This image is from my book Voices from the Old Earth.
A city appears in many of my books and stories. I remember the first time I saw it in my mind, arriving unbidden. I was living in Belle Harbor, New York, and writing a film script set in a mental hospital in the desert. Fifteen years later that would become the novel Force Field, but back then it was just the script. I had described a mountain range bordering the desert when in the distance appeared a city, not unlike the one shown in the slider image on the home page and in this book. It showed up eventually, too, in a short story called “Rose-Colored Glass,” set on a planet that was a prison outpost…and in other stories here and there. It stays, as if there is some intent to be solved about its presence. When (or if) I manage that, I imagine it will no longer appear at all.
I recently watched an old interview with Stephen King–it occurred somewhere around the time he was writing Christine–and he was in his own living room in Maine. The reporter asked him why he didn’t write about other subjects instead of horror stories, and King’s answer to him was “You say that as if you think I have a choice.” What we write comes to us–out of what inner impulse, who knows, though it is most likely at the subatomic level, some deep, inner self–but its energy is its own, and the voice and subject are what they have to be.
