Second Thoughts

In Fiery, the second book of the series, I was beginning to have my doubts about GW. A good guy. Loving husband. Solid father. That’s a model I know and the research was easy.

GW was created as a serviceable plot device, but that’s like describing furniture. And like furniture, after a while you don’t pay attention to it — to him. In Starfish he helps solve the problem, vanquish the bad guy and gets the girl. Yea! Then what?

This was a deep structural problem I wrestled with. In real life, steady is great, but it makes for boring storytelling.

It’s my belief that at our core men and women share the same emotional engines. However, by ancient and current culture the male emotional engine is something that is crated and put in deep storage and society has little interest in hearing about it.

Not so for the female side where emotional nerve endings run close to the surface. The male lens sees this as a bug. I see it as a feature.

When I’ve been able to, on community-based boards, I’ve worked hard to promote gender balance and, in my observation those have been the most effective and pleasurable boards I’ve served on.

This past winter I was invited to attend a get together of the mountain rescue team I spent eight years on. In 1973, a group of us college aged men forced the issue with the old guard who’d start the team in 1959 to change the bylaws. It was contentious, but we were successful.

Looking at a room with over a hundred people fifty years later, almost half were women.

That’s the kind of polar reversal that warranted another spin of the Rubik’s cube and finally the solution clicked into place: make the women interesting. And they don’t come much richer than Tali Gold. The complexity that is Tali is fertile ground.

Thought experiment: imbue GW with Tali’s backstory, would that make him an interesting read? My thought is no, because that’s not how we culturally read men.

Should you work your way through the series, Solstice is where I made a decision to bring the saga to a close. The unique storyline of Starfish demanded a follow-on, but I felt, for me, it was time to move on.

When I started Solstice I didn’t know the endpoint. I never do. But, as it’s happened in the other books, at the halfway point I’m high enough up the mountain to see the larger terrain.

The ending surprised even me. At its core it reflects my belief that the future is not an extension of now. It is always something new. Sometimes rising from a sturdy foundation, sometimes from the ashes of intentions that have run their course.

Perhaps it’s my world view hiding in plain sight.