Warning. This post meanders.

Six months ago, at my then place of work, someone started a thread on Yammer (like Facebook, for businesses) on the subject of staying safe. The company I worked for is big. Very big. It handles enormous energy infrastructure projects running to the tens of billions of pounds and dollars every year. By its very nature, the health and safety of such an organisation’s employees is paramount. Not only in the field, but in the office too.

Leaders shared thoughts on how they keep themselves, their teams, families and friends, safe. How their outlook towards the subject – including physical and mental wellbeing – has changed down the years. I was encouraged by others to share my own ideas and experiences.

And so I started writing about wearing high visibility clothing when out running. Not wearing headphones when I’m out running. Selecting running routes that are unlikely to harm me and fellow road users (I mostly run trails, but many routes entail at least several miles of quiet but fast roads).

I switched focus halfway through my piece and discussed chaperoning my young charge while filming the Netflix show for six-months (she has severe allergies and so entrusted me with observing the strict protocols necessary for her safety. Namely checking all food prepared on set, and so on). Then, as if something dormant had been stirred, at the end of my thread I made a statement about becoming ‘more risk averse’ as I’ve gotten older. I finished by veering off into declarations bordering on the existential. Discussing family tragedies. My older brother and his disability. How precious life is. Why you wouldn’t find me today doing the things I did a decade or two ago.

Strangely, the post received a lot of likes.

Why am I saying this here? Well, I often wonder why I write the fiction I do. The books I read and the stories I love, are oftentimes far removed from the narratives I put down on the page. Fifteen years ago, as an exhausted parent of young children, and studying creative writing, those great expansive American novels from the likes of Franzen and Chabon were my thing. A comforting, thoughtful place of escape. I loved the style and sharply observed characters. The holding of a shiny mirror in front of the world we inhabit and staring back to find and identify myself – and my mores – and the environment around me, among the panoply of protagonists and villains. Then I transitioned through darker, more dystopian, sometimes satirical fiction; Dave Eggers, Kurt Vonnegut, Don DeLillo. Cormac McCarthy. I found some of these shadier novels unsettling, leaving me feeling unbalanced and disquieted. McCarthy in particular is the type of author I can only read once a year. In small doses, if you will. His vivid yet pared-back storytelling is fiction concentrate. They would write about the big stuff. What it is to be human. Life and death. I would tell myself I could never write like these particular authors do. I want to write light, and bright and breezy. Accessible stuff. The sort of fiction I read as a youth. Boys’ own adventures. Gripping but simple thrillers, such as Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, and escapist fantasy, a la The Lord of the Rings. Or family sagas from the likes of Franzen. Perhaps the absorbing contemporary worldbuilding of Chabon, or Donna Tartt, packed with fully realised characters following meandering plots. Nothing so challenging as Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, or Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. Too much risk involved. A lot of deep stuff. Sometimes just a plain old tough read.

However, whenever I sit down to write, whether a short story, or with the hopes of a novel, no matter what I’ve outlined I find myself returning to themes of life and death and the purpose of existence. Every novel I’ve started (and I’ve completed two) has at least one soliloquy devoted to a deep or spiritual theme. I can only think these notions were sowed as seeds a long time ago. Perhaps in my childhood or youth. Seeds that have lain buried but very much alive. Fed and nurtured by the ups and downs of my own life over the subsequent decades.

Most certainly we all have our fair share of tragedy and triumph, we all have our crosses to bear, as the saying goes. But I do wonder why I choose on some conscious level to focus on such ideas of mortality, and night and day. If you ever read my short stories you’ll see what I mean. In one, a man approaching retirement loses his job. But he doesn’t just get made redundant. It becomes a fundamental situation discussing the beginning, and the ending of things. A prelude to death with a final triumphant moment in the sun.

I wrote a few ghost stories (there isn’t anything in literature more aligned to death than a ghost story!). A Western written in vernacular parlance with cowboys discussing their purpose on this green and blue planet of ours. A father on a Scottish mountainside with his young son reminiscing about his own, dear departed dad.

And so it goes on.

All of which is to say, despite my perceived obsession with death, and the life preceding it, I have embraced danger and risk (to some extent) in putting these stories, and this novel, The Otero County Disclosure, out into the world. To be read and critiqued, possibly savaged, hopefully enjoyed.

This brings me to my final point.

Purpose.

I have always loved writing. It is, in its own way, the essential intangible ingredient of who I am. Suppress my ability and opportunity to write and you will see a very different Huey Hawke. And in order to maintain the opportunity to write, I will face all risks. Perhaps some risks are just worth taking? Some risks are less likely to cause physical harm. What danger, after all, is there in publishing a novel for all the world to see, other than wounded pride if things go south. I feel like fiction, and writing more generally, is my purpose. It may only satisfy me, readers may take a different view of my work. But that’s okay. I suppose it’s repression of this purpose that fills me with real dread. To not do it would be tantamount to a large part of me being sacrificed (yes, it really does feel like that some days).

But still. I’ll return to the beginning of this post, and that work Yammer thread, keeping safe and sound and those others around you. I am risk averse, at a very basic human level. And yet I find myself routinely writing on themes of life and death, perhaps light after death. Who knows. I do know I write to understand; myself and the world we inhabit. I’ve discussed this in previous musings, here on this blog. It’s very true that when you come to read early drafts of a story, long or short, hidden themes, not always apparent in the process of scribing, leap out at you, like those optical illusions when staring at a page and an image reveals itself. I don’t know what all this means other than the mind works in mysterious ways indeed. The Yammer thread was like catnip for me, I had to write something about health and safety, and yet for some reason I took that discussion to some place else. Somewhere darker and deeper, more profound. I almost can’t help myself. I mean, look what I’ve done with this post!

Thanks for reading.

Huey.

April 2025