Back from Unplanned Hiatus

As my regular readers will have noticed, I’ve been a little bit lax in posting of late. So, as I’m finally back on track and ready to get on with somewhat regular posting again, I thought I’d let you know something of why.

My posting schedule had become a bit more infrequent when I started some new work around last November. Unfortunately, the nature of the work means I can’t talk about what it is publicly (and if you know, as some of you will, please don’t you talk about it publicly either). Work that pays solid money is always going to have to take priority, at least until such time as this blog somehow earns me something solid towards my living costs (and slim chance of that, though if you think it deserves it please do consider contributing to my Patreon – the more I’m making there, the more reliable my posting will be). So while that work is variable, I’m going to take all the days I can of it in order to be financially not-in-a-crisis. Having this work is good news, it means my wife and I are a little more secure (though not as secure as we would be if it were a reliable, set amount of work), and that’s great. It does mean other things were under a little more pressure and some things got squeezed out.

Quakers and Social Media

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Love it or hate it, social media is now part of our world. It's not a purely western phenomenon, nor something restricted to “developed” economies. Not only is it prevalent in the so-called BRICS economies, or even the so-called “Next Eleven”, but it is increasingly a meaningful part of life in pretty much every country where it is available – and it’s available in more than you might think. We might look at how much our computers cost, in the Global Economic North, and the price of iPhones and their most direct competitors, and boggle at the idea that people in poorer countries have access, but remember that far more inexpensive phones exist. Companies want to make money from every population they can, and if that means finding a way to make it affordable to additional populations, that is what will happen. Also, it is worth remembering that every country, no matter how much poorer it may seem, has a wealthy elite. In fact, the biggest barrier to social media adoption in some parts of the world is not wealth, but literacy.

Why Write?

It's an interesting question to consider, why anyone would write for others to read. Writing to make a living requires not only talent and dedication, but also a fair dose of luck – the better you are, the less luck you need, but you will always need luck. So writing with the express intention to make money from it is either foolish, or optimistic (or perhaps better to say “hopeful”).

I felt moved to write about why I write when, as I do from time to time, I was re-reading a collection of essays by Isaac Asimov. Most of these collections are compilations of his regular science fact feature from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (often referred to simply as F&SF, though that is subject to confusion with a description of a literary genre), which might be billed as science fact, but often contained things that took a certain departure from that brief. Each essay begins, almost invariably, with some anecdote from Asimov's own experience.