Samhain Publishing

Now that that is out of the way, welcome to 2010!

Writers on this blog and elsewhere have shared some profound thoughts on the “Naughties” over the past week. Much as I like the name, I’m way too shallow for deep thoughts on any subject.

Besides, I’m not too sure how I feel about the last ten years. I love history and repeat it often, but the Zero-Decade is too close for me to have any perspective. I tend to focus on the present and near future, which I can worry about much more effectively.

The next ten years give me a lot of material to work with. Of course, there’s global warming and a screwed up health care package and war and terrorism, a growing energy crisis, Mayan Calendar madness and the evergreen Nostradamus predictions of doom. That’s just the global stuff. Three different friends plan weddings this year, one of them barely eighteen. That’s always good for a panic—have you seen the latest divorce statistics? And divorce is the least of it. Sadly, although we made great strides in the last century, violence against women is not a thing of the past, and the younger the couple, the greater the risks.

Which brings me to what really scares me about December 2012—hello, that’s the last month this century can call itself a kid. After that it’s a teenager. No more cute mini-person with curls and clear skin repeating (and sometimes mangling) the opinions of its elders in a darling lisp. No, we’re talking snarky. We’re talking snarly. We’re talking acne, hormones and delusions of immortality. We’re talking mayhem and rebellion…

Did I mention hormones?

Consider what this century has to work with: robot dogs, combat drones with artificial intelligence, satellites that can ping anybody and anything on the planet (the Brits even call theirs “Skynet”; are they mad?), a growing interface between electronics and life-forms—i.e., us. Arthur C. Clarke’s famous Third Law is becoming reality: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

We could wind up living Terminator. We could become the Borg.

We could get Amber.

I remember what I was like as a teenager. Everything was bigger than life—the highs, the lows, the utter mortification, the determination to show them. All of them, even when the identity of them changed from minute to minute.

I wanted magic. I wanted magic to change myself and the world. I wanted to be an actor and a rock star and Lois Lane. I wanted to write the Great American Novel, script the movie and film it. I would’ve wanted to act all the roles myself, except I wanted to cast a lot of hot guys—which was, in fact, the only reason I wanted to go through the trouble of writing the novel in the first place. After all, writing is work. If I was going to work, there damn well better be hot guys involved.

The thing is, I thought I could do it. Fifteen years old, with a total lack of acting and musical talent, halfway through high school, with no equipment or instruction or experience in any of the fields needed to pull it off, I knew I could do it. Anything was possible. I was the Little Train That Could. Besides I was very good at bossing people around.

If I’d known about CGI… (Insert shivers here.)

And now I can have CGI… (Insert more shivers, of a distinctly different kind.)

I haven’t given up on magic or the The Great American Novel With Lots of Hot Guys, and I’m still bossing people around. I suppose these are all signs of a deeply flawed character. But prefer to think it shows some goals are achievable if you keep trying. After all, I did write for newspapers and ultimately published both government journals and my own magazine. (I married a super guy, too, but that’s another blog.) Okay, I didn’t grow up to sing or act or direct, but lots of people do. They become basketball stars and rocket scientists, too. And I guarantee the event or compulsion driving them to the top founds its fuel in the fury, the desperate need to prove something and, yes, the hormones that make the teens so scary.

Adolescence is a terribly productive time—emphasis on both the “terrible” and “productive” part of that sentence. It’s frightening from inside and without. Facing the teen years of the new century of a new millennium, all I can think of is the famous misquotation from All About Eve: fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

But the destination—the results of adolescence’s mad stew of hope, determination, fervid enthusiasm and creativity unconstrained by the possibility of failure—will be something to see.

Happy new decade!

Jean Marie Ward