First and last blog of 2021
Whoops! I’ve managed to go a whole year without writing a blog. One of the worst aspects of social media is expressing views when one has nothing worthwhile to express. I, therefore, feel little guilt at this absence.
Having written a number of blogs around the themes and content of Liberty Bound, I can only add that this year has been one of critical success for my debut novel. Three international award placements, a clean sweep of 5 star editorial reviews and a continual trickle of 5 star reader reviews. I’m hoping 2022 brings a broad range of readers.
So, what about the sequel? Well, it has a title, ‘Where Liberty Lies,’ it is plotted out and I have written 57K words to date. There is still a fair amount to write and progress is slow due to the day job and other projects, but it is coming along very nicely, with plenty of trials and tribulations for our heroes and a collection of new and interesting characters.
Liberty Bound considered how fear and ignorance imprisons us as a society and as individuals. In Where Liberty Lies, I want to explore how freedom is endangered by the foundation of untruths or illusions that permeate through society and individuals. Everybody probably thinks they know the ‘truth’ and can’t be swayed or fooled, but we are all influenced and shaped from birth by whatever tune is played the loudest and always susceptible to the ‘greener grass’ of hope that can lead us down a dead-end lane.
We are creatures of emotion, vulnerable when hurt and damaged, willing to believe and follow those who offer a resolution to our pain. In medieval times, people were persecuted as witches, not on evidence but in response to misinformation and fear, used to fill the blanks in the persecutors’ comprehension of the world. Why has the crop failed? Who is responsible for this horrible disease? In more recent times, the rise of the Nazis was fuelled by a nation on its knees after WW1, hoping to recover its lost glory, susceptible to lies and directed towards scapegoats, such as the Jews, to sate anger and insecurity (with cruel irony, some areas of medieval Europe didn’t succumb to the witch craze, blaming lone or unusual women, because they had Jews on hand to lay all the blame on instead).
We have come a long way since those times with our knowledge and technology, but not so much in our emotional response and vulnerability. Again we live in a time of turmoil, and see the fragility of societies when fighting through hardships and lured by the promise of a better country or better times ahead. Those at the extremes find their voice carries further, aided by technology, reaching the ears of those who now feel aggrieved or isolated. The long suffering become scapegoats yet again, innocent as always, but convenient for a lazy, ill-intended lie.
What modern technology has added to the mix is its ability to reinforce the dug-in minds of the misled. ‘Fake news’, that weapon of many a politician or nation to deflect from their own lies, stirring the silt in the pool of truth until no one knows what they’re looking at anymore, creates a culture where one retreats into a narrow, familiar mindset. I am minded of a debating exercise I once undertook at school. The question for discussion was ‘Do fairies exist?” Championing the ‘no’ side of the argument, I was confident of victory. However, the ‘yes’ team had a hand to guarantee entrenched positions. They argued that you could only see fairies if you believed in them. Of course, we couldn’t unpick that despite ‘knowing’ they were lying when they said they could see fairies… or were they? But this is the society we risk creating, based on this murky mess where evidence and the truth get lost in the mud and people see what they want to see until they believe in the lie. Plenty in that for a novel!