Asking a writer to explain his novel is like asking a painter to explain his painting. It cant be done and that's not why it was made in the first place.
There is one political party that believes satanic pedophiles are taking over the world and another political party that thinks we are so stupid that they can force-feed us their anointed politicians. The sad part is both are right to some degree and I have no idea what to believe anymore.
The last year has been one disappointment after the next when it came to expecting anything from the US Government. The stimulus checks were a joke. The pandemic response is and was a joke. The SBA, the State Department, and even the US Coast Guard dropped the ball when it came to doing their jobs for the last year.
Hell, the IRS stopped taking calls sometime last winter and stopped processing returns. All of a sudden last week, they came back to life and in doing so, seemed to ignore the 150 pleas we made through my congressman's office to give our refund back to us because of financial hardship and in lieu of the stimulus checks that never seemed to show up. They still haven't acknowledged that we submitted our 2019 tax return on their website, but had the thoughtfulness to tell us by mail that they were keeping our refund because they needed the money more than we did.
My wife looked at me the other day and said, "You know, it's really expensive to be poor."
She of course is right.
In truth today, we are all heading toward poverty and oblivion, some faster than others, The thing about oblivion is, once your there, it is like climbing out of a hole at the beach. You just keep pulling the sand down upon you as you try to climb out until the tide comes in and drowns you.
It was with all these thoughts that I wrote the book. The two men in it, Simon and Gus, are really just two sides of me. One is a stable establishment kinda guy who sees the writing on the wall but can read it, while the other is a jaded battle-weary soul who just wants to throw it all away and start again.
They were born from those two ideas but became personalities in their own right. As I was writing it, my wife would could home daily and I would give her updates on Gus and Simon and the adventures they had today. They really were just two sides of me though and when writing I sometimes would forget myself and exchange their names mid-chapter much to my editor's confusion.
Once they were written however and the book was sent off to the publisher, the copyright filed and the audio files rendered, that was when they become yours. Simon and Gus belong to you, the reader.
They are yours to use and learn from. Yours to love and hate. In this novel, I have no more I can give them and they, along with the direction the United States takes in this book, is yours alone. However you envision the Army will grow under Gus' leadership, or the Patriotic Unity Stations grow with Simon and his team of volunteers, is up to you.
I can tell you in the next book, Governments of Men, which is painfully stalled somewhere in the Arizona desert right now while I work to make a living by sharing Whither We Tend, they check back in and all hell breaks loose with President Crawford and the Independent Army of Resistance. But it is the adventure they make in the first book that inspires my ideas for them in the second book.
That is why I wrote Whiter We Tend. To share the adventures of Simon and Gus with you as they work to survive in this collapsing hole of existence we are heading toward. It is my hope that you can be ripped from the pain of life today to imagine if just for a few hundred pages what we as a Nation could become.
I wrote so that we could imagine a better place together and talk about it and envision what could come next. I wrote it because there will be a 2024 and life will go on and it is ours to imagine. Let's imagine it together, shall we?
No comments:
Post a Comment