Coming into the Twenty-First Century

“The only way to make sense of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” ~ Alan Watts

“How can you know what you’re capable of if you don’t embrace the unknown?” ~ Esmeralda Santiago

Today I’m at Cochise College second annual Comic Con. I’ve never attended a comic con before, but since my book can be classified as fantasy, I thought I’d get my feet wet by participating in a panel discussion about world building and see how it goes. Some of my students and former students may be there, so it’s a good time to promote my book with them.

The Space Between Time kind of defies classification. It’s part historical and contemporary fiction with some time travel, paranormal and magical realism thrown in. So the world I built is based on real life world situations. I didn’t create a whole new civilization, complete with political, scientific, and/or religious struggles. Fortunately I don’t have to do much preparation for this discussion, because I’m a little over my head with creative projects at the moment.

I wanted to share the second section of chapter one of TSBT with you today, but I’m still recovering from my cold and just don’t have the energy to get the section prepped and converted to the proper audio file. Sometimes I feel so behind the times. I want to utilize all this wonderful new technology, but learning how to use it properly can be a struggle. Yet, it’s good to learn new things. In a way it keeps me young.

This week in my dramatic structure class we watched Gentleman’s Agreement a 1947 movie about anti-semitism. It was eerily relevant to what’s happening in our country now, only with muslims, hispanic, Mexican immigrants, and as always, blacks. In the movie, the main character Phil, played by Gregory Peck is writing a series of articles for a progressive magazine. He tells everyone he’s Jewish so he can get inside what it feels like to experience the discrimination for himself and thus bring a new angle to the problem faced by Jews in America. His mother, played by the wonderful Anne Revere, says after reading the first two installments of the series, “You know something, Phil? I suddenly want to live to be very old. Very. I want to be around to see what happens. The world is stirring in very strange ways. Maybe this is the century for it. Maybe that’s why it’s so troubled. Other centuries had their driving forces. What will ours have been when men look back? Maybe it won’t be the American century after all … or the Russian century or the atomic century. Wouldn’t it be wonderful … if it turned out to be everybody’s century … when people all over the world – free people – found a way to live together? I’d like to be around to see some of that … even the beginning. I may stick around for quite awhile.” And that’s how I feel. I want to stick around for quite awhile to see if the twenty-first century is everybody’s century.

Hopefully soon, I’ll learn how to make the audio recordings of my book chapters and share them with you. I’ll keep trying to connect with what my nieces, nephews and students are interested in so I can keep up with the changes that are happening. If you look at the world as always getting better, we’re living in a pretty exciting time. When people look back on this time what will they say about us?

Thanks for reading all my meandering thoughts. Have a great weekend.

Lucinda Sage-Midgorden © 2018

Lucinda is the author of The Space Between Time, an award finalist in the “Fiction: Fantasy” category of the 2017 Best Book Awards. It’s a historical, time-travel, magical realism, women’s novel, and is available in all ebook formats at Smashwords, and print-on-demand at Amazon and other fine book sellers. To join her email list, click here. She will never sell the names on her list.