I’ve been a bad boy. I haven’t been posting on my poor, neglected blog lately. You see, like all truly creative types, I’ve been protesting.
Call me simplistic, but I always thought America was about freedom. I grew up writing fantastic (as in wild, unusual, not as in great) stories and nobody said anything I wrote was threatening. I didn’t know any better—I was just a boy with a tablet and a pencil. I wrote my imagination.
Now we have a president who’s trying to slash the National Endowment for the Humanities. There’s no profit in it, you see. And this after having W say just a few years back that freedom isn’t free. What? You have to pay for freedom? Forgive me, but I’ve always been a live and let live kind of guy.
My horror isn’t gruesome. It’s existential. Maybe that’s why I have such a tough time getting published. With nearly twenty stories in press I hope my writing’s not that bad. I can live with people just not getting it. But I protest a government that can’t support the humanities.
I’ve been a bad boy. I went to Washington to join the Women’s March. I may not be a woman, but half the people on this planet are and they should have the same rights as the other half. And throw in an order of freedom while you’re at it, please.
All this fighting for freedom has taken its toll on my fiction. Not that the ideas are fading—they’re not—but who has time to tweet their congressmen all day and then write stories? Who thought politics would ever interfere with good, old-fashioned creativity?
I like my freedom free, just like my imagination. There’s no places barred to it, and there’s no limit to the number of genders or races you might find there. Is it too much to hope for a government that’ll just leave me alone to be free?
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