And Here is Why, Second Verse*

It's been hard starting to write this. Although computers don't let you see the eraser marks, this is my fourth attempt to write an opening sentence, not including the two word replacements (I previously used "keyboard" instead of "computer" and "the fourth" instead of "my fourth" - you be judge as to whether this is an improvement or not).  And as an opening sentence it probably failed, since it doesn't give you any sense of where I'm going with this, so I'll try again.

Sometimes you lose sight of why you do something, even if that thing in question is supposed to be fun.  This hit home a couple of weeks ago, necessitating my absence from this site and, happily (hopefully), my return to it.

The death of anyone you may have personal knowledge of is a lesson in the finite time we have in this universe.  You mourn, you examine your life through theirs, your beliefs - not just the big markers like faith, religion, belief in an afterlife, etc. but the small, quiet things like your diet, that garden you need to plant, your child's first science kit.  When that death hits closer to home, it throws any sense of reasoning out the window, and you don't so much examine as judge in a fog so dense you can't trust your own thoughts until it's lifted.

Or maybe it's not like that at all for you.  If I've learned anything it's that no two deaths are alike, and we all grieve in our own way, in our own time.  And this was my experience over the course of the last few weeks after the sudden death of my father, who left here far too early at age 59, and far too suddenly for me to see him in time to let him know all the things I can't find in me to accept that he knew.  More than any other person it was my father who instilled in me an almost covetous love of books.  One of his passions was collecting various editions of J.R.R. Tolkein's Middle Earth books, and if I turn my head to the right as I write these words I can still see the copy of The Hobbit he first read as a kid back in 1960.  He gave it to me when I was about the same age, and it's the first book I ever remember loving.  When I was younger instead of taking me to baseball games in the city we would drive down in the early mornings to The Strand, a twisting labyrinth of what is now over 18 miles of books, and one of the landmarks of the New York City.

And now those trips to The Strand have ended, as have the talks about what's on our bookshelves and our night stands.  No more arguing about the missing sections from Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy (my father constantly lamented the omission of such tiny things as the name of Gandalf's sword), and no more shared discoveries (he turned me on to John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series, I turned him on to Ed McBain's 87th Precinct procedurals).

In the time since his death I've actually read quite a few books - the plane ride back and forth was filled with the exploits of the first Americans into space in Tom Wolfe's classic The Right Stuff as well as the award-winning YA illustrated novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret. And I also opened up and read through my father's copy of The Hobbit, remembering him and remembering what it felt like to just read, and enjoy the words for what they were: not fodder for a book review, but lives opening and closing, reaching out to my world while simultaneously inviting me into theirs.

I had forgotten that.  And moreover I found myself moving away from so many of things I wanted to read in favor of something I could read, fast and easily, and more in line with the majority of what's written about here.

So that's probably going to change.  One thing Adele and I agreed on so long ago when we were pretty much the only people writing here was that despite the emphasis on F&SF Un:Bound would be a place where we could openly discuss all thing writing we loved - and so that's why we see a Dana/Inara at the bar hosting a bi-weekly column on romance and erotic fiction.  It's why Harbinger writes about football biographies and MangaCat writes about, well, manga.  It's why I could have a great dialog with Jack C. Young about Civil War literature and why so many of you responded favorably to it.  It's why Vincent simply writes about the art of writing, and Stray Taoist writes in his wonderfully abstract way about anything and everything.

Which in turn makes me realize that the only one keeping me shackled was myself.  And which, if my father taught me anything, was both silly and easy to remedy.  So going forward I hope to bring to Un:Bound the things I truly love about the written word.  I hope you enjoy it and respond with the things you truly love, and that we can all share in it.

And finally, I hope I can express a fraction of the love for reading my Dad did, and that by doing that in some way honor him.  Because right now no amount of words - read or written - have stopped the pain of not having him here.

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* I wrote a very different piece about my Dad's impact on me with regards to film under a similar title over at Celluloid Moon.