It has been more than a year since my last blog post. Tomorrow I will shut down my two Web sites, bradswriting.com and bigpicexplorer.com. The most public activity has been on Bluesky and YouTube, while in private I continue working on my novel “Biome” (the prequel to the book “Lights Out”) and hope to produce at least one more book when that is complete — the long promised sequel “Visitors” whose back story was necessary to fill out before writing it.
This partial shutdown of my business activity is driven by financial and logistical reality. I am getting old enough that I need to be more careful with my resources, especially since stretching them to downsize in a move from my house of 23 years. Most of my creative energy and time is spent on a full time job that enables everything else and provides an experiential grounding in the world we all share. Recognition that my remaining work years are more limited, and that the traditional supports for retirement can’t be relied on, has kept me anchored to the options at hand.
As for the subjects of my blogs, I am collecting more understanding and ideas that can be shared, yet I find that most of what I would consider writing has already been written. This is both fortunate and sad: fortunate because my previous insights are still useful and relevant; and sad because my most dire expectations of the future are coming true. My research is dominated by discoveries others are making about the wide range of topics I am interested in, with particular focus on what proves or disproves hypotheses generated in the process of overall learning.
Exploration of the interaction of values and their consequences (the subject of my Bluesky banner, summarizing the most basic lessons of my mathematical research) remains a major driver of my views about human activity at all scales from the personal to the community to the world system. It is fascinating to watch how it is both explanatory and predictive, and fun to craft into opinions about current events that expose both opportunities and threats that can potentially be acted on.
My focus on fiction in my limited spare time has been both a coping approach and a means of viscerally playing with alternative experiences as other “people” occupying a simulated world. Ventures into imaginary use cases of arbitrary requirements develop and amplify skills useful in real-world requirements and activities; at least, that’s how I justify it and have used it in actual application. Tying my fictional events (albeit loosely) to physical and historical reality has provided motivation to study a variety of related subjects, and with those studies, a way to exercise curiosity - which is perhaps the most useful of traits for those who care to acknowledge it.
