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Welcome to the 21st Century.

Why Liner Notes?

This is not a junkyard, a cemetery, or a coredump. This is not a cheap attempt to exhibit material which I couldn't plausibly worm into the story itself. This is a collection of things which are not necessary for a reader to understand and appreciate FREEFALL, but which were vital for me to create it. Some are simply reference sheets. Others are accounts of how hazy concepts were turned into clean dialogue. All of them represent the creative process, and it seems fitting that that should be recognized here, on a Web which is perpetually under construction.

A considerable amount of thought, research, and plain hard work goes into any written work, but fiction also requires the writer to conceive the material s/he will present. This is almost inevitably a long and arduous process. Many things which happen in the mind during that time never make it to the page, yet their influence may be very apparent. Authors often hint at things never explicitly told, or write as if they know some important, unspoken secret. They usually do, and it's not always revealed at the end when you find out that the butler did it.

Any questions about FREEFALL not answered in this section were not meant to be answered by the author. I don't think fiction should be completely, or even primarily, didactic. The purpose of art is not to teach, but provoke, entertain, and engage on a more subconscious level. The best fiction does not force ideas into the reader's grasp; it sublimates them into the narrative landscape and draws the reader into that environment. That's why Solzhenitsyn's A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch worked so well-- it's easier for us to understand the physicality of a Siberian gulag than the abstract concept of oppression.

The writing is in the walls. Besides, as you can tell, I'm a pretty lousy essayist...