This blog, and its companion blog Visions of Paradise, were begun as siblings of my quarterly magazine also entitled Visions of Paradise. I started that zine when I was a college student participating in the APA (amateur press association) called APA-45, whose membership was restricted to youngsters born no earlier than 1945. Most of those youngsters, myself included, are a lot older now than we were then.

I published the original run of VoP for three years before deciding that writing nonfiction was not how I wanted to spend my life. Instead I devoted the next fifteen years exclusively to writing fiction, mostly science fiction. I spent no time at all on fannish writing, and virtually no socializing either. That determination lasted through five novels and more than 60 shorter pieces of fiction, whose resounding lack of success convinced me that perhaps I was more suited to writing nonfiction than fiction.

I returned to nonfiction in two ways. In the past twenty years I have published two nonfiction books, the first a survey of English language science fiction, the second a textbook I co-edited about the Japanese invasion of Nanking, China. I also revived VoP, first as a bi-monthly zine for an APA named MIShAP, and when that APA folded I shifted to a quarterly zine for FAPA. A few years ago I also started these two blogs as ways of keeping in touch with my readers and friends on a more frequent basis than just quarterly.

During this twenty year period I have written less than one science fiction story per year.

Recently my urge to return to fiction writing has grown stronger and stronger. Briefly I considered whether I should discontinue both VoP and the two blogs entirely and devote myself to writing fiction for another decade or so. But I quickly dismissed that idea. I enjoy writing nonfiction as much as I do fiction, and I enjoy even more the social aspect of people reading my writing and commenting on it, either through mailing comments in FAPA or letters of comment from my other readers.

So instead I have decided to cut back the frequency of VoP from quarterly to semi-annually. That will cut my workload considerably, hopefully giving me time to work on fiction inbetween. As for the blogs, I only post each of them approximately twice a week, and nearly everything that is posted either ends up being revised for VoP or is itself edited from the zine. So ultimately it is little extra work with the advantage of staying in frequent contact with a lot of people. And anybody who enjoys my writing and cannot wait six-months to get a fix of it–God help the poor souls!–can continue to read my blogs in the interim.