Two... Two...
It's like those movies where someone finds an old spaceship that's been under the ice for a thousand years, and after switching on a few switches and twiddling a few buttons the whole thing fires up and starts pulsing and glowing as if it really hasn't been gathering dust all that time.
Actually I've never seen nor heard of a movie like that, but I like the image as a metaphor for firing up this Blog again after whisking it away from right under your noses nearly 10 years ago to the day. I can only imagine the torture I've put you all through wondering where on earth he went and whether he died or went to prison or why did he stop after all this time etc.
Well, you know how it is. Life gets busy, we get older, the world changes under our feet. Does anyone actually Blog anymore, or has that been replaced with TikTok videos and podcasts? My head spins when I try and work out what's "in" at the moment and what all the young people are doing. I try not to even think about it anymore. As you get older you become less and less concerned with what's popular and hip and you become more interested in what you like and what you enjoy. Or at least that's my experience so far - how's it holding up for you?
I used to enjoy writing this blog. I didn't quite realise that until tonight I logged in and worked my way through all my previous posts. My word - what a time capsule - what a window into a time and world that wasn't all that long ago but somehow seems like a lifetime. And now I feel like blogging again. It's highly possible that I will never feel like this again and this will end up as one more dangling little orphan of a post, separated from its ancestors by decades and never to have any children of its own. But who cares? Let us live for this moment and damn the consequences, as some wise man probably never said.
People sometimes (I was going to write "often" but that would have been a lie) ask me if I still write. My answer is always a slight variant of the same theme. I wrote my books and short stories when my boys were small and went to bed early, leaving me a few undisturbed hours to focus. Now that they're hairy teenagers they go to bed way later than me, and the house is definitely no longer peaceful in the last few hours of the day. Of course I would have this no other way. But if I'm honest, it's not the entire reason I haven't written anything much in a decade.
The real reason is that my experience as a published author involved lots of wonderful experiences that I was grateful for, but also a lot of negative things that still leave a bitter taste in my mouth. The details aren't important. It's sufficient to say that the hard work and frustration doesn't end when a publisher accepts your manuscript. In some ways, that's when it all begins.
There's something else I want to say. I said above that the world has changed, and so it has. When I first conceived of the idea for what would become Tales of the Blue Jade, I was living in a world where it was completely acceptable for a white Australian of European descent to borrow elements of other people's cultures and attempt to blend them willy-nilly into his or her own work.
This is no longer acceptable. And thank god.
Nowadays it would rightly be called "cultural appropriation". I look back now with deep regret at what I didn't see at the time, and I have to say I am deeply thankful that the series sank like a stone and is no longer in print. It's next to impossible these words will ever get to anyone who needs to hear them, but all the same, I want to say publicly that I apologise for any offence I have caused. It was done with good intentions, but that doesn't make it good.
That said, I would like to write again. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I have ideas galore running through my little head, ideas that are not based on stealing from a culture not my own. I'm not sure if I could ever go through the torturous path to publication again, but I think I'd be happy just to get some of these ideas into writing, even if it was just for my own satisfaction.
And so I fire up this long dead blog again. Let's see where this old star-ship can take us.
