Andrew Sweet's Blog: Reality Gradient

In the 1970s, scientist discovered the ozone layer was depleting, sparking a mitigation effort that could only succeed by international cooperation. Atticus’s father, Wolf, was on the team that was tracking the effort when they discovered that the hole in the ozone layer was the least of their problems. This is my rough draft of part of the first chapter of the new effort, tentatively titled “Everything.” That working title attests to two things about this piece: I’m attempting to make this appealing for literary readers as well as genre fiction readers. More important to you, though, is that the plot devices in this piece will impact very literally everything in the known universe…and possibly more. It’s an ambitious work that will take months to years to finish. Like every work of fiction, the story has to begin somewhere. And here, we start with a happy couple undergoing a routine pre-natal visit.

There are as many stars in the sky as there are sands at the beach, and as many types of beautiful children—all worthy of love.

Gold-embossed script etched these words across the bottom of a framed poster clinging to the burnt-orange wall of the patient examination room. Against the blues and blacks of the poster’s quasi-Van-Govian background, that sentence, coupled with a similarly embossed star, exuded almost a spiritual aura. The words whispered truth in that subdued, confident way that defied refutation. Dr. Conrad felt the same sensation every time he visited room 231, as though something miraculous were about to happen. The second thought he always had was how once he fully entered the room, the poster disappeared from the patient’s view, blocked by the door’s arc and trapped behind his white coat.

“Are you the doctor?” the woman seated on the patient bed asked, as though his coat and explicit nametag, along with the bulging clipboard, were not hints enough. He checked the board.

“Nancy Beichner?” the doctor asked. He nearly stumbled as his heel caught on a tuft of the bright orange shag carpeting layered over the ground. Dr. Conrad cursed under his breath as he recalled the former co-worker who’d latched onto that trend. Thick carpeting was meant to provide a more “homey” feel to expecting mothers. Bryce Conrad wasn’t certain that the carpeting projected “home-ness,” but a handful of old rust-colored stains attested to the fact that it definitely absorbed body fluids…and defied cleaning. He licked his dry lips as he teetered on the edges of his toes struggling to regain his footing without launching his clipboard toward his new patient.

“You’re getting close, I see,” he said, letting his eyes fall to her baby bump, jutting out with a thin inch-wide strip of pale cream-colored skin showing between a bright-white top with tiny flowers decorating each intersection of threading, and overly-tight bell-bottom pants that most women seemed to wear since the seventies began. “First child?” he asked.

Nancy nodded. Her frantic eyes followed him as he approached her with his hand extended. After considering it for a second, eyes flicking between his hand and his hopefully jovial smile, she lay her hand in his with all of the daintiness of a Southern debutant.

“Bryce Conrad,” he said, as he shook her hand gently. “You can call me Dr. Conrad.”

“Hi Dr. Conrad,” she said, offering a weak smile. “I guess you know my name. I go by Nancy. Thank you for seeing me on such short notice.”

“Certainly. So…Nancy, why are you here today? I understand you already have a doctor to help manage your pregnancy, is that right?”

“Dr. Stockhart,” Nancy said. “She…no longer practices. There was that—”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “I remember. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”

He wanted to smack himself in the forehead. Stockhart had shocked all of them when she’d killed herself via drug overdose, from the looks of it, intentional. And he should have remembered that because the woman’s name was right there on the same page as Nancy’s name.

Great job, Bryce, he chastised himself.

Another man’s throat-clearing was followed by a slow shuffling sound. The unexpected company caught Dr. Conrad’s attention, drawing it toward the same door through which Dr. Conrad had just passed. Someone, a male someone, lingered there, pacing in small, slow circles. It didn’t seem as though the man had noticed the doctor’s entrance.

“I haven’t felt them kick,” she confessed. “Not for two days. I just wanted to know if—” She trailed off without completing the sentence, but Dr. Conrad got the gist of it: concerned mother-to-be checking on their child. This should be a simple, routine checkup, though it was curious to him why she felt obliged to bring the gentleman along.

“Is this your husband?” Dr. Conrad asked loudly, in a thinly veiled effort to stop the man’s pacing and draw his engagement to the discussion they were about to have about the couple’s unborn child.

“Yes,” she said, motioning to the man with her head as an embarrassed flush waxed crawled up her neck into her features, then drained again slowly from the high cheekbones of her diamond-shaped face. She turned toward the man, eyes oozing adoration, “he’s my one and only. Wolf, this is Dr. Conrad.”

The disinterested husband didn’t turn, or even acknowledge. That gave Dr. Conrad time to examine him without consequence. The man had the chiseled facial features of a male runway model, though his body was so thin and short that his head seemed a touch too large for him, lolling at times atop his neck. When the man nodded absently at some thought only he knew, he reminded Dr. Conrad of wobbler toys, with their disjointed heads bobbing up and down. And he wondered vaguely what the woman’s interest in this man actually was.

The man muttered something Dr. Conrad couldn’t hear, causing the doctor to swivel his head for a more direct gaze where he noticed that the man’s eyes had snagged on something. At least, the man’s movement ceased and he seemed to stare at the poster now, despite it being mostly concealed between the door angle and the doctor’s positioning. The man now studied it with near fatalistic intent, shifting his weight hungrily back and forth as the completely impractical carpet attempted to swallow the glossy corefram shoes that peaked out beneath his army-gray wide-hemmed slacks that touched the floor on either side of their pointed toes. 

The doctor turned his attention to the stack of papers fixed to his clipboard.

“First thing, from what I see here, the baby is fine,” he said. “Sometimes they just don’t feel like moving. And…it looks like…you’ve had an ultrasound recently?” he asked. “Has anyone gone over it with you yet?”

Nancy shook her head. “No, not yet. We don’t—didn’t want to know the sex.”

“And now?”

“All this time I didn’t know what to call them, whether a little boy or a little girl. They might have been dying and I didn’t know. I think I need to know, Dr. Conrad.”

Dr. Conrad flipped a couple of pages, and sure enough there was a copy of the ultrasound image. He examined it for a second, then lifted his eyes toward the woman, followed by a quick eyebrow raise toward the still-pacing husband. “Are you certain?”

She bit her lower lip as she followed the doctor’s gaze toward her husband, whose back was now fully to her. A mischievous grin floated across her face as she glanced to the side, then nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Mrs. Beichner,” he said softly, looking at the blobby black-and-white image, and squinting. He flipped a page. No hints from the ultrasound tech. He flipped back. “Uh…Mrs. Beichner,” he stuttered again, trying to interpret the ultrasound blurred in precisely the wrong places. The sex of the child was either male, or a female with overly pronounced sexual organs. He rolled the dice in his head. Odds of the child being intersex were roughly just under two percent, and there was nothing to be done anyway, at least by the woman right then, if that was the case. His lips formed a thin line as he thought it out. “It’s a boy,” he said softly.

“Are you sure?” Nancy asked, clearly picking up on his hesitation.

“I’m sure,” he said, and then again: “I’m sure. A healthy-looking, happy, baby boy.”

The look in her was fluid, and difficult to read after that. The emtions written across the face of the hopeful mother oscillated between pitious, drooping exhaustion, and unrestrained joy. He sought to bolster the latter by pointing out the things in the sonogram that he could see more clearly.

“Ten fingers,” he said with a smile as he stroked his graying beard, “and ten tiny toes. A perfect little boy. You should be a happy mama.”

She smiled at this, flashing a couple of perfect white teeth between lips just a shade too dark red to be natural.

“Did you hear that, Wolf?” she asked. Dr. Conrad assumed that Wolf was the husband’s first name—unusual, but not the strangest he’d heard. “Table” was the strangest, given to a little girl by a couple of hippies who were neither aesthetically beautiful, nor seemed disciplined enough to care for a newborn. He shuddered to think what had happened to that child, born only a handful of months earlier.

The fact that his child was male didn’t change Wolf’s attentitiveness. He seemed disinterested, or perhaps even preturbed, as his pace quickened. Nancy asked Dr. Conrad once if he was absolutely sure that it was a boy. The man continued to pace as the doctor explained that yes, it was a boy, and in the ultrasound, you could just seen his forming penis protruding just barely above what the doctor assured her was a scrotal sack. It may not have been. And honestly, could have been a smudge on the ultrasound created by a careless tech. Dr. Conrad would have a visit to the ultrasound department to make after he finished up with the Beichners.

“You wanted…a boy…right?” the doctor asked, careful to leave emphasis off of every word. His question finally stopped the father’s pacing for long enough to respond. “A girl,” the thin man murmured beneath his dark reddish-brown mane, without directly acknowledging the doctor’s existence. Wolf ran his fingers through his prematurely-graying matching red moustache and muttered something to himself that Dr. Conrad couldn’t make out. But he’d had enough of the man and turned his focus back to the woman.

Nancy reminded the doctor of his own mother. It wasn’t her features. The woman’s dark black hair, coal-black, looked nothing like his late mother’s golden locks. Nor did the woman’s roundish face match the Nordick features that the doctor’s mother had passed on to him, with his hawkish gray eyes and sharp cut chin. But the way the woman gazed toward the Dr. Conrad’s clipboard, still opened to the ultrasound image, as though she’d already met the child, and was ready to love him no matter that he wasn’t the girl that they’d been expecting.

In a similar respect, the man unfortunately reminded the doctor of his own father, down to the disinterest that the men shared toward anything familial. In a future the doctor could have predicted, the misery that he’d felt at his father’s hands for so many years would soon be visited upon the man’s offspring. Caught offguard by his own emotions, the doctor slipped slightly, staggering from the weight of churning memories.

The entire room went black. To Dr. Conrad’s surprise, the impact on the soon-to-be family was minimized to only an interruption in the father’s rapid pacing. Nearly a minute passed in total darkness in the windowless interior room, before the lights slowly warmed their way back to blinding brightness. 

Nancy looked up at her husband, her eyebrows furrowed into a tent of worry. There was something between them, the doctor could see now. If he had to guess, and he did because in no way was he going to ask about that look, a shared secret lingered between them, one so intense that it may very well have been the only thing keeping their relationship together. But, Dr. Conrad reminded himself, I’m still not psychic.

“What was that?” Nancy asked, likely about the faltering lighting, her disproportionate fear transforming the soft husk of her voice, rending it into a pitch that bordered on squeal.

“Nothing,” Wolf muttered, though he stood transfixed, as though listening for the next thing to happen. When nothing did after another fifteen seconds, Bryce Conrad saw something flicker away behind his eyes. Dr. Conrad addressed Nancy, determined to deflect some of the anxiety of the moment with a bit of levity.

“Well, at least there’s nothing to worry about with the baby. He looks as healthy as he should be, and your workup seems better than normal. You are a natural at this,” he stated boldly, then, “Now our lighting on the other hand, seems like it could use some work.” Dr. Conrad let out a low chuckle, but neither Wolf nor Nancy joined in.

Despite not playing along, the expectant mother did seem less worried at his words, and eventually offered a small mercy smile in gratitude. The man seemed more concerned at the doctor’s words, somehow. His pacing resumed and his stare at the door intensified until the doctor surmised that maybe he was less thinking of leaving, which he could have done at any time, than waiting for someone else to arrive, although the doctor couldn’t imagine who it might be the man thought would interrupt them. As though he’d thrown the question haughtily at the universe itself, the universe answered. The door bursted open and three men in dark suits entered abreast each other. Had they been any more abreast of each other, they would have gotten stuck in the doorway. The woman looked up at the man, her frown back and deepening.

“Work?” she asked.

“Work,” he responded gruffly.

“Do you have to?” she asked, tears gathering in her eyes. “This is our time, to celebrate our baby. What could possibly be so important to take you away right now?”

The doctor almost gasped at the reprimand he hadn’t expected. He shoved his glasses up over his hooked nose and listened to the argument unfold.

“You knew when you—” the man said.

But that wasn’t it. Whatever secret it was between them, it was stronger than his disinterest, and stronger than her resistence.

“—married you. I know. Go then,” she said, though her resignation bore within it a tinge of disgust. “Service your masters.”

“You know my service is to save—”

She sighed. “I know. I know. Just…I want some time for us too. You can’t save the world all by yourself, Wolf. There must be someone else you can lean on, so you can spend a little time with your family?” Her hand moved to her belly, and rested there.

To the doctor’s surprise, the man snapped into the conversation. Wolf knelt beside her and took her hand in his own, an awkward move given that she was currently sitting on a patient’s bed, and so her knees were about even with his face. He did it anyway, lifting his hands above his shoulders to reach hers.

“I love you,” he said, not breaking eye contact. Dr. Conrad watched her shoulders sag after Wolf’s declaration, but she didn’t respond. Dr. Conrad presumed that the battle for his attention had been going on for a while. The man stood, turned quickly with a militaristic pivot,  gave a quick look back, and followed the interlopers from the room. The woman once again reached toward the sonogram image, apparently having already forgotten about the man in favor of the son she would one day get to raise. She smiled, but it seemed to take effort, and Dr. Conrad no longer believed the unadulterated join her mouth projected as her fingers made contact with the clipboard. 

“My boy,” she said with glassy eyes. Her fingers brushed against his little head. “My beautiful son.”

Dr. Conrad gave her a sympathetic touch on the shoulder. Her hand lay atop his a moment later, pressing his fingers down on her shoulderblade, slipping his index finger perhaps unintentionally toward her bare clavicle of the wide-necked shirt. By their touch, he discerned her too-rapid pulse as her heart forced the blood in her veins to move faster, faster, to flee some unknown danger. That touch revealed anxiety, fear, and hope all wrapped up into the nearly inperceptible vibration of the woman’s slender neck. She squeezed his hand once before she dropped her hand back down to her baby bump again, humming a tune he could feel in the vibration of her skin more than hear.

The lights flickered once more and her hand found his again, gripping fiercely. Something in the changes in the light scared her. To him it was just the faulty electrical wiring of an old hospital that many said needed to be demolished and rebuilt. To her, there was something else in it. Maybe she was a spiritualist, and maybe it was a ghost she feared, letting her imagination steal her common sense. Or perhaps it was that shared secret again, that thing that locked this clearly negligent husband into a life with a woman deserving of so much more.

He was projecting again. Dr. Conrad pulled his hand away slowly. This wouldn’t be the only woman in his Denver office in nineteen seventy nine who would trigger his protective instincts. He couldn’t save them all from poor life decisions. And he was only one doctor. Whatever fear gripped her now, he knew, it would be nothing compared to the fear of trying to protect a curious infant, a life force so dependent on her that her neglect could kill him in minutes. Whatever fear she now felt would pale compared to that, but as well, he knew by his own three children at home, whatever love she thought she knew now would be a drop in the ocean of the new depths of love she would experience as well.

It was his turn to sigh as he turned to leave the room. The lights flickered again, and he saw her hand go up to where his had been, but his fingers were no longer there. She turned, confused, toward him as he flashed an apologetic smile.

“The nurse will be in soon,” he assured her before he turned toward the door, shut tight after Wolf’s exit. Across the top of the painting were those familiar words he knew by heart, or so he thought. Something seemed off as he looked on. The star clinging to the top, he’d thought, had been a six-pointed star of David. But the one he now saw only had five points, the type of star a child might draw in a second grade art class, complete with uneven points drawn in the same gold, but with the stroke a child might also use. He scrunched up an eyebrow at it. More likely, he told himself, I was mistaken before. This sentiment was comforting enough until he read the words again:

There are as many types of beautiful children as there are stars in the sky—every one as beautiful, inside and out.

Could I have been so wrong about that? he asked himself. Bryce Conrad rubbed his eyes. He casually blamed exhaustion as he worried the door open, before stumbling slightly from the thick carpeting onto the linoleum flooring.

Hey parents, don’t read this around your children if you want them to believe in Santa. There are a few spoilers in here, not just of Santa, but of other traditions as well. I hope, however, that you will continue to read through, as these wandering thoughts do come together toward the end. So…without further ado…much ado about Christmas…

A long time ago, there was this fledgling little religion, an upstart really, in the heart of Rome. This religion is called Christianity, and was a brand new tome added to the already established religious repertoire, which at the time, was the Roman hierarchy of gods (itself adapted from Greek religious tradition). Let’s sit with that for a minute, because this is too often glossed over.

There was an established religious tradition in ancient Rome, and it was the worship of the pantheon of gods and goddesses, ranging from Jupiter (or Zeus) down to Hades, and so on. This was the normal state of the Roman empire at the time. The people worshiped multiple deities, that’s what they taught their children, and that’s what drove the holidays they celebrated. They had what to us would be weird festivals for all the gods, like the celebration of Saturnalia, and my personal favorite, Lemuralia, where they spent their energies exorcising “demons,” which would be entities like the vengeful spirit of Remus, Romulus’ twin who was murdered upon the founding of Rome. (Sometime in the early 7th century, Lemuralia was finally taken over by Christianity, allegedly, by All Saints’ Day.) My point here is only that there were many, many religious traditions established and in place, and along came this little religion that simply would not die.

Back then, there was another religion that would not die just beneath the surface of Roman life at the time. Trust me, this comes back to Christmas, I promise! But this religion is Judaism, which still lasts to this day. As a child, I was taught that the main difference between Jewish and Christian faiths was that the Jewish people worshipped a god called Yaweh, and the Christians believed that Jesus was the son of god. To me at the time, this was all the difference in the world, until I eventually learned that Yaweh is just another way to express Christianity, and that the Talmud is really just the old testament. So in a very real sense, Christianity is, from my understanding today, an evolution of Judaism, as opposed to something starkly different.

My, how things have changed! With the advent of prosperity gospel, and the downplay of Jesus’ influence (on the religion named after the man, as if that makes sense), I would argue that the religion has continued to evolve over the years. To be clear, one of the chief differences between Christianity and Jewish religions from a morality perspective is that Judaism requires participants to perform certain acts, whereas Christianity, especially today, requires nothing of the participants that can be reviewed and confirmed in the outside world. In other words, if I say I’m a Christian, you have no way of knowing whether or not that’s true, no matter how it is that I conduct myself in the world. (In my opinion, without the separation of acts from religious commitment, prosperity gospel would never have become possible.)

The situation is redeemable though. Ever since Martin Luther, Christians (read: ley-people) have been in charge of the protestant church. So through the people, people like you, the religion can be evolved back. And this is where Christmas comes in, folks, as well as a confession: I am not a Christian. If you know me, you know this, but you should also know that I do celebrate Christmas. There’s a good reason for it.

Finally, to the point!

I can think of no other holiday in modern America, or perhaps even in the entirety of western civilization, where the emphasis is placed as much on actions, external to self. Christmas is a day when it’s not enough to have that “personal relationship with god,” but when it’s important to act, to let others know how you feel about them, and that you care. It’s an act that builds community, and brings people closer together. So I celebrate. It doesn’t matter to me much that there’s a Winter Solstice that the holiday supplants, or that it, by tradition, follows along with Saturnalia, the Roman holiday in which people did exchange gifts. Christmas is, despite the commercialization, despite the over-eager advertisers trying to start the holiday months earlier, is a community-building event.

In fact, I think that it’s more special because of these historical connections. I think that Christmas transcends one religion, transcends ideology, and has the capacity to unwind a lot of the hurt we’ve been through in recent years. But to do it, we have to understand it, and not simply go through the motions. The gift we give, the most important of which is always time, is how we come together. The importance is not, nor will it ever be, what those gifts are (although I do love my Cocktail Smoking Kit I got as an early present). What really matters is that they are from other people in our lives, families, and society, and they very much mean that someone is thinking of you.

And that’s what we really need, especially now that there seems to be so much other-ing happening. We need someone to be thinking of us. So Merry Christmas, and if you’re reading this, know that someone is thinking of you, whether you know it or not. I hope for you the best, and I will forever believe in the power of community to change the world. Your gift giving, in so many ways, is an act of power by strengthening those ties with others.

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bernie Sanders. Specifically, I’ve been thinking about the Social Democrats, Socialism, and the arguments that distinguish between them. I’ve also been reading up on the shenanigans surrounding the death of the pension, a large part of which happened between 1970 and 2010. What do these have in common? Well, innovation, of course.

Let me stake my position so that you know where I’m coming from. I began many years ago as a sort of idealist, eagerly consuming literature about the founding of the United States, the rise and subsequent fall of communism, and the petty dictators mixed throughout. Of the types of economic systems, I’ve always loved the emphasis that socialism puts on protecting the individual, over the capitalist model, which is seemingly in a perpetual battle to determine exactly how “laissez- faire” the economic activity should be, and whether the government should play any role in the economy. But, from my perspective and over the years, I’ve yet to see a single example of a successful socialist economy that has survived. And on paper, that’s a huge endictment. But lately, as of the last ten years or so, I’ve been engaging in that dangerous passtime of thinking. And it’s in this process that I challenged some of my own assumptions.

One of my assuptions was that socialism is doomed to fail. This may be true, or may not be, but there’s one thing that we must admit: socialism never had a fair shake. The problem with most of the socialist systems is that the revolutions, soft or hard, didn’t occur in a vaccuum. These events occurred in a world in which other, more established nations, lingered on the sidelines waiting, and sometimes not waiting, but in any event hoping for the experiments to fail. And, as with the ever evasive position of the electron, the very act of observing these things drove certain outcomes. I’m convinced at this point that the western world, which I love being a part of and I do lover our rich history, interfered extensively in the potential of any socialist economy. But also, revolutionary leaders, feeling the very real external threat, transitioned so quickly that they overburdened the systems for feeding people, and for maintaining stability, and thus generated things like the Great Leap Forward, for one example (there are many). I’m not suggesting socialism is the evolution of the economic system that we all should strive for, but only that it’s not the bogeyman that people seem to believe, and not inherently doomed to failure. Socialism, in a very real sense, is an innovation in itself though, and that fact is definitely interesting.

One point I have yet to convince myself on, and am researching currently, is innovation. The claim that I hear made the most whenever I hear someone attempt to discredit socialism is that socialism fails innovation. An easy thing to do is drag out the cars in cuba, decades old and many gas guzzlers. Aside from technically being an authoritarian government, which I should point out is independent of economic policy (i.e. authoritarian socialist and capitalist countries both exist today), there’s one thing Cuba caught my attention on regarding the topic of innovation: a lung cancer vaccine. This is something I can’t imagine even being attempted to develop in the United States, for fairly obvious reasons. This is what brought me to my first serious question about innovation: what innovation are we talking about when we discuss innovation in the United States?

After all, sub-prime mortgages were technically correctly called innovations. Machine-learning instant trades in the stock market are also examples of innovations. So are PEP (Pooled Employee Retirement Plans) and Cash-Account retirement plans. Three of these last four innovations disrupted the lives of millions, and all four were at play when the nation went through the Great Recession. Does the direction of innovation matter? It’s one thing to claim to innovate, and an entirely different thing to claim innovation at the good of society. For example, right now, artificial intelligence is being used to generate books en masse, which generally lowers the price that individual authors can charge, and makes readers more skeptical of quality as the quality of artificially generated books is not, as of this typing, up to par with actual authors. Expect that to change soon. And then an entire industry is at risk to disappear.

In both socialist and capitalist claiming economies (most are somewhere in between), it takes government intervention to reign in innovations that have gone off the rails. Also, it’s important to note that innovation comes from individuals, and, from what I can tell, a mixture of knowledge and opportunity, and room to fail. There is nothing about socialism or capitalism, either, that indicates to me that innovation is more likely in one versus the other. Between China’s rapid emergence of capabilities in space and autonomous vehicles and the entire Cold War, among other things, it’s safe to say that innovation is not chiefly an American thing, but a human thing. Where there are humans, there will be innovation. Freedom to fail is definitely a contributor, as experimentation contributes innovation too, and where such freedom is allowed (either by strategic experimentation or generally in the public), then innovation will follow.

As such, I’m sticking to my guns: it is not the economic system that causes a state to stagnate and fail, but the all-too-common propensity for corruption. I’ll talk more on the concept of corruption later, and have done so before. But the economic system isn’t the determiner, from my understanding. Corruption is much more the problem, and in a single-party system, as strict socialist states have tended to be, corruption may easily take hold, as it does in many of our states which have single-party rule. More on that later.

This letter was sent to the distro of Authors Against Book Bans, and republished here for posterity.

from Authors Against Book Bans

With the election of the Trump administration and its policies as embodied in Project 2025, we authors have deep concerns about how our publishers will be operating and how publishers will advocate for and protect authors. Trump's agenda explicitly calls for the criminalization of authors, teachers, librarians, and publishing professionals with consequences including, “imprison[ment],” and being “classed as registered sex offenders” (Pg 4, Project 2025). For authors who are not citizens, this could also result in deportation. This promises to be a pro-censorship, pro-book-banning administration, and the successful implementation of its policies will require willing compliance of America's institutions, including its corporations.

The freedom to write is as important as the freedom to read. We have been heartened by many publishers' willingness to engage in legal and legislative pathways to fight book banning, and want to be sure that you will double-down on your fight during this consequential time.

This past week, AABB held open forums with authors from all genres and age levels to better understand author concerns and needs. While this may not be a complete list due to the rapid turnaround, we know we have a short time before January to prepare for what is to come, and we want to start this conversation sooner rather than later.

As authors, we need you to:

Continue to acquire and promote books by LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC voices. We are concerned that these voices under particular attack will be silenced or discouraged, directly and/or indirectly.

Be unequivocal in your support of LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC authors. We need to know that no author will be asked to “tone down” or erase elements in their books to please potential censors or to avoid being targeted by unjust laws in certain states. Authors need to know that we can continue to speak our truths in our works and remarks.

Guarantee the safety and confidentiality of all personal information that exists in your portals, or that has been shared for book promotion. We need publishers to refuse to provide lists of:

Authors or staff they know to be immigrants, Muslims, individuals with backgrounds from Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Yemen, Gaza et al (targeted under Trump's promise to expand the “Muslim ban”)

All books by queer or trans authors, or that include queer or trans characters or content

Authors and their citizenship, birthplace, and/or other personal information

Books that reference diversity, equity, inclusion, sexual orientation, gender identity, racism, privilege, or “critical race theory” etc as defined or listed on page 4 of Project 2025

Refuse to provide “ratings” of books that goes beyond the current industry standard categorization of books by age group.

Resist requests for authors to sign contractual language for appearances that impinges upon our free speech in ways including but not limited to: written or spoken language, personal expenditures, personal advocacy.

Provide security in states or locations where an author may be under threat or has received threats. If an author is arrested for discussing their book in a public space, we need you to promise to provide legal aid. We need clear industry standards regarding author security and direct contact information for security and legal needs.

Stand against the blanket weaponization of “pornography,” “obscenity,” “triggering,” and “inappropriate” as they have been used in widespread book bans to target anything with queer content, sex, or references to racism, bigotry, misogyny, abortion, etc. Project 2025 states that people who produce or distribute anything deemed “pornographic” should be jailed, though it does not define pornographic, nor does it seem to adhere to the SCOTUS standard of pornography.

Ensure the freedom of every author to use the terms targeted on pages 4-5 of Project 2025 (which include but are not limited to: sexual orientation and gender identity, diversity, equity, and inclusion, gender, gender equality, gender equity, gender awareness, gender-sensitive, abortion, reproductive health, reproductive rights, etc) freely in their works. We need to know you will continue to send LGBTQIA+ and BIPOC authors to schools, libraries, and festivals funded in whole or in part by federal grants.

Provide training on author safety and emergency contacts for situations when an author feels unsafe.

Be more aggressive and more public in fighting book bans and censorship at local, state, and the national level.

We approach all these needs with the assumption of your support, and we will be vigilant to make sure that any divergence on these crucial points will be noted and protested. It's imperative that publishers, like authors, do not obey in advance. We must be aligned against policies that promote censorship, book bans, and the criminalization of storytelling. We look forward to working together with you and with all the other organizations fighting for our fundamental freedoms to read and to write.

Sincerely,

Authors Against Book Bans

Stephen was a normal enough fellow, and he followed a very predictable routine. A toymaker by trade, he woke in the morning, packed his tools, and went to his office to carry on the family business. The sign on the door read “Stephen and Sons,” but that was his father’s sign. His father had passed some time ago and left the store to him and his brother, Daniel. Eventually, Daniel had left to go work in a clock factory, adding to his wind-up toy knowledge ideas in advanced engineering to develop ever more complex clocks, some that only had to be wound once every fifteen years. One of these is what awoke Stephen this morning, chiming with the predictable call of the coo-coo bird. He arose, kissed his wife, once again packed his tools, and left to his modest, if not reliable, job in the little toy shop in the village.

This was his calling, and not some job in the big, bustling city. The gleams of joy on the faces of the children who came into his shop, wondering at every invention that he’d made, and every toy that he’d personally assembled by his own designs. The walls of his shop were adorned with shelves, altogether holding nearly a hundred years of toys. His shop had the fortunate location of being just on the corner of the only bridge leaving Evoation into the wider world beyond, and so a good number of his shoppers were visitors from other parts of the world. He liked the idea that his toys kept children happy outside of Evoation, as well as in the sleepy little town.

But he had a problem. Every year, the materials to build his toys became more and more expensive. He’d noticed it first five years before, when his wood went up to ten dollars a plank. After five years had passed, he was up to nearly twenty dollars a plank. This winter, as he went through his budget, he scratched his head and pushed up his glasses as he summed the profits of the last year. They were not equivalent to his expenses. In fact, he had spent almost half again what he’d earned. One glance at the line that showed his savings told him that he had at most another year or two before his shop would go under.

So on the blustery, snowy evening when the largest toy manufacturer in the known world came into his home, offering to annex his little shop to the toy manufacturer’s already massive empire, Stephen listened.

“You can do everything just as you do now,” promised the portly man with a laugh and a twinkle in his eye. “Just you send me ten percent of the profits, and I’ll send you the wood that I get. I have a massive discount because I use so much, you see, and you can be part of that. It’s an economy of scale.”

Stephen’s wife, Karen, sat next to him at the table, with worry across her brow. She gave him a glance that told him not to do it, and Stephen heeded her glance and said that he would think about it.

“A wise man,” said the boisterous man. “And you married well too, I can see that. I’ll give you a week to think it over, but I really must then retract my offer. Business awaits in other locations. I have only so much time and money, and it doesn’t do to not use both efficiently.”

Over the next week, Stephen tossed and turned, having dreams repeatedly about the man’s offer, and about the red ink on his balance sheets. By the time the week had passed, he’d convinced himself that the man’s offer was good. Stephen sent a letter to the man indicating as much, over his wife’s protestations. The man sent a contract back, and Stephen signed it straightaway, and for the first year, things were spectacular. The man sent the wood at pennies on the dollar, and Stephen made his toys, and sold his toys, and brought joy to the faces of the children.

The next year, the price of wood yet again went up. Along with a letter from the man that said how apologetic he was, and that the price had gone up on him as well. It was still cheaper than before, so Stephen felt that his deal had been a good one. The man also sent that year a few boxes of the man’s toys, manufactured somewhere Stephen had never been or seen, and asked that Stephen display them in the windows alongside his own toys. This Stephen did eagerly, as the man had helped him so much that Stephen thought it was still a bargain.

It was around this time that a different man brought his son in looking for toys for a Christmas celebration. That man, Albert, was a regular and lived on the other side of town, so hadn’t frequented the shop often. But as soon as he walked in, Albert noticed the toys in the window, and pulled Stephen aside.

“Those toys,” he said, pointing. “Those were made by Hinderson Toys, right?”

“Yes,” said Stephen, a bit concerned as to the man’s tone.

“You know I’m a woodworker. I used to chop down trees in the forest just beyond the church to the west. That is, until Hinderson put a fence up. A few years back, Hinderson bought the land back there, and now I have to buy wood from him. The price is so high that it keeps me barely able to feed my son. We saved for months to come buy a toy from you, but I don’t think we can. Not when you’re working with Hinderson.”

That moment, the man took his son and left. The boy’s face was what impacted Stephen the most. He saw the longing, aching pain that he as a child had felt so often when he’d seen toys that he wanted but couldn’t have.

That year, he got another letter. This one said that soon, he would find an entire crate of toys from Hinderson that he was expected to put up. And, the letter continued, that the price of wood had gone up on him again. This time, the price was even higher than he had ever had before, and his entire savings would be wiped out if he made any more toys. So it was with a heavy heart that he replaced all of the displayed toys he’d made with love and affection for the machined things that were now in the window. And it was with an even heavier heart that he realized the truth. He wasn’t a toymaker any longer, as he couldn’t afford to make toys anymore.

The man he’d trusted, he realized, had been the same man who’d caused the price of wood to go up in the first place. He’d been tricked, but now, there was nothing to be done. As he talked it over with his wife, she asked why he didn’t just send the toys back and refuse to sell them. But it was too late. He hadn’t made any new toys to sell, and even if he had, they’d be more expensive to make and sell than anything Hinderson sent him. He told her they’d just have to make do, and for a while, they did.

The next year, another letter came from the man. This one said that things were bad for toys everywhere, and Stephen would have to pay for the Hinderson toys that he now sold in the window. Stephen couldn’t afford to pay for the toys for resale. He told the man this, and the man sent another letter. This letter said that if Stephen wanted to sell his shop, Stephen could stay and work it for a salary. Stephen didn’t see that he had a choice, so he did exactly that. For a while, Stephen and his wife lived off of the proceeds of that sale, but when his savings were used up, he found himself reliant on the money the man gave him for salary. 

When the man sent a letter the next year, saying that the toy business was still suffering, but he was sure that it would be better soon. However, in the meantime, Stephen would have to take a pay cut. Barely able to afford to feed himself and his wife, Stephen threw the letter into the fire in frustration. He packed his clothes and set off across the long bridge.

It took him some time to get to Hinderson Toys Headquarters, and when he did, he was appalled at what he saw. Warehouses were full to overflowing with wood, some of which looked as though it had been there for years. Three separate toy stores were connected to the property, each with lines of people out the door. Through one window, he saw the portly man and stormed in. The man didn’t appear to be suffering at all, despite this supposed blight on toy sales. He confronted the man, and the man only laughed in that boisterous way that made his belly bounce up and down.

“You believed me,” he said, snickering. “It’s not my fault you didn’t check first and find out who I am. How do you think I built my empire in the first place.”

It was then that Stephen realized he’d been tricked, and tricked completely. If you go into Evoation today, you’ll see Stephen and Sons toys, and a wall full of toys for sale, all at reasonable prices. There, however, is nobody named Stephen working there any longer. But just outside the front, under a sheet of newspapers, you may find him still, asleep under a bench, muttering seemingly nonsense words about promises broken.

I had a bad day yesterday.

Watching wholly unqualified and seemingly deliberately anti-qualified candidates being pitched to lead our nation has worn on me a bit. I can’t possibly see how someone like RFK JR can be good to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Can you? If you don’t know anything about him, and you think “oh, he’s a Kennedy,” then you’re falling for it. Would it do me any good to explain that genetics aren’t as strong as you think they are? Would it do you any good to tell you that the most qualified person to run any organization, out of 350 million, is rarely the offspring of someone who’s run that agency successfully in the past? This is not true. And Elon Musk as Department of Government Efficiency head is a bad joke. I won’t even mention that there are two folks heading that department—an even worse joke. I guess I just did.

Here’s what I’m really struggling with. As we watch these things unfold before our eyes, we’re so shocked that we’re not thinking strategically about the future. The Executive Branch is massive, you all. A lot of the information we get out of what the government is doing comes from Executive Branch functions, and this is what’s really at stake. Are we downloading and archiving those data? Because, when it comes to it, without reliable information, how can we make good decisions? We’ve seen what Trump did last time to “tweak” what he could of what comes out of the government. Are we ready for that again? Remember that research I’m also doing (posted the other day)? Guess how much data comes from the Executive Branch for that sort of project. A lot. And it’s typically good data because of the non-partisan nature of the civil servants that do that job.

If you know of an organization that’s pulling down federal data right now, please let me know. I’d love to help do that, and perhaps store it in a decentralized way so that we can be assured that we get access. I mean, for publicly available data anyway.

But what about government secrets that we’re not privvy to? There’s literally nothing I can do to help with that, so I’ve got to right now have a lot of faith that our feds are doing it.

Here’s the deal, folks. If running our country into the ground to gain power is what is happening (it is), then nothing is sacred to these people. And when, not if, Project 2025 get’s underway, guess what? Institutional non-partisans get replaced by lapdogs and lackeys, and any information that contradicts The Party’s message goes away. This isn’t me making stuff up. Read the document, and exactly why Project 2025 exists in the first place. Think about it. Even the bills maintained by Congress.gov may not survive with the Liar Party, which I will refer to the Trumpublicans as henceforth, when they take over Congress. If we think it’s hard to inform voters now, imagine what happens when that transparency evaporates.

This isn’t doom-and-gloom—it’s a call to action. There’s a lot of work to do to protect our democracy, and while our Federal Government structure is right now moving to do what they can, it’s a hefty task shoring up our institutions. I’m looking for a way to get involved, but I’m just one person. You need to as well. Even if it’s as little as, I don’t know, downloading demographic data from the last twenty years so that they can’t lie about the numbers, that’s a small thing that might help.

BTW, don’t let anyone convince you it was a mandate. That’s not what happened. What happened was that a lot of people who don’t really understand how government works, or why it should work that way, voting with their feelings. A lot of other people, who should understand how government works (looking at you, protest voters and equivocators) anti-voted with theirs. This was a repudiation, not a mandate. It was an endictment of our failing education system, and our profound, almost criminal, lack of understanding of history.

Breathe.

Good. You’re doing great.

Now consider what I’m about to tell you, but as dispassionately as you can.

We are a nation struggling, and we’re making some poor choices because of it…but we can change it. What do I mean, and what does this have to do at all with the title?

Well, there’s something important that we don’t seem to have internalized yet. No, not equality as an overarching principal, but if you thought that then at least you’ve been paying attention to my facebook rants. That’s a good one. But I mean this truth: all of the stuff we want, we can get with equality. This also ties into why I dislike the concept of billionaires (not one in particular, but generally). But this is also why I continually focus on equality as an overarching goal—because it’s not snake oil. You want a better society? Fix inequality.

Let’s focus on income inequality for this article. You can read more about income inequality in the United States. I’ve mentioned before that income inequality creates more crime and establishes more career criminals. Note I didn’t say poverty, but income inequality. This isn’t new, or something I made up. I first did a short post about it on Facebook almost ten years ago. This is known. So known, in fact, that scientists are doing studies to figure out why this relationship exists. For those of us living it, it doesn’t matter why it exists, as much as it matters that it exists.

What you’re going to start seeing is a tightening up of laws as politicians scramble to save face. You’ll see people who rely on perception (politicians) hurt a lot of people pretending to be strong on immigration, for one thing. You’ll see homelessness treated more like a criminal offense than a result of society. A lot of stalwart politicians who you used to think were bastions of egalitarianism will show their true colors, not unlike the talented Mr. Musk. Oh, get it? It’s a reference to the Talented Mr. Ripley. (Brace yourself for that, because you’re probably not mentally prepared for the second round of betrayals yet.) What they’re doing is protecting themselves, so don’t judge them too harshly for it. My point in mentioning them at all is that these people will make things worse. While that’s going on, the tariffs and mass deportations, if they end up happening, will turn this country on its head as the bottom falls out for poor and middle-class people.

If you’re confused by that, let me explain. Tariffs are basically taxes. Level a tariff against a country means adding taxes on every good from that country. A brute force approach to tariffs means basically that a lot of goods are going to get a lot harder to get and a lot more expensive. Meanwhile, mass deportations mean that a lot of things we need migrants for, like picking food and construction where they’re over-represented, will make food and housing more expensive and harder to get at the same time. Basically, the combination of the two means sticking it to the poor, because the rich are rich enough already that they won’t feel it. Therefore, poor and middle-class people get poorer, widening economic inequality.

This is where you come in. While the federal government is up to their shenanigans, get involved on a state and/or local level, and work to put in place a safety net. Work on building up income equality, and your efforts will be rewarded with people who have the brain-space to think critically about the issues, and absorb the reality of what’s going on. Get out in your community and make yourself uncomfortable, not to get a vote, as we often do, but to make friends. And be supportive. Build community so that people have somewhere to go, and people to talk to. Bring people in.

Oh, that’s going to suck a lot. Because talking to people in person isn’t like talking to people on social media. You can’t just unfriend someone when they’re right in front of your face. In fact, talking to people in person is super-risky to your self-esteem and well-being. But if you do that, then you have a chance to bring attention to the inevitable rising inequality. And if you work toward building a safety net locally or statewide, you can reduce that inequality. As an added bonus? You talk to someone and get to know them, while they get to know you, and that matters because through relationships are where a lot of people get their news.

Nothing builds community like building community. And working toward income equality is one way to do it, with the added benefit that in doing so. What’s wrong with America isn’t its people, but human nature and the presence of such severe economic inequality. We’re at 45 on an index of 0 to 100, where higher is better. Norway is 27, for a reference point. We can do better at that, and a lot of that can start with us, personally. I point this out not to blame us, but to give us focus. The political conversations may be toxic to have, but everyone can have a conversation about the price of bread, which could lead to a conversation about the relative price of bread, near perfect segue into the topic of income inequality.

So yes, organize for political purposes. Definitely we need that. But also, don’t forget the human element. You’ll never convince someone trying to figure out how to feed their family and coming up empty of the importance of literally anything else. Fix the cause, and the rest will follow. There is a way forward, and you can be part of it.

“What’s beyond the river?” Bobby asked his mother, Helen. He flicked his dark black hair over his shoulder. Curls tinged with amber fell against his red collarless shirt. Bobby had a way of turning up his head that made him look as though he were admonishing someone, especially when his curiosity caught the best of him, as it often did.

“Land,” was the quick response that Helen gave him back.

“I know that,” Bobby said. “What kind of land is it?”

“Nobody knows,” Helen replied. “I’ve never seen it myself.”

“Nobody’s seen it?” asked Bobby. His eyebrows narrowed as he latched onto that concept. Nobody knew what was beyond the Cryms. “I want to be a great explorer. I will discover what’s beyond the Cryms.”

“You’re barely twelve,” Helen said. “How do you plan to do that?”

“Ask, of course,” Bobby said, his eyes brightening. He wiped something brown on his coarse brown pants. “If we know there’s land, then someone’s seen it right?”

“Someone? Well, I suppose,” said Helen. She wore a crimson gown that flowed around her ankles like a river. It was a nightgown that Bobby always loved, because of the way the hem floated there. “That would be Roget and Nance. They’re the only two people who have been across.”

“I thought you said we don’t know?”

“We don’t,” Helen assured him, shaking her head. “You’ll see why.”

Bobby thought about Roget and Nance. He knew that Roget lived closest, at the water’s edge, and thought that might be his best shot for an answer. And so, he set out that day in the shimmery sunlight to walk through the forest toward the water’s edge, where Roget’s house was.

When he broke through the clearing at the edge of the water, Bobby saw a little shack. It was half torn down, and around it were posts with painted rocks atop them, each decorated stone with an eyeball peering away from the house. At first, Bobby thought he might need to leave. He didn’t really know Roget. The man was rumored to shout at night random musings into the air, almost stream-of-consciousness stuff. Bobby knew this, but he had to find out what lay beyond the river, so he swallowed and pushed past the creepy structures toward an opening he hoped was the front entrance.

“Who’s there?” came a voice, quivering and full of bitterness.

“It’s me. Bobby,” Bobby said.

“Why are you here, Bobby?” asked Roget.

“To seek knowledge,” Bobby said. “I want to understand what’s beyond the Cryms.”

“Death,” said Roget. “Chaos. It’s a world that won’t be understood.”

Bobby sucked in his breath. “You’ve seen it?”

“The far shore? Indeed I have. I set foot upon it.”

“What happened?”

“I got back into my boat, and I returned.”

“And you saw—”

“Some say that there’s a jabber that lives in the woods there. Some say that it will sneak into homes at night and steal babies.”

“And you saw one when you were over there?”

“I saw trees that stretched into the sky, behind which jabbers could easily hide. I saw caves where jabbers like to roost.”

“What does a jabber look like? I mean, you know, when you saw one?”

“I saw a shadow move.”

“Shadow of a jabber?”

“Shadow of a bear. But it could have just as easily been a jabber. What if the bear ate the jabber?”

Bobby blinked. He mulled the conversation over in his mind, pulling at the strings of it and trying to weave something meaningful from the dribble. The truth, the best he could make it out, was that Roget had seen nothing. Maybe he’d stepped foot on the other side, maybe he hadn’t. But either way, he hadn’t seen anything at all, and yet, oozed this fear, the same fear that Bobby had heard repeated constantly in his village. But if it was only Roget, then what?

“Coffee?”

“I’m twelve.”

“Still. Would you like some? I could tell you about the time a jabber almost got me.”

His eyes popped open wide. “Really?”

“Yes. I heard it outside of my tent when I was sleeping.”

“How do you know it was a jabber?”

“Well, people say there are jabbers out there. I believe them. And I was in my tent and heard something, so it had to be a jabber.”

Bobby’s heart fell. Another non-jabber sighting.

“I’m going to talk to Nance.”

The old man wrinkled his nose at this. “What would you want to talk to her for? She doesn’t know anything. Like she’s ever been over the river.”

“Mom says—”

“Your mother doesn’t know anything. I never liked Nance. You can’t trust her. She doesn’t speak the truth.”

It was half a day between Roget’s shack and Nances little hut, farther down the river, and with a front porch covered in flowers. Bobby felt happy approaching the hut, just by virtue of the plethora of different colors that presented themselves there. He felt uplifted, as though there were something peaceful there that he might discover. He had no apprehension approaching, and even found a knocker on the door so he didn’t have to just wander in.

“Come in,” came the woman’s voice from inside. Bobby entered the hut, which sat against the river in very much the same way as Roget’s shack. As he passed through the little hut, he saw paintings adorning the walls, some of towers and high city walls that didn’t exist in Evoation. When he came out the other side, he saw a bridge extending a few feet into the water. An older woman leaned over it, hammering down a plank into place. When Bobby raised his eyes, he couldn’t see the opposite side of the river from where he stood.

“Nance?”

“Yes, child. I’m Nance. What can I do for you?” the woman said, brushing sweat from her eyes and her gray hair out of her face.

“I want to learn about what’s beyond the Cryms.”

“An entire world,” Nance said. “A world of trees and wonder and fruits we don’t know. It’s a world of splendor and potential trading partners. There are cities with streets laced with gold and paved with marble stones.”

“What about jabbers?”

“Those childhood stories? No, they don’t exist, Bobby. You’re old enough to know better than that, aren’t you?”

“Roget says—”

“Ah,” Nance commented. “Roget hasn’t been to the other side.”

“Helen said he has.”

“Roget’s told everyone that he has. Some people believe him. A lot of people believe him, in fact. So many, that I haven’t managed to convince anyone to help build a bridge and connect us to the world.”

“I’ll help,” Bobby said.

“Before you do,” Nance said, eyeing him up and down. “Before you do you should ask yourself if you trust me either. What if I’m lying to you and there’s nothing but death and destruction beyond the Cryms?”

“It seems to me that if that was the case, you wouldn’t be building a bridge.”

“Smart boy,” she said. “No, while Roget keeps his lies up, I can’t get anyone to help. So it’s just me, just working on this bridge.”

“Why?”

“To show them. Once I get it built, people will be able to see for themselves.”

“No, I mean why do people believe him?”

She shrugged.

“I’ve wondered that. Hand me that plank.”

Bobby dutifully grabbed a nearby plank. It was much heavier than he’d expected, but he managed to tug it over to Nance’s side. She wedged it into place, reached into an apron, and produced a handful of nails. She talked as she hammered.

“I think that maybe it’s too much for people. They can’t see it for themselves, so they have to believe someone. Roget’s convinced a lot of folks that I can’t be trusted, so they won’t even listen to me. Those are the people who keep coming by to try to sabatoge my bridge.” She pointed to an out of place plank that looked a little uneaven. “Had to replace that one yesterday. If anyone does discover what’s on the other side, then nobody would listen to Roget. He’d have no power, and we could be part of the world. Imagine the things we could discover.” Her eyes sparkled when she talked.

“My mother doesn’t believe Roget.”

“Helen doesn’t, you’re right. If she had, she wouldn’t have mentioned me,” Nance said, smiling, though Bobby could see a pain in her eyes.

“Why are you sad?”

“Because she won’t support me either. Do you see her here, helping? Hand me another plank, will you?”

Bobby ran to grab another plank.

“I’m helping,” Bobby said. “And she sent me.”

“Fair,” Nance said, chuckling as she nailed the plank into place. “As long as you remember to come back, you’ll be a great help.”

“But don’t some people believe you?”

“Some do,” she said, nodding. “But most have decided that Roget’s story and my story are too different. They can’t believe that the world could be as beautiful as I’ve described it, and their fear keeps them from wanting to find out. They build walls around their own hearts and minds. Whether they believe me, or believe Roget, their inaction supports Roget. After all, if you want to find out what’s beyond the river, you really have to look, don’t you?”

“I will,” said Bobby, laying a plank down for himself. Nance handed him the hammer and a few nails.

“The hard part will be setting the next post,” she said. “The one after that is even harder.”

“When will the bridge be finished?” Bobby asked, staring out over the water.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But as long as we keep laying planks, it’ll get to the other side.”

So Bobby helped. Every day, for the rest of his life, he helped work on the bridge, one plank at a time, until it stretched nearly halfway across. Nance died before the bridge was completed, and Bobby inherited the hut. His mother, eventually, began to use the bridge building as an excuse for them to stay close, and Bobby liked that. But eventually, his mother died too. Bobby kept working. It was when Bobby was as old as Roget that he finally reached the other side, and laid the final plank. As he stepped foot over, he felt a warm gust of air caress his leathery skin, which he likened to the gentleness of Nance, thanking him for the work he’d done.

The bridge was the first of twelve to be built over the next few decades. Trade flourished for Evoation, and visitors from all over came to the little village, turning it from a village, into a town, and then from a town into a city. All of the growth was possible because of the little bridge that Nance had started, a tool that allowed the people of Evoation to see the truth, despite being inundated with lies. And once it was finished, and the people could see for themselves what lay beyond the water, then all the talk of jabbers became resigned truly to the storybooks and children’s tales from which they’d come.

Over the course of the next few months, I’m going to be merging my blogging for http://www.rightandfreedom.com, my socially-conscious website that a couple of my former Marine buddies work with me on. I separated these at first because I thought that perhaps my particular social leaning might scare people away from my entertainment novels, which do, if you’ve been paying attention, follow along with some of the social problems that we see today (in a very entertaining way).

Except Drift, published under my pen name Roman Hawthorne. That’s a total escapist horrorfest. Get your copy for Halloween! Thank me later!

Back to more serious topics though. I might lose some folks with this, but it’s close to my heart so I’m going to do it anyway. Buckle up!

So I was listening to a podcast today that was discussing a couple of things that, really, seemed quite innocuous on the face of it. One of them was the recent rollback of affirmative action’s ability to use race on admission applications. This bothers me, but it’s kind of hard to describe why. The other thing that they talked about was the recent Louisiana court case that rolled back environmental protections supporting marginalized communities. This is the one that got to the Supreme Court and basically said that states can’t consider race when considering where to put industrial facilities. But it was kind of sneaky. What the decision really said was that the Legislative Branch wasn’t prescriptive enough about the what they wanted the Executive Branch to do about racial disparity.

By now, your eyelids are drooping and you’re slowly dozing off. Yes, this stuff is dry. But it’s also super-important, so WAKE UP!

There’s more. They said that it would be unfair to consider race at all when determining where to put factories and industrial complexes. At this point, you’re probably like, well…so what? Isn’t making decisions about where to put factories and industrial complexes…racism? Yes. You’re right. If we were dropped into a world where all races historically have been treated equally. You’d be surprised at the current situation, and just how much more exposure minorities have to cancer-causing agents. And if you think about it, it makes sense, right? For a long time, our zoning laws and home sales strategies in this country were flat-out racist (explicitly so, in many cases). So as a collective, we basically funneled black and brown people into industrial districts, where they are more likely to be exposed to toxic chemicals. And then, like in Flynt, Michigan, we just kind of forget about them until someone finally complains loudly enough that they can’t be ignored. Fix one site. Move on.

What the Supreme Court did was took away the systemic fix that Congress had put in place. By requiring intent (as they indicated) and limiting the Executive Branch to only address intentional racism as opposed to looking at disparate outcomes, as the Executive Branch used to do, the runaway Supreme Court knee-capped the governments ability to affect systemic change around this topic. Again, it wouldn’t be a big deal…if we were all on the same playing field already. But I think we all know that’s not the case (yes, all of us, even if we don’t admit it out loud). So if we’re already in a bad situation that past racism produced and perpetuates, there is no way out of anymore.

Know your role. Shut your mouth.

That’s basically what the Supreme Court implied with this ruling. Yes, I take it personally. Being half-black, I take a lot of things personally that others might scoff at, but it’s important. Who was it that said if you don’t cry out when you’re being hurt, they’ll kill you and say you liked it? Paraphrase anyway.

Think of racism as it truly was: a system. It was a systematic way to disenfranchise a huge swath of Americans for many years. Just like the interstate highway system makes it easier to get to certain destinations, and harder to get to others, racism has paved over two-hundred years of roads that lead black and brown people to destitution and poverty. You can take all the “no blacks allowed” signs you want down, but the roads are already there. People will take them. They will just not know why the roads are there. And if you can’t address why the roads are there (racism), then do you also not acknowledge the outcome? And if you don’t acknowledge the outcome, do you even make an effort to fix it? Or do you just tell the people in Cancer Alley, Louisiana that they’re SOL, because there’s no racism, and they should just move. Despite…all the things that keep them there in the first place?

Man, racism sucks. Ugh.

Okay here goes. You’re going to see a lot of advertising as we move forward around my upcoming Kickstarter campaign for Inertia and Momentum. Some of it may make sense, others won’t at first. But it all comes together, and I’ll let you in on a little secret: this novel is ties my Virtual Wars series even closer to Reality Gradient. Let me explain.

The novel traces two main storylines. The first is Larken’s, of course. She’s been through the ringer a couple of times, only she’s much better positioned this time than she was before. She’s got a thriving if not somewhat rudderless anti-extremist organization, and she’s a little immature still to be completely effective at running it. But she’s doing it, with the help of her android assistant Dandelion Lemaire. The two are inseparable, which becomes something of a plot point in this story arc. It’s not entirely clear if their relationship is reciprocated between the two of them, or if its unbalanced.

The other storyline is about Amanda Briggs. You might remember her from my short story Ms. Barnett’s Favorite I wrote back in 2021 for a Reedsy contest. Yes, her storyline has been bouncing around in my head for three long years. The law which dictates that models (clones) aren’t really citizens is about to be repealed…at least many people think so. That has one important implication for Amanda and her ilk: there has been a stay on Reclamations, the process by which clones are “recycled” and their constituent proteins used to make the next generation (gross). As a result, she is stuck at Emergent Biotechnology headquarters doing time-wasting jobs like clean a hallway that’s not used often enough to actually get dirty. Worse, the executives have their sights on her as the next information, their eyes and ears in the clones’ quarters.

These storylines connect through another character you haven’t yet met, named Angela Brody, the District Attorney of New York City. She’s trying to help resettle the clones, or at least have a plan for when the aforementioned law is overturned. She seeks out Larken’s advice, which unfortunately for Ms. Brody, amounts to “have rich friends.” (If you’ll recall from books 1 and 2, Larken has developed some pretty significant connections with the independently-wealthy Aiden, friend of Harper Rawls). See? It’s all coming together!

So even though Virtual Wars is an entirely different series, there are story elements that flesh out some of what happened in my already-published trilogy, Reality Gradient. The way I see them is as ice cream and cobbler. Either is delicious without the other, but they’re so, so much better when you pile vanilla ice cream onto your piping-hot peach cobbler.

Oh yeah! The tie-in. No, Harper isn’t it. I mean, she does offer a connection, but it’s not the one I was referring to before. The one I was referring to is Amanda’s daughter, and when I say her name, it’ll give away the game—but only if you’ve read my first series! Her name…drum roll please…is not Briggs, but Lothian. Her first name is Aida, and she’s there in all of her neuro-divergent glory! If you don’t know what that means, read (or re-read) Libera, Goddess of Worlds from Reality Gradient.