Tales of the Continuing Time and Other Stories

THIS IS THIRTY-seven years of work.

Not thirty-seven consecutive, of course. I’d have published a lot more books if I’d written instead of raising children all these years. But thirty-seven years first to last. I was nineteen when I wrote “The Gray Maelstrom,” and I was fifty-six, today, when I finished “A Son Enters, Stage Right.”

So there are likely to be some tonal shifts in the work. Can’t be helped, and probably doesn’t matter. The kid who wrote “Gray Maelstrom” isn’t me and hasn’t been for decades. He still entertains me, though, which helps; and he’s stopped embarrassing me, which also helps. (With the exception of the movie tie-in “The Ring,” I’ve never published anything that had flaws in it that I knew how to fix. My immediate response to my own work is almost always delight: this is some good stuff, world! And then I start to get some distance on it, and think, Oh, hell, that doesn’t work. And a few years after that, it’s actually painful to read that material. I don’t know if that’s progress, exactly, but it’s certainly the impact of distance.)

But time continues to pass, relentlessly. The kid who wrote “Gray Maelstrom” and “Realtime” did the best work he knew how to do. He was younger than all but one of my five children, today. He was a good kid and when it came time to set aside writing to earn a living and raise children, he focused on what mattered and did. I’m not embarrassed by him these days.