I was in my early 30s working as an associate attorney in a small but well established Wheat Ridge law firm. My children hadn't started first grade yet. I hadn't started this blog yet. I had no real peers, just long time office staff and bosses. The Internet wasn't what it is now, and I didn't have my first cell phone yet.
Lunch breaks were lonely and I needed something to give me a mental break from work. So, I'd grab lunch away from the office and I started writing chapters of a fictional story by hand with pen and paper. I'd write scenes that took place on the same date starting in the moderately distant future of the year 2030, more than a quarter of a century away.
I didn't really have a firm outline for the plot. I'd write what came to me that day and tried to fit it into the same future timeline for the year 2030. At first, I wasn't even sure who the main character would be. It was about world building and character building first, and plot second. I was inspired somewhat by a serial novel being published in one of Denver's two daily newspapers at the time, called "Confluence Park."
Looking back at it now, with the year 2030 just four years away, I still like what I wrote, although we certainly aren't on that timeline and it could use some copy editing. I got to about a hundred and twenty pages, with twenty-eight installments grouped into nineteen chapters, typed them up, and eventually saved them to a private blog on the same Blogger host as this blog and its sister blog.
But, I lost the plot as it swirled away in too many directions that I couldn't figure out how to tie up, I moved onto a new job as a professor (perhaps my favorite job of all time), and the project stalled. A few months before I was laid off from my job as a professor, I started this blog and poured my time into it, averaging multiple posts a day, in an era before social media was really a thing.
Like any fiction, it was influenced as much by the time when it was written, not long after 9-11, as by realistic predictions of the future.
In my fictional metro Denver of 2030, Highland's ranch had become a slum full of Muslim refugees from the Nigerian civil war between Northern and Southern Nigeria in which the U.S. was playing an active role. The fear of terrorism from foreigners in Colorado was pervasive and was being addressed by various branches of the U.S. military, including the Colorado National Guard and the U.S. Navy which was taking a leading role in U.S. involvement in the Nigerian civil war.
The characters were living ordinary lives and finding their places in it. One group of characters were members of the family of an economically marginal lower middle class white property manager in the Highland's ranch slum: a mean drunk patriarch, and overworked CNA mom twenty years younger than her husband, a rebellious older teen daughter with a very serious boyfriend that her parents did not approve of, and a fourteen year old middle school aged daughter who was recruited to by a confidential informant looking for terrorists among her tenants. Another character was a U.S. Navy Officer stationed in Denver to head up counterterrorism operations. Yet another was a young adult woman who made ice sculptures for an event company, who was an orphan who grew up in the Eastern Plains who was a low powered hereditary witch with little formal training who migrated to the big city for work and who ended up being the main character. She also volunteered for a dive rescue team. There was a young man who worked in a fuel cell powered electric motorcycle dealer's shop, and his aunt who had faded unicorn tattoos and listened to this oldies music called grunge. There was a young very academic minded Muslim woman who'd let the high school space club and had fallen for a devoutly Catholic boy but had parents who had arranged a marriage for her that would derail her college plans, pared with her father who had been an Islamic law professor in Nigeria but was now a businessman in Denver, and a brother who she goes to the same high school with who has been targeted by some suspicious characters.
It had airships, was in the process of transitioning from internal combustion to electric vehicles, was experiencing climate change with Denver Water restricting what it made available to the suburbs that it resold the water from its water rights to and wildfires raging in the mountains. It had a pair of half-mile high skyscrapers erected in downtown Denver in remembrance of the World Trade Center. One plot point involved a Yucca Mountain nuclear waste facility finally being opened and nuclear waste being shipped from nuclear power plants in the east across the rockies, and creating a target for terrorists. China had just put the first men on Mars. All teens got shots for AIDs, syphilis, HPV, and warts, and teen girls almost all got contraceptive implants. Video calls were a thing.
Some of my predictions weren't so far off. Others were, but weren't necessarily meant to be predictions so much as they were to play with ideas and concepts and possibilities that weren't likely but were interesting and still believable enough.
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