Novel Points of View

I devoted almost all of my “working” time over several weeks to completing my first novel, Lights Out, which I now intend to get published. This came at the expense of updating my blog and my Web sites, yet still fed my personal mission to explore issues important to the survivability of the human species.

Many of the models I’ve developed over the past two years have been done in tandem with my writing of the novel, which is as much a report on a simulation as a work of futuristic fiction. Indeed, my desire to make the novel realistic has driven the development of those simulations. For example, the power model actually started as an attempt to objectively determine how my characters would interact in a changing environment, and has now become a cornerstone of my understanding of how we might create an ideal world (and alternatively how people might behave if the world continues on its current path toward a resource crisis). Working in the other direction, the model I developed to predict changes in population size as a result of resource depletion became a critical part of the novel.

While I still intend to use more conventional routes to shop my models around, I see fiction as a valid and potentially effective way to get my ideas into the public debate. I also just happen to love writing it (and judging from random reviews of some of my work, may actually be good at it).

I’ll be switching into marketing mode in an attempt to improve the chances that I can continue writing on a full-time basis about the things I care about. As the spirit moves me (and time is available), I will continue blogging and sharing any new (and hopefully valuable) insights as they come up.