Why is it going on hiatus? The first reason is that its original purpose – a blog about translation and linguistics – no longer makes much sense. That’s because translation is no longer my primary job. It took a while to get to this point. First, around the time I started the blog, machine translation began to replace human translation. This led to an erosion in wages for translators, as well as making translation itself a less interesting job. The second factor was Covid, which decimated my workload. With business at a standstill and courts in Europe closed, work dried up. It has recovered somewhat since that initial shock, but it is still nowhere near where it used to be. Therefore, I have had to shift gears. Most of my work is now writing or editing rather than translation.
The second reason follows from the first: I’m now busy with writing projects. Some of these are paying work, such as editing manuscripts and ghostwriting. But the big one, the one that’s most important to me personally, is writing my second novel. This blog played a part in reviving my literary activity. Writing it provided exercise for my writing muscles and made me want to undertake longer projects. Among other things, it gave me the impetus to finish my novel, Abandon All Hope, which was published last year.
Regarding my next book, there are a few things I can tell you about it at this point. In contrast to my previous book, which was set in 1998, the new one is set in the present day, or even a few years into the future (I’m keeping it intentionally vague). It’s more topical, dealing with subjects that are on a lot of people’s minds: the revival of small towns, ongoing threats to civilization, the wish to escape our current situation, as well as generation gaps, craft beer, dogs, folk music, regional cuisine, and yes, linguistics. My one-line description of the book is: “A midlife crisis meets a civilizational crisis.”
Maybe I’m picking up on something in the air. Recently I read Emily St. John Mandel’s excellent novel Station Eleven, published in 2014. In that book, a flu pandemic wipes out most of the population, and the survivors are forced to pick up the threads of civilization in any way they can. This is symbolically represented by a company of actors who go from settlement to settlement in the Great Lakes region, performing Shakespeare. The characters in my story are trying to keep civilization going in a small town in the Great Lakes region, though under less dire circumstances. I was relieved to discover that beyond these basic themes, my book is very different from Mandel’s, so I can’t be accused of plagiarism.
This means that the blog goes into hibernation until I’ve finished a complete draft of the new novel (working title The Great Retreat). I’m aiming to finish that by late spring or early summer. I hope we can reconnect in the new year!