Why I'm Here in Korea

This is a subject that has been plaguing me for about almost every moment that I have been here in South Korea. It's not like I've never been here before, so the "it's new" rationalization hasn't been here in this adventure. Yet, I have had this distinct feeling that coming to South Korea was important for me, that it was something I had to do rather than something I wanted to do. But I really haven't known exactly why that is.

I think I'm starting to see through the reasoning, or at least through the haze to feel that I might eventually see the matrix that makes up the reasoning.

I'm starting to think it all comes back to my writing. And while I kind of talk around that subject a lot, and a few select people know about the volume of my writing or its content, I really don't share all that much with people other than some of the writing itself. Before I left, I handed five or six manuscripts of my 12 or 13 novels to Kat because she was interested in reading some of the stuff I have written. To be honest, I have been kind of closeting much of that writing because it's really a different part of me. Well, let me explain....

My early writing was all about getting things on paper. That's how the first nine or ten novels went. Then there was this really long hiatus between the tenth, or eleventh, novel and the last novel that I wrote. It took me about five years to write my last novel, and it was mainly written during the last six months of that period of time. And to me, it is probably the greatest novel I have ever written. It was different, it was humorous, and it was written so that numerous audiences can get different readings from the same material. It was very hard to write, but I wrote it, and I'm very proud of it.

But that novel (the Ameriad, in case people are curious) was a milestone for me. A breakthrough in a way. After having written that novel, I have a really hard time taking myself serious with the type of writing I was doing before.

You see, I used to write a lot of mystery/suspense. It was fun fiction, and I write that kind of stuff really well. That was my earlier work. That was my first published novel, Innocent Until Proven Guilty. Then I started branching out and writing pretty much anything that came to mind, including science fiction and fantasy, and sometimes both at the same time. All in all, I have two really strong books that have introduced series characters that realize I will be revisiting over and over again for the rest of my life (the first is the Reagul series, which is fantasy, and the second is my Soldier series, which takes place 80 years in the future in a fantasy setting here on Earth).

But when I was doing Forensics, I started writing something different, what I like to refer to as the psychological study piece. I really felt this need to get into the minds of people, into men, into women, into crazy people, into neurotics, into anyone who sees the world slightly different from everyone else. That has led to a number of short works I have recently written that have won numerous awards. My latest short story is called Precipice, and it explores an extremely deep analysis of suicide and its motivation; my writing is evolving into something I do not yet understand.

So, here in Korea, I find myself constantly thinking that this is the place where I need to really hone this writing into something I was born to write. A number of idea pieces have been nagging at me lately, and pretty soon I have a feeling I'm going to be disappearing and doing nothing but write with my spare time. It's kind of funny, but this is how my writing process always happens. I start to get nuggets of material that come to me, and then I try to ignore it or avoid it, and it just keeps building until I finally sit down and start knocking out the story. It's my way of writing. It's been with me since I was a little kid.

But I'm ready for something big, but I keep having to tell myself that I'm not going to be writing something big because I have this belief that if you glorify the work you are creating, it becomes tired and overly reflective. So I plan to let it just run its course and hope that it becomes what I suspect it is going to become.

So that's what I'm believing may be the reason why I'm in Korea. I really can't put my finger on anything else. I really don't think I'm going to hook up with anyone and get into a relationship or get married. I missed that calling in my life. I've resigned myself to pretty much living a solitary life without anyone else in it. And that's not a horrible thing. I've been a loner most of my life, even though I'm generally pretty good with people. I've come to realizing that I can only feel comfortable trusting myself, and maybe my stuffed bean bag frog Elmer. Well, maybe just Elmer, but that's just cause he's such a freaking cool frog.

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