Not Giving Up: The Catharsis of Writing

I read something on Facebook yesterday that was uncanny, as my Other Worldly novels’ protagonist Rowan Layne would say. I wanna move to Mars and hang out with aliens. I’m tired of humans. Literally the very focus of the seven novels I started writing seven years ago this month and began publishing in early 2020.

Years ago when I toiled as a government lawyer, I used to doodle in meetings and while listening to boring presentations at conferences to help keep my mind occupied, and to endure. Much like why I started drafting my first novel, Alienable Rights, in November 2017 during one of the most difficult post-9/11 times of my life.

That novel, the first of what would become the Other Worldly series, was pure catharsis. I ultimately rushed to publish it in January 2020 while feeling a sense of angst that I needed to get it out and start drafting the next. The COVID pandemic hit within two months.

Hence, it was good that I jumpstarted the series and self-published, yet I still long—and aim—to republish Alienable Rights after more strenuous editing. You live and learn, or you try to. But as we horrifically experienced on alarming display this week, far too many Americans simply don’t learn. They don’t want to. They never did.

As Voltaire said, It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere.

I wrote and published the second Other Worldly novel, Feeling Alienated, within six months in 2020. Those first two book titles reveal much about what was going on at the time in the US, and what was happening with me. The isolation, the fear, the sense of doom.

Then January 6, 2021 brought full-bore 9-11 trauma back, once again spiraling me and the nation into depths of despair.

Like many, I’ve relived all that and then some the past two days, reminding me that my salvation is writing as a catharsis. Hence, I was already drafting this post in my head in the middle of the night. It only took 24 hours to revert to my chosen method of coping: putting my rage and despair into words of hope and happiness on page after page.

In particular, writing comedic speculative fiction for the past four years after the horrific four years before that in order to process and address the turmoil, violence, hatred, and blatant racism and misogyny in the world.

My fictional otherworld is filled with benevolent aliens. Therein, I can make things right and avenge atrocities. In my novels, Rowan  struggles to see the good in some, but in reality I am no longer willing to believe that there are actually more good than bad humans in the US.

In 2021, I wrote and published books three and four. Aliens Abound sent Rowan Layne into space for the first time to escape a maniacal alien-hating president wreaking havoc after losing an election. Being Alien was set mostly in Scotland where I longed to be, as I do now. Except I cannot easily fly my beloved critters there in an alien spacecraft, so that, too, is as much a fantasy as escaping to the moon.

In 2022, I wrote and published Alien Sensation and began Altogether Alien, though not publishing it until 2023 after moving from a rental house into an over-55 community.  I’m glad I no longer have dangerous individuals living directly behind me, thugs who ultimately materialized in my books. But now I grapple with remaining in Nevada. I’m not at all certain that dangerous individuals don’t still live among me.

Many people are struggling with what’s happening in their communities, their states, and throughout our nation. So I will continue to write to keep my spirits from plummeting further. I’m determined to post to this blog on a weekly basis as always, and I plan for book seven, Aliens Watch, to release early in the new year. It’s been ready for months and I’ve since begun drafting what is supposed to be the final novel, Alien Origins.

Before I comment further on that, I want to say that the entire Other Worldly series reflects ongoing nightmares within our nation, and with humanity itself. My way of coping with it all, and hopefully helping readers feel a little less alone in the world while melding some humor and love among the cruelty and craziness.

Ironically, the upcoming Aliens Watch addresses an issue that is most at the forefront of the heartache I am hearing from friends and seeing on social media this week.

Folks feel betrayed by their, brothers, sisters, parents, or friends who voted their hate while claiming to have made a choice based on the “economy” or  “immigration,” which really just means they hate foreigners of color and want cheaper gas or eggs. They chose cruel deportation of so-called “illegals” and blatant lies about those legally seeking refuge over voting to protect the most vulnerable among us, including their supposed loved ones.

In Aliens Watch drafted during the past year and a half, I addressed the personal pain of now ex-friends and ex-communicated cousins who began to gush over and worship a man not worthy of their admiration in 2016, some absurdly in the name of their “Christian faith” and/or “patriotism.” In doing so, they derided and condescended to me, an actual patriot who worked as a civil servant for the military, because I wouldn’t join them in their selfish, white supremacy hate-fest seeking destruction of the rule of law and evisceration of basic human decency.

Eight years later, once again so many are truly stunned that their friends and loved ones could be so callous, so sickeningly self-absorbed, and so cravenly careless with our democracy and with human lives. The apathy, the avarice, the antagonism. Totally lacking in empathy, and so easily threatened by diversity. Consumed with revenge and roiling resentment that someone else might be getting more than them or taking that which they themselves never earned.

And so I will work my way through this by writing. In order to not succumb to despair, to not let them destroy my will to live or my last glimmer of faith in my nation. I must fight to not isolate and battle the chilling fear lest I become any semblance of the sickness that pervades so many.

Because, as Plato said, The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

I cannot revert to indifference to what is happening around me. Which means Alien Origins won’t be my last book, even if it concludes the Other Worldly series featuring Rowan Layne.

Alien Origins may get me through next year and get me back to Scotland if only in my mind, but the burning need to continue writing is now rekindled. If nothing else than to feel a tad less helpless. Through it all, I will hold fast to the words of Shakespeare from The Merchant of Venice, “But in the end truth will out.”