I do not think I am alone in breathing a sign of relief at the end of the Holiday Season. There was not much evidence of any Holiday merriment and good cheer as I went about those two weeks. My current job takes me to approximately one hundred work places of all sorts every week. The most commonly repeated appraisal of the two weeks consisting of Christmas and New Years Day was that it “felt like four Mondays”.

In my own case, I made a very bad decision a few weeks prior to this Holiday Season. I will exercise my self-editing prerogative and leave it at that. I will only say that the results of that decision were that every day for several weeks in early December were “dark, cold and ugly Mondays” for me.

It is said that all types of writing, whether it is labeled Science Fiction, Fantasy, you name it, is “emotionally autobiographical“. I could not agree more. For me at least, writing has little to do with agonizing over the right word to describe a certain character or complete a description. It isn’t a beautifully constructed sentence or a brilliant metaphor or allegory . Hell, I can’t even tell you the difference between the last two.

For me, writing is about making contact with myself. And if that is done in a way that a reader can recognize emotionally in themselves in some way, then it works for both of us. In revising and renewing the novel I wrote 25 years ago, Back outta the World, I am making contact with myself as a young man. It is illuminating to look under those words I wrote then and see what I see now. One theme I see emerging from the protagonist “Jay” was that he was taking his road trip in an attempt to both see new places and flee others. I see, and now describe, Jay’s road trip as ” his attempt to escape conscription into the American Dream”.

I could try to change Jay from Back outta the World. Re-write his story and thus mine. Sounds like a good sci-fi novel actually. I rewrite my old autobiographical road novel and it changes my current life as I go along….hmmm?

Got sidetracked. No, on second thought, I’ll leave Jay alone. Let him contact me and maybe learn something about myself as he goes on his trip. He made his decisions back then and he has to live with them. Come to think of it, so do I.

“May I help who’s next?”

Tags: Christmas Day, New Years Day, road novels, Science Fiction, writing fiction