Unprepared

I’ve been thinking about murder. It was fiction, based on news stories and historical accounts of true murders.

I’ve been crafting scenes and realizing characters, and defining arcs. I’ve been immersing myself in these fiction details. It was enjoyable. It was about the writing, the story telling, the characters, and the richness I felt in finding them all in that one beautiful little chapter.

But today it seems odd, even wrong, to write about violence after such a violent week. Besides America’s gun violence, besides Dallas, besides WaPo’s feature that shows 509 Americans killed by Police this year to date, besides the bombing in Iraq that killed 300, besides these and the anti-Semitic, anti-sanity, anti-progress utterings of Donald Trump, GOP candidate for POTUS, besides the ongoing refugee crises from the ongoing wars and fighting, and the animal abuses and murders….

Well, besides these things, and climate change and the hottest June on record and the smallest Arctic ice on record…besides these things….

I write to entertain myself. The entertainment comes from trying to understand events and people. In my murder mysteries, I attempt to understand how one person comes to decide to kill another and the course of thinking investigators follow to discover who did it and why. In my science fiction, I attempt to bridge technological advances with the impact on societies and individuals, and strive to understand how they cope with the challenges of change, of being on other worlds and traveling through space in another world, the one of the starship.

But the real world is intruding today. Dallas is intruding. I don’t want to write about murder.

This becomes a test. I have my coffee, my goals, and my intentions. I’m here to write. Writing is meditative, a chance to escape the world’s trials and errors and the personal frustrations of living. But the building momentum of what’s been going on, the world’s escalating violence and, sadly, what seems like rising selfishness and hatred, is crashing over me and taking me down.

Now I offer another but. Everything is a spectrum for me. This post is on a spectrum of personal and private thoughts and efforts to understand the world and myself. On the private scale, it gets close to the bone, probably a seven on a 1-10 scale. If I’m ever at ten, I’m emotionally and intellectually naked and truthful. There have been searing moments when I’ve been a ten with myself. It’s ugly and beautiful.

So now, the but, writing this post helps me understand my perspective and permits me to vent. It isn’t deep nor gravely insightful or profound, but still, it’s a release. That’s what’s happened by sitting and writing out my thoughts. Now I can take a deep breath, pivot myself, open a file, and write like crazy.

Just give me a few more minutes, and I’ll willing to try.