And so it came to pass that Aeon and Nature both published one of my pieces on the same day.
The Humanitarian Future was difficult. The original article was trying to be three things: a potted history of the modern humanitarian sector, an outline of what needs to change for ‘humanitarianism’ to survive in the now-times, and a brief personal account of my work. My editor Brigid Hains took one look at that and realised it wasn’t going to work. The final version doesn’t capture everything that I wanted to say, but, contrary to what the internet wants you to believe, it doesn’t have to. This is a small part of a wider discussion, across many platforms and in many fora. Go read.
The tiger waiting on the shore, by contrast, was easy. I had been enjoying the Nature Futures podcast for a few months, and wondered if they had an open submissions policy. They did, so I wrote the story in less than a day, and sent it off with no expectations. Editor Colin Sullivan accepted it immediately, and it’s printed more or less as I originally wrote it. Writers’ lesson for the day: you never know where you might find a platform for your work. The story is a science fiction / horror / family drama – a bit more obscure than most of the stories that Nature publishes, and it fills me with a feeling I can’t quite describe.
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