Context Matters
I recently waxed nostalgic about the heady days of 2008 to 2009, when it felt like my fiction writing career tracked along with far more promise than it does today. I was focused on my writing career to the exclusion of everything else, a host of stories were published and opportunities offered, and things felt possible in a way they don’t right now. But a quick survey of the context in which I did all that work is pretty illuminating: I was younger, newly single, and looking for distraction. I was newly involved in the spec fic scene, and therefore a novelty. Social media was relatively new, and work gained attention because it was easier to reach one’s friends and communities with news. My father’s Parkinson’s disease was newly diagnosed, and hadn’t yet hit the point of physical and cognitive where I was increasingly conscious of both spending time with him and providing relief for my mum as his primary
