I still want to believe there are canals on Mars.

My current book is a seriously silly book. I can almost visualize most readers rolling their eyes.

But my twelve year old self is having a grand time writing it.

I think probably my first love is retro science fiction. It wasn't retro when I first read it. The Lensmen series, Heinlein, Asimov, Andre Norton, Jack Vance (the Great Jack Vance). Burroughs and Howard and Zelazny.

All terribly dated now. But so much fun.

I still want to believe there are canals on Mars.

As long as there is internal logic, anything goes. So, obviously, it wasn't really the science I was after--it was the adventure. The science just sort of gave it some kind of underpinning, but when fantasy came along (and believe it or not, it came along--it didn't much exist when I was younger) I realized I didn't need the science to have the adventure.

But I still like all the dressing of spacesuits and rockets and robots.

I've convinced myself of this fictional future I'm writing where everyone lives their adventure lives everyday by dressing up in Cosplay and going to Larping events. That holograms and VR are readily available and can produce anything the imagination can come up with, and that everyone has access to it.

The question of, if holo decks really existed and you could live in Middle Earth, why wouldn't you? has always been something I think of when I watch STNG.

This isn't a cyber future (is cyber still used as a term?) like Neuromancer and Snow Crash and Ready Player One, but more physical, more real, yet still containing all the elements of a completely fictional world.

It's nerd culture carried to its logical conclusion. Not just nerds and cosplay on weekends, but every day. Getting up and dressing as Aragorn and going to work, and meeting Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and Spock.

So it's silly, and I'm probably including too many retro references (not just the 80's like Ready Player One, but all the way back to the 50's and earlier, as far back at the black and white movies that played late nights on TV when I was a kid.)

I suspect no one will ever read it. I loved my little fantasy roadtrip, Faerie Punk, and it had a similar vibe, and absolutely no one picked that up, so...

But over the last few months I've moved irrevocably into the idea of writing exactly what I want without any regard whatsoever to what I think the marketplace will accept. No one knows that anyway.

Way back when I first started writing, I constantly included anachronisms in my stories, and was told by everyone, writer's groups and teachers and friends and professionals, that I couldn't do that. I didn't understand why not.

Over the 25 years I didn't write, this became not only acceptable, but standard. I was ahead of my time, dammit.

But even now, I probably mix it up more than is acceptable. I mean, I don't mix it up more than Zelazny did in Lord of Light, but he's Zelazny and I'm McGeary, and...well, who am I to be messing with things.

Actually, I'm probably caught somewhere in-between. I venture off the path, but maybe not as crazily as would make it truly effective.

Anyway, it's happening, and I'm having a great deal of fun. It probably is such a hodge-podge of my own particular tastes that no one else is going to like it. Except Linda. Bless Linda, she likes what I write.