So my fine peeps, I am working on a new book!  After a long sabbatical doing lots of making, I am back to worldbuilding — this time with my friend Gary Kloster.  We have a great new world we’re working on, and I hope you’ll like it.  It’s my desire to start keeping up with this blog more, so please: watch this space for more soon!

I’ve been reading lots of reports of assault, spray painted swastikas, vandalism and hateful messages on commercial displays on Twitter. I’m actually more frightened now than I was yesterday.

Weirdly it makes me see how a reversal of the “city is dangerous” trope could happen. The countryside is much less policed; if someone decides they don’t like you at an isolated gas station or as you camp somewhere or whatever, you are screwed. And now people think they can do it with impunity. It would be easy to retreat in fear from going out into the American countryside, but that would be wrong.

I read an article yesterday about how a lot of “nice” people who voted for Trump did so because they live in a very limited environment. They never see the Other, so they are afraid of it. They never go outside their small community, so they see other places as scary and full of scary people. They are more likely to be racist and homophobic simply because they’re not exposed to anything but people like themselves. Studies have shown that it’s easier to think badly of people you don’t know and haven’t talked to.

It left me wondering if the answer to some of this is more circulation, more people moving into/through these places that no one visits, or some way to get these people out of their ruts. The coastal areas and the metropolitan areas get a lot more travelers coming through, a lot more variety of people settling there, so the people who live there are more comfortable with people unlike them. Is there some way we could unclog the arteries of familiarity?

Given that the country is just about to embark on a long slide toward more open-minded people being afraid to move outside their comfort zones, I think it’s likely this schism will get worse. And worse, until we have a Hunger Games view of the world on one side, and a Deliverance view of the world on the other.

We can’t let fear stop us from being a united nation who takes care of itself. There must be some way to break the stalemate.

I have no answers to this, but it feels there must be some way we can break down this mutual avoidance. Any ideas?

Vegas is weird. It reminds me of those fish that lure little fish into their mouths with the shiny light. It’s hot, flat, and unchanging in texture in the residential areas, full of malls and condos, with a hostility in the local populace that comes from living in a place based on greed and avarice. The whole gambling lifestyle I find creepy (particularly the way it pervades all of Nevada, in the lowliest convenience stores and the bus stations, and the way all the poor people flock here to try to strike it rich). It’s pretty much everything I don’t like about American culture, all in one place, which makes it amazing and horrific all at the same time.

Given the position I’m in (a Californian from a bohemian-lifestyle family who married an Englishman), it should be a real study in sociology; but somehow, with Trump looming over the presidency, it feels a little apocalyptic. With all the awfulness going on in the country right now, I can’t help but notice how unsustainable it all is: the electricity, the water, the bad processed food and huge quantities of factory-farmed meat, the fact that no one seems to notice any of this but goes heedlessly on into the hedonism of it without a qualm. It feels a little end-of-days, like the last years of Rome: bread and circuses.

That said, the Strip is amazing, and the sheer glitz of the endless acres of gambling machines in each hotel is mind-boggling. It’s an amazing show, even if it’s not my cup of tea. Everyone should see it once, if only as an object lesson, I suppose!

Also, it’s pretty great to go out to breakfast and see people in Starfleet uniforms and Klingon outfits at the tables around you, eating eggs and bacon.

I suspect a lot of people who read my tweets the other day about giving up on writing thought I was having a snit because I didn’t get into Clarion.  I wanted to clarify my stance on this, because it’s hard to explain on Twitter the underlying truth behind my statements (and I probably shouldn’t have tried, anyway, but that’s another story).