My secret book

Last week, without consciously noticing it, I passed a small but meaningful milestone—I’ve now published something on this blog every single day for the last seven years. On most weekdays, I devote at least an hour to writing a new post, and while I’ve occasionally fallen back on reruns or longer quotations to fill space, they account for a tiny minority of what appears here. Perhaps the time that I’ve spent blogging might have been more profitably used in other ways, but I doubt it. The discipline of producing a thousand words on a daily basis has been inherently constructive; it wakes me up in the morning; I’ve used it as a platform for ideas and opinions that probably wouldn’t have found a home anywhere else, now that the market for online freelancing has mostly dried up; it has provided me with a necessary emotional outlet as I continue to deal with the fallout from last year’s election; and above all else, it gives me a place where I can workshop material in plain sight that will end up being used elsewhere.

In particular, I’ve often used this blog as a kind of sandbox for elements of Astounding. (Here and there, entire phrases and sentences from these posts have ended up in the book itself, although nearly everything has been reworked substantially for publication.) I’ve also seized the opportunity that this venue affords to talk at length about subjects that won’t make it into print, and when I look back, I found that I’ve written the equivalent of a stealth book—amounting to something like sixty thousand words—in my posts on science fiction alone, most of which have appeared within the last two years. With this in mind, I’ve gone ahead and compiled many of these shorter essays on a single page, “Science fiction studies,” which you can see in the navigation bar to your right, and I’ll continue to update it going forward. It includes my reviews of classic stories; such longer pieces as “A Hawk From a Handsaw” and “The First Foundation”; and my original research on topics like L. Ron Hubbard’s lost rebuttal of dianetics and the origins of Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. If you’re a science fiction fan, you might find it interesting. And best of all, it’s free.