More of our Time

 I wonder what my writing says about me, and how I think.

 Look at Stephen King. We all know his work, right? King himself says a lot of it is driven by his belief in good and evil, in forms that we encounter every day. He believes that in the end we all have to take a stand with light against the dark. (I think he's right. If you hear overt sexism on the bus, or you see racist bullying in a bar or nightclub, don't walk by. Not unless you want to live in a world where such things are accepted.)

 But King's work was coloured heavily after his accident. For a while it was full of crippled characters - in Dreamcatcher and Duma Key, for example. King's own pain seeped into his work. So some of it is conscious and some sneaks through without us poor writers noticing it. How then can we tell how much of us is in our work?

 Well, I try not to repeat ideas or memes, but I've noticed that I have. Alar in Risen King and Calesh in Songs of Sorrow are both reluctant warriors, drawn into battle as young men and now returning to fight again. There are big differences between them too, but that lies at the heart of both their characters. More broadly, several of my books are about the struggle to be free. Risen King and Sorrow feature here too, as well as Black Lord of Eagles. The situations are very different, and the stories change - those are three very different tales. But I can't deny there are similarities. So it seems I've returned to a theme without even realising it. I must be as dumb as a horse going to the same old watering hole, sometimes.

 Maybe I have an itch about the question of freedom. I admit, I've never been especially persuaded by the way we define freedom in the Western world. It seems to boil down to being free to vote once every four or five years, while also being free to be exploited by the wealthy, to be denied health care, and free to be cold in winter because we can't afford to turn the heating up. The gap between the richest people and the rest of us is wider than at any time in hundreds of years, and it's getting wider. We can't eat freedom. What good is it when it's just a word?

 Bizarrely, in some ancient societies even slaves were more free than we are today. A debtor in ancient Greece could work off what he owed, as a slave, but then regain his liberty. Serfs in England might work as little as one day a week for their landowner, and have the rest of their time to spend on their own crops. All right, these were grindingly hard lives, I know that. Still, on the road between then and now we've managed to give away more and more of our time, often for less compensation, and we call this freedom.

 Yes, I have a bee in my bonnet about this. It can only continue for as long as we let it. So in these days when Greeks are scavenging food from bins in Athens, when British people are fined for going to the dentist, and when Americans are being stripped of health insurance they paid for, why do we let it go on?

 In all my research into ancient cultures, I've learned one important thing. People build the culture they want. But then it changes, the society stops serving its people and the people begin to serve it instead, so the system (whatever it is) can be perpetuated. It's why change is so hard.

 But boy, do we need change.