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It’s not necessarily that I believe I owe anyone here on the internet anything per se. However, those of you who have taken the time and/or money to follow what I do and read my books, I do believe you ought to have my thanks, and more of an incentive to visit this (admittedly still obscure) website of mine.

I have long since given up on trying to keep up with the endless trough that is social media. My life is so much better and richer for having dropped all but the bare minimum presence on Facebook, for example. I have started posting more often on the Instagrams (https://www.instagram.com/neo_ragnarok/) because I like that the presences there are more focused on art and less on politics, blathering, or generally useless and inane opinions on any and everything. Even there, though, I don’t have much time invested. I don’t care about trying to optimize my presence to get more likes and followers. You either like what I do or you don’t. This generation and society in general have become sickeningly addicted to social media, to instant gratification. It seems that so many go batshit crazy if they aren’t being constantly bombarded with information and content. Art gets buried in the feed. Meaningful wisdom is overshadowed. Success is less about quality and more about how much you can spam feeds.

Fuck that.

I stand in a weird place here, as someone whose voice is currently being heard in large part only due to the modern artist’s conveniences of the internet, a website, and the relative ease of self-publishing. Yet I despise the mechanisms that have spawned around and between these things, so here I am using a modern boon to say that I think we lost something crucial by abandoning the days where quality won out over quantity. Would things have been different if we were slower and more responsible in our adopting the internet and the digital age? Certainly, though the same could also be said for most innovations or breakthroughs, such as, say, atomic power…

So, I appreciate all of you who have read my work or taken the time to comment on one of my blogs, or who likes the artwork I’m posting. That’s really cool, and I want to going forward make any investment in me on your part worth your time. But it’s not going to be from quantity. I’m not gonna be blowing up your inboxes or your feeds. Like any treasure, you’re gonna have to do some digging here and meet me halfway. In so doing, you’re going to get something better than the torrent of spam that is flooding most of the internet. If you don’t like that, and want to follow someone who is going to constantly bombard you with updates and content, you might as well exit stage left, because that’s not me, and trying to be that way was detrimental to my existence and happiness.

Here’s to art, to quality, to creating and sharing something meaningful.

FIN

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It has been a while since I have updated the blog here on afterterra.com, due to fault strictly of my own.

There are not going to be any drastic overhauls to the site like the last update, however, there will be a refinement to the sort of content that appears on the blog henceforth. I will still be posting about my books, about writing in general, as well as reviews and explorations of things and topics that I enjoy, such as Star Trek. Writing about my personal life, on the other hand, will see a decline in frequency. Also some of my older posts that were of a strictly exploratory, personal nature will be consolidated, as in going through them I noticed a lot of redundancy. Basically, I reiterated many of the same points and lessons throughout multiple posts. I also have a few other reasons for putting some old posts on the chopping block; firstly, because while talking about things like breakups or struggling to cope with a job seemed like big deals at the time, experience has taught me that these weren’t the life shaking struggles I though they were (more on that later). More importantly, even though many of my personal posts were written for catharsis, and the hope that they might help someone who was going through a similar situation, I’ve come to realize that letting these past hurdles be immortalized on my site gave them more power and relevance than they deserved.

I’ve come far enough as a fiction writer, I believe, that I can exorcise whatever grief I need to through my creative work, and save blogging about deeply personal matters to subjects that have real gravity to who I am as an author and a person, instead of using the blog as a sort of pressure release diary. It also seemed simple and logical to me to shift the focus of this site more heavily to my creative work and science fiction topics, seeing as it is the official site for my After Terra series.

More content for the After Terra codices and news about my next written works in the pipeline will follow in the future. In the meantime, please pardon my absence and my dust as I do some cleaning up and refining of the site.

FIN