world but every day we have a chance to change the world in the smallest ways and grand ones. I hope that at this point in the world we can forge a path that is hopeful about what is possible in the future no matter how hard that path may be. I want to be a writer, an explorer of worlds even if they started in my head as nothing but ideas.
That is where all the best ideas came from, built on the backs of every word we have read and everything we have experienced. None of us are telling fully new stories, often they are the same stories just told in slightly different ways. This is one of my own. I don’t have characters but I have a concept I want to explore in my own way. Shall I write this to be commercial or shall I write this story for me? It is both even if this is a long road it is the one, I have wished to take but have never pulled the trigger on.
What I want to do is do serialized fiction where the reader is more active in choosing their own path through the story. The reader is always part of the story even if just as an observer but I want to make a story and a world that they feel part of. It’s still at its beginning and I’ve been holding it in my head for years but it is time to explore it fully and see if there is a group of people out there that will see the value and the worth of the world.
That is my goal now. To take what is titled in my bible of the world the Rift Zone, a science fiction world. I am a sci-fi guy by nature who loved The Expanse series in both its book and TV form. I am taking the realistic bent of how space looks and carrying it forward if differently. That is where I am in my mission, not at he beginning but at the start of the creative process but with a world created, with the foundation built but now I have to give it colour and personality through the people that will inhabit it.
I have to use this time in quarantine to explore the world, the stories I will tell within in and how to make it something that someone out there will want to read. How do I make a sci-fi story my own except through the story and the colours embalmed in the world itself? This is my writer’s journey.