So this is kind of a rambling thank you.

Tl;dr – Stuff is stuff ’cause we say it is. Books are in the mail.

Robert Chaff is on hiatus for a week or so. Whatever disaster Quinn has found herself tangled up in will just have to wait. Apologies, sort of.

I wanted to take this week to just shoot out a short thank you to all the people who took enough of an interest in Light’s Shadow on Goodreads to click the button which raised their ethereal internet hand for one of the ten copies I had on offer for the giveaway. While I understand that clicking the button doesn’t necessarily mean much more than ‘I want some free stuff‘, I appreciate it none the less. 

And to all those people who added the book to their ‘want to read’ shelf – thank you. It’s flattering for a little nobody like me to think that there are so many people interested in something I’ve created. 

Who knows? Maybe you’ll click through to the blog that this is posted on and take enough interest in Mr Chaff and Miss Bishop that you decide to buy a copy of that other story universe I constructed for Light’s Shadow. 

Maybe you won’t. 

But that’s okay too. No hard feelings 😉

To the people who won… Congrats! The books went in the mail today, so I hope they arrive before New Years and that you enjoy the characters and their story as much as I enjoyed creating them and letting them lead me through their world. 

It was a remarkable, albeit simplistic, experience filling in all the paperwork to ship the books. So much effort has gone into a process by which we can be identified and located by some intermediary stranger on the other side of the world. I wrote my name enough times to have the letters lose meaning and came to realise that the lack of denomination in our intrinsic personal identity is a little bit boggling. Perhaps humanity was never meant to grow quite so large – in fact, I’m certain that other animals think so. Or maybe it’s just that the symbolism that we madly tacked together as we became more and more intelligent over the years, is proof of the limitations inherent in how we view things. 

I’m getting a little philosophical, I know, but that is just part of the whole conundrum isn’t it? Creating words in order to discuss the various meanings of other words?

It was in the process of writing out post codes for foreign states with street names that doubled as cities in other places, that I felt that everything was just a little tenuous. I was pushing ten books into the ether, as it were – if the ether were discovered to have actually been a thing rather than just a notion created to describe the space beyond Earth through which all the planetary bodies might move. If the books disappeared (and I hope they don’t – not just because I want them to be read, but also because the shipping was anything but reasonable!) they would merely add to the detritus clogging up every corner of human culture. 

How many books and sheafs of paper fill shelves and drawers collecting dust? And all of these things have passed through countless hands – hands identifiable by an arrangement of letters and numbers that form a kind of geological self that without the correct cypher is ultimately meaningless. But to us – those of us with the language of understanding – they amount to all we have. This symbolic reality is quite literally everything there is…

I mean – wow, right?