E. C. (Gene) Ayres Blogspot

I have been silent for a while, as (being high-spectrum autistic) I sometimes am. I am waiting for my Earth Day (more or less) release announcement for my first new eco-thriller in 17 years, Red Tide (stay tuned). (Full disclosure: like all of my books, it will be controversial. But more on that later. (My pen name is E.C. Ayres).) For now I am driven to write by world news: nothing new, mind you, just increasingly intensified. More and more, of late, I have been thinking--and wondering--if reason even actually exists in our world, or ever did, as a principle upon which people actually acted. I know there to be reasonable people (I like to think of myself as one) and always have been. But how many, and what do they actually control? A few small countries in Europe, I think, at most. Congress? The Military Industrial Complex? The Middle East? If ever there was a place where reason takes a back seat, it is there, where, for whatever historical reasons however historically justifie...

One of the consequences of being both bi-polar and autistic is that there are side effects. I get at least two I've monitored: OCD and good old-fashioned paranoia. Not extreme; just enough to be an itch, an irritation. Or to cause problems (or imagine them) with neighbors. My wife, daughter and I share a house in a suburb of Seattle. We have neighbors. An interesting variety, in fact, but that's another story. One of them is a fellow nerd, who also works at home, and is just a (tall) fence away, much like the neighbor character in the Tim Allen sitcom Home Improvement . In fact I really can see him only above eye level unless he's on the second floor deck, where he sometimes appears. Otherwise we have this fence, and on my side is my little park and garden and on his side are, well, two dogs, three (young) children, two adults (parents) and a couple of stray cats. Being a writer, given (and when) we actually have sunshine, at times, in Seattle, I like to sit, or rathe...