Hi, I’m James Parsons. My most important roles are husband, brother, and friend. I am also a writer, thinker, and RN.
Here’s some background about me. I’ve written three novels and a screenplay over the past twenty-five years. The most recent novel, An Odd Way to Get Even, is available as an e-book on Amazon.
Within a couple months I’ll introduce my next one, Forgive and Take. My ideas and energy have always outpaced my discipline and concentration. Now in middle age I’ve cleared out enough distractions to grow some of the stories that have entertained only me over the years. Participastory is where I hope to meet potential readers. But it is also where I plan to explore certain ideas that I think about a lot.
From about 2000 to 2010 I struggled to write a book called I Contact. It was a speculative novel set in the near future when an autonomous swarm of nanorobotic cameras and microphones engulfed the earth, recording all human activity and making it available to view on the internet. The protagonist tried to make the best out of this dystopian prospect by using the complete transparency offered as a form of feedback for self improvement, specifically improvement in how we interact with others. The title came from the idea that because humans are interdependent, you must know others around in order to know yourself. I thought it was such a great idea, so prescient and full of literary and commercial appeal, that I got a great deal of storytelling satisfaction just from telling people about it. So much satisfaction, in fact, that I did a lot more talking than writing. I scratched out two or three bland drafts over a decade and wound up moving on.
I never stopped thinking about interdependence, though. That people depend on each other in various ways seems an inherent part of life. And while people, and groups, are often encouraged to become more independent, how often are we encouraged to improve or better understand our interdependence? The fact we don’t see many of the people we depend on and have some choice as who these people are, creates the illusion of independence. And in advanced modern societies many people do have some degree of independence in material terms. But we depend on everyone we interact with for some knowledge about them and what they expect from us. Sharing the right information about ourselves in the right way may be as hard as interpreting that information from other people correctly.
Suggesting dependence on someone else implies weakness, which makes an already difficult topic even harder. Perhaps people would be more comfortable thinking about interdependence in terms of how we all affect each other. Affecting another person can involve many elements, including giving and getting support, as well as exchanging thoughts and emotions.
I want to use Participastory to share and develop ideas about how people affect each other. I think all stories can be boiled down to the statement – one or more persons affects another person or persons. Unless it’s a story about how a volcano erupted over vast ocean area five hundred million years before human existence, but I usually call those geology textbooks, not stories. People affect each other in all the stories I write. It is my grandest ambition that through reading some of these posts you will begin to more actively participate in the stories unfolding around you. But I’ll be happy if I can help you chuckle, think, and enjoy yourself while reading.