Ten years ago, I published a digital anthology on Amazon entitled Gloom Feast. It was a way of exorcising my restlessness and anxiety in a post-millennial world. Shortly after the release of my novel, life threw curve balls and the writing stopped, but the compulsion to create and share didn’t.

And then, the world began to change so drastically that my years of studying cults and writing speculative fiction about humanity’s worst impulses suddenly seemed like boot camp for the world we now find ourselves in. I’m back because I have to be – keeping the demons at bay, one morsel at a time.

In the last few years, the world has become more desolate and divided. It’s an especially scary time because truth is muddled. We’re in a post-truth society and bracing for our handles on reason and science to erode even further. Social reckonings and a deadly pandemic devastated and split our communities. Snake Oil, Superstition and Conspiracy Theories have always been, to some degree, woven into the fabric of American life, but never to this degree. They have descended and taken over, and the institutions keeping them at bay are diluted, discredited and sputtering for air.

No easy paths now from where we now are. There is no longer even a pretense of an ethical center in our public discourse. Our social platforms pretend to be (but aren’t) spaces to contemplate ourselves or each other. They’re where branding and clout chasing rule. They’re where we are more likely to see and assume the very worst about one another.

Ad revenue and clicks have always driven the way news stories are dispensed, but they now shape the stories themselves. Grotesque and cruel people now have the same credibility and weight as anyone else. The villains are all heroes in their own narratives, and some of the heroes have lost their fire and given up, or fallen from grace. From this morass come monsters.

I would not be here without hope, though. There still are glimmers of it on the horizon. I am inspired to dive back in and find stories to lead our hands through this darkness. I’m here to find common ground, to create and share and most of all, learn. It’s the only way through this.