In the late 1950's, Mad magazine did a particularly scathing sendup of Batman. Our heroes were swinging from building to building, when suddenly they found themselves motionless, two guys in fey costumes hanging on a snake-charmer's unsuspended rope. "What happened?" demands Batman, anxiously looking down. "How'd we lose our momentum?" "I had a whole bottle of momentum in my pocket," the Boy Wonder replies, "and it must have fallen out."
Despite losing my bottle of sf writing momentum, the urge to write -- to express, to communicate, to teach, to entertain -- has stayed with me. I write several thousand words a day, usually on topics related to my business. People read them -- some avidly. Praise accrues. Yet the creative urge remains. When I was younger and my imagination exceeded my (non-existent) experience, that urge was channeled into science fiction, whose sole admission requirement was imagination. Today, with more experience, I write travel essays, movie reviews, and even my science fiction focuses not on the future but on the past -- Mandrake is an alternate history. Others in the Cambridge SF Workshop have similarly migrated -- to pure historical, to mystery -- but we all seek the sense of wonder, the journey to Other.