About Evening

I started writing what would eventually become Evening over twenty years ago.

Sitting at a my desk at UTA, where I was an assistant in the TV department, I would spend my lunches writing out ideas that I envisioned at the time as the central themes and plot lines of films or tv series.

Fragments of ideas around AI and sentience/sapience swirled and coalesced around larger concepts about humanity - more of an excuse to explore grand ideas that intersected both science and philosophy, than a story at the time.

Each fragment felt isolated, and whether small - such as thought versus mimicry - or large - such as the origins and eventual fate of the humanity - they bounced about and against each other for a bit as I picked it up and put it down every couple months.

What was most interesting to me across all of these ideas and fragments, was how I kept coming back to a core idea: how people are generally really bad at understanding the long-term ramifications of their choices and actions. Working in technology today, I can say that the past twenty years has only reinforced this particular idea.

I can’t say with any amount of faith that I knew whether these stories would ever intersect or whether they would remain disconnected stray thoughts forever. But I knew that there was at least one continual thread that connected them to each other:

Me.

So in many ways - perhaps every way that matters - Evening is a place I built as an excuse to explore my thoughts and feelings about where science and philosophy overlap. And as is my wont, I found myself using science fiction to tell stories of tomorrow that examine the perceived truths of today.

Over the course of writing the many, many chapters and storylines that eventually encompassed the broader Saga, some of these naturally diverged from where I thought they would go. That’s just storytelling - sometimes your characters surprise you with their choices, and sometimes you find yourself discovering that where the story naturally needs to go isn’t where you necessarily wanted it to go (I’m sorry Anna - so, so sorry.)

But something else happened throughout the twenty years of on/off/on writing that I absolutely should have been able to predict: some aspects of the story that began as fiction ended up becoming fact. And some elements of the “near future” that I wanted to write ended up becoming the present reality, and even the past. That march of technology I was often discussing throughout the narrative … kept happening.

(Yes, this is very much a lesson in “stop thinking about doing the damn thing and just do the damn thing before you can’t do the damn thing anymore” but some lessons have to be learned the hard way.)

Score one point for being able to somewhat predict the trajectory of technology, and three points against for missing the opportunity to be public about it beforehand. But alas, such is life. And being a late bloomer in most aspects of my life, I’m doing the next best thing: planting a tree today.

Evening is a story I’ve written in bits and pieces and stray thoughts and lines of text in my notes app and borderline manic episodes and midnight panics for twenty years now. And one I will continue to write for years to come, if I’m lucky.

But twenty years after the smallest kernel of it first took hold in my mind, at least one thing has changed in my favor:

I now know how it ends…