As much cultural credit as today’s human being gets for being an emotional nonentity, I confess I’m remarkably bad at it; I spend most of my time either on the cog-railway climb up the slope of an emotional stress-high, or on the nosedive-crash end of it as all the adrenaline exits at the close of an endeavor.

It’s right around those metabolism moments as I blow off the alkaloids of the bygone months of panic that the reality of what I’ve done – and what’s left to do – starts to sink in.

It’s a voice – my voice. And the chiding, the belittling – is insistent.

“There’s really only a snowball’s chance in hell that I’ll catch the interest of the initial publisher read-through. Even if I do, there’s no guarantee I’ll survive the more concrete vetting of an editor. And if – if I somehow make it through that whole gauntlet, my book won’t be published until 2013 – won’t I be irrelevant by then?“

Truth be told, even my rational side worries hard about irrelevance, but my weapon to combat the fear is simple to the point of stupidity: I quite simply double down on realism. I’m not immortal.

I’m not on speed dial to the scribes of the future claiming my name as pre-written on the bathroom stall wall of eternity, crammed forever-remnant sales down the throats of tomorrow’s readers like gavage corn in the goose’s gullet of intellectualism. My ideas, like my very bones, are finite; written or no, they have an inflection point, maximum utility, bursting in autothysis, silly string all over the map of culture, and then – well, then, we move on.

But some part of me knows that. I know I’m dust. I’m a one-time code, a unique but disposable product of a continuous equation. And yet, something inside of me chose this path, like all of us that stumble into science fiction. Loaned books from an uncle or lone trips to the library, bus rides or sleepless nights under the reading light, escapes into worlds of delight and horror.

The books I found, the books I read, those books changed me. They crossed in front of my eyes and affected a mutation in the fibers of my thought and belief. And ultimately, they produced in the desire to create my own volume – my own way to share with the ones that come next. Ideas breed; they mate, exchange genes, heterogenize, and – if we are truly, truly lucky – enter the world to find their way.

As I said in my earlier post, I have my superstitions to comfort me as I wait, but come what may, the need to create and share something of my own with the world will be ever-present, even if the works themselves aren’t. Somehow, that feels just fine.