Nearly 95,000 words into Northwest Passage now and I know exactly what I want to happen.  Might go a bit over a hundred thousand words, but not by much.

If anyone is actually reading this blog, you may be wondering why it’s taken me so long to finish Northwest Passage.  Well, the honest answer is that I have been very distracted by a lot of things in life this last year.  My daughter is getting to that point in her interest in soccer as a sport that we are spending a lot of time and money getting her to a competitive league that will give her a chance in a couple years to be scouted by college coaches.  My son has enlisted in the National Guard, attended Basic Training and AIT, graduated High School and is about to start college (IF we can get the brilliant strategists in the college financial office and the efficient public servants in the National Guard to get on the same page…pardon me, had to wipe a bit of sarcasm off my chin).

At the same time, there’ve been some personal issues that have hit our family—my wife’s father has been in ill health and various financial issues that are too mundane and boring to detail have dragged me away from the keyboard.

Now, finally, I am over 80,000 words into Northwest Passage, and I BELIEVE I am less than 20,000 words away from being finished.  I can see the light at the end of the tunnel and I am making a commitment to finishing this thing within the next few weeks.

Sorry it took so long.

If you are like me and have a list of writers that you consider greats in the field of science fiction and fantasy, I would urge you to not follow their Facebook page.  I just looked up one SF writer who I had considered very erudite, and funny while also being able to string together some quite gripping action sequences.  He’s a liberal, but a lot of old-school sf writers from the 60s and 70s are, but he’s a raging, raving rabble-rouser that doesn’t just believe conservatives are wrong or misguided or even ignorant…they’re all EVIL.  It’s interesting how people of his philosophy are quick to say that right and wrong is relative and determined by society, until they come across someone who believes differently from them politically…THEN that person should be killed or thrown in jail.

I have a lot less respect for this writer as a man and a human being than I had a few minutes ago…