JAMES STEIMLE

No good story ever really ends.

 

This is the key to all religions.  Wouldn’t you say so?

 

Your story, for instance.  Does it end when you die?  Not by any account!  Go to heaven, your story continues.  Go to hell, your story continues, continues, continues—like burning, I understand.  But maybe you don’t believe in any religious philosophy (certainly if you embraced the idea of reincarnation you could see how your story continues).

 

Scientists say that energy is neither created nor destroyed.  What does that mean?  Imagine, if you will, that you could watch your after-life story as one who sees his own body decaying in the ground.  Decay sounds like such a bad word!  Let us instead say, your cells break down, your molecules disperse, become running liquids, dry shapes, wandering gases.  And still you would continue.  Not as you are now … but are you the same now as you were ten years ago?  Twenty?  A hundred years ago?  A thousand?  You might want to think about that, like a scientist if you wish.  For all matter contains energy, and energy is neither created nor destroyed.  It exists.  So you have existed, you will exist.  And what a story, if only you could read it.

 

Of course, you can.  All a writer need do is pull the idea from the air, spin threads out of it, dye all that gossamer, weave a tangled web, dark and shocking!

 

Which is why I keep writing.  Because no good story ever really ends.

 

Even as we sit here in this virtual world around this dream of a fire that warms me so, I am writing a gripping thriller called Zeal.  It’s all about belief, evolution, and survival of the fittest—or the most zealous, I should say.

 

I am also working with my revered fellow book lover, Will Keck, on a novel of scientific possibility and terrorism.

And last but not least, I am busy completing The Midnight Club, my suburban mystery of nocturnal grandparents who must find an Old Creeper before he finishes them off, one by one.

 

Fiction writers are often asked where they get all their ideas.  Most have cute pat answers to give in reply, or they say they don’t know, or they might tell their inquisitors a suspicion of the truth—but who wants to hear any kind of truth from a writer of fiction?

 

I have a muse of my own, but I can’t tell you about her.

 

What I can say is that fiction deals with what quantum physicists call realities.

 

I like this plural word.  I test this word in my latest novel, Interference, which I suspect you will enjoy.

 

We are here, you and I, right now because I have fashioned this little reality where you are sitting across the fire.  Perception, it has been said, defines one’s reality.  And it is the job of every writer to clarify one reality at a time in a reader’s mind.

 

I told you that to tell you this:  Writers are privy to letters, in various forms, from other realities.

 

You might receive a letter from another reality too.  You could.  I know the way ...