“And miles to go before I sleep…”
I’m at a point in my life when it’s obvious that there are many more days in my past than those remaining in my future. In other words, I’m beyond my expiration date or shelf date and must prefer for the inevitable. Maudlin thoughts entering the new year 2025? Maybe. In my stories, human mortality is always part of the plot, though, so it’s difficult to not be morbid at times, especially when I kill off a character!
N Scott Momaday taught me to love poetry, but I could never create any of my own that I considered consequential. (Penny Castro’s poem to her husband, old friend, and adopted children in Menace from Moscow might be my best attempt, but there are a few others sprinkled throughout my books.) Professor Momaday would pace back and forth up on the stage in front of his large lecture class—I was only one of him many students—indicating possible meanings for the poetry after he read it. I was able to conclude even back then, though, that what makes poetry great is that almost every poem can contain multiple yet significant meanings for listeners and readers.
At least, most of the so-called “classics” have that characteristic. (And also those who aren’t classics! In Penny’s case, readers must recognize that her poem’s meaning covers all three novels in “The Last Humans” trilogy.) For me, Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is about the mystery of our lives and the deaths we can never avoid. It differs from the “Rage, rage, against the dying of the light” found in Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” which is more like philosophical advice we probably should all follow to deal with our human mortality: We probably only have one life to live, barring reincarnation, so we should make the most of it! Frost’s poem is more about how to follow Thomas’s advice; “sleep” is simply a metaphor for “death.”
And that’s where I am in 2025: I’m going to rage against death as long as I’m able before I take that long sleep, The miles I’ll travel are represented by my storytelling, which I’ll continue as long as possible. I realize the day will come when it’s not, if only because my touch-typing skills will have diminished too much as the arthritis in my joints increases.
I fully realize that I’m a prolific writer whose readership is practically non-existent. That’s okay; it always has been okay. I’ve mostly done my storytelling on my own terms, mostly ignoring agents, acquisition editors, and pundits (like MFA professors, literary critics, and reviewers—the good, the bad, and the ugly). I’m still telling my stories as I want to tell them, and hopefully I’ll be able to write many more that no one reads…before I sleep!
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“The Last Humans” trilogy. In the first novel (written before Covid, but it could have been taken as a warning for the consequences of that real worldwide pandemic), The Last Humans (Black Opal Books, 2019), Penny Castro, an ex-USN SAR and current LA County Sheriff’s Deputy forensics diver, surfaces to find all her deputy-comrades dead. An enemy of the US has attacked the West Coast with a bio-engineered contagion, and it has been carried on the prevailing winds around the world after its initial dispersal (Covid might have been bioengineered as well, of course—ask the Chinese about that Wuhan lab!), creating a worldwide apocalypse that kills millions, although there are a few other survivors like Penny. She struggles to stay alive in this post-apocalyptic world, creating an adopted family in the process.
In the second book, A New Dawn (Draft2Digital, 2020), readers learn who was responsible for that biological attack when Penny and her husband are forced to take part in a revenge plan that what remains of the US government organizes as payback. Contrary to that plan’s goals, though, Penny and friends have something more peaceful in mind. Achieving that isn’t easy, though.
In the third and final novel of the trilogy, Menace from Moscow (Draft2Digital, 2023), the now reformed US government has some nobler goals: Disarming the nukes that went down in a US submarine that sank off the coast of Cuba. Unfortunately, some of the surviving Russians have more nefarious plans for those nukes. Can Penny and friends stop them?
This trilogy represents some of the most personal stories that I’ve written in my long career, if only because so much of the action takes place in my native California, the greatest and still democratic state left in our country (and an economic powerhouse comparable to many other countries!). I grew up there, and I know the state intimately. While some of my other novels are influenced in this manner (i.e., contain settings where I’ve actually lived, not just visited), these three novels are special in this sense. Of course, those Californian landscapes aren’t post-apocalyptic landscapes…not yet anyway!
Around the world and to the stars! In libris libertas!