It’s been a little while! The culprit is another writing project, and I’m excited to finally announce it.
I wrote a short story! Entitled When I Laid the Foundations, it’s a sci-fi/fantasy story with some elements of time travel and theology that runs about 6,500 words (roughly a 15-minute read).
Immortality is a curse that Lucca has been forced to bear for millennia too long. The more she wanders between the threads of time, bending past and future, the more lost she becomes. Worshipped by some, hated by others, she is little more than a bitter, hollow shadow of the questions that cycles of history have failed to answer. But when she agrees to meet someone from her distant past over drinks at a coffee shop, Lucca must finally confront her immortality and the Old Testament God’s enigmatic response to Job’s innocent suffering: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”
Read it online now, or request a physical copy.
Thoughts from the Author
Before reading any further, please read the story! The commentary below contains spoilers.
Writing the “About the Author” section for the back cover of the print books was surreal. I’m not an author! Well, I am in the sense that I wrote something, and it technically has my name on it, but “About the Author” sections are for people who write real books and talk about their potted plants and their meaningful cultural experiences and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But here we are. In elementary school, I always said I wanted to be an author when I grew up, and although life has taken me down a slightly different path, it still feels gratifying to have completed a work of fiction that I can share.
It seems to be a universal principle of writing—or maybe it’s just my writing—that anything I write seems awkward and cringey in retrospect. Perhaps that’s an indicator of progress. Either way, it’s unavoidable, so I just keep writing and hope that people will be able to enjoy and relate to it. I’m learning to worry less about letting negative reactions prevent me from trying new things. The very best movies have bad reviews. Even the Wikipedia article for Andrea Bocelli says that “his voice and performances have routinely been the subject of negative reviews by critics”—and if the work of an immensely popular singer like him can be described as “a profoundly unmusical contribution”, then I have no chance at pleasing everyone. But if just a few readers find my work worth reading, then I’m happy I wrote it.
As I mention in my acknowledgments, this story has some history behind it. Originally, I wanted to write a time travel novel told in chronological order. (Don’t think about that too hard. The more sense you try to make of it, the less sense it makes.) That was back in 2018. There was a large ensemble cast of characters with interweaving stories, flashbacks to alternate timelines—the whole thing was rather unintelligible, especially as a first effort.
However, a few characters and scenes worked well, particularly Lucca, the central character of that outline. The name and hair color were inspired by Chrono Trigger, the Super Nintendo classic—a delightful piece of video game storytelling—but the similarity to that Lucca ends there. My original outline had planned a great deal of philosophical navel-gazing about free will, culture, life’s meaning, etc., and the anchor for that was a completely nihilistic, “anti-god” who had lost all sense of meaning because she was subject to neither death nor time; she became too powerful to face any kind of material resistance, and the world became a plaything to her. The pivotal final scene played out the same way as it does here. It was the strongest of the scenes I ended up writing, and I shared it with friends and family, but it didn’t come together without the rest of the unwritten story.
Meanwhile, the content related to the Book of Job was added much later in 2020, when I was reading the Old Testament seriously for the first time. Job quickly became my favorite book because of its fascinating tension—no two commentators seemed to agree on what it meant or how to interpret it, and the winding interior of the book stood almost completely at odds with the simplicity of the frame story. I was especially interested in God’s response to Job—opening with “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”—which seemed like either a deflection of the question or a complete non-sequitur. I began to make sense of it when I turned the situation on its head. What if Job were in God’s place, or God were in Job’s place? God’s tour of the cosmos became intimately related to Job’s suffering, and this story’s coffee shop conversation was born.
Eventually, I decided to try submitting some of my writing to a college writing journal, and this is the story that was in the best shape at the time. I tore the ending and the coffee shop scenes from the early draft, wrote a single chapter of backstory for each character, glued it all together, and put it through a couple rounds of editing. As soon as it was finished, I decided that I’d rather retain the publication rights and distribute it to my friends and family and on my blog, so I had some art done and made some physical copies (I’ll be making more once I get a printer). The manuscript I submitted is still lying in a slush pile somewhere.
And that’s the story of How I Laid the Foundations! My hope is that the story in its current form is an engaging narrative that points to questions and answers about human significance, compassion, death, meaning in chaos, and letting go. I hope you enjoyed it.
Future Plans
My current writing project is a lovely research paper for my historical linguistics class with the working title, “Broderfolk eller brödrafolk: Are Danish and Swedish still mutually intelligible?” or the more sterile “Asymmetric mutual intelligibility between Danish and Swedish”. It sounds absolutely thrilling, I’m sure, but I’m enjoying learning more about Scandinavian linguistics in the process. If you happen to be curious about that particular niche, you know where to find me.
Otherwise, I’m writing some early scenes for another fiction story. The surface genre is YA dystopian romance, and the ideas I’m hoping to dig into are modern anti-natalism, coming of age, and a relationship between two young people without a common language. Stay tuned!
As always, thanks for reading, and have a wonderful holiday and Christmas season!
Yours, Eric. ∎