There are definite patterns played out over the past few decades. I’m still coming to terms with my mistakes – if they are mistakes. Maybe it’s just resistance to the reality that I will never be successful the way I thought I would.

Nice! And how about in your writing life, outside of the actual story-writing, E.? Do you notice any themes based on choices you’ve made as part of your writing career, or reasons for doing the things you’ve done?

Gabriela always asks great questions! Yes I did! I thought about my themes a lot – usually they deal with unconditional love, suffering, grief, forgiveness, and courage. It helped me draw what I connect so much to certain books as well 🙂

Thanks, Abigail! Though I think Gabriela deserves a little credit for the idea, too, since she asked me the question in the first place. 🙂 Were you able to think of some of your writing life themes off the top of your head?

LOL! I hope the gobbling helps a little more than the panicking, John. 😉

And yes, topics we’ve written about consistently can often serve as our personal writing themes. You could even take it a step further and say that, on a more abstract level, curiosity or passion could be some of your themes as well, since you might not have written so often about machinery had you not been curious or passionate about it.

But seriously, thanks for this, Sara. I too write speculative fiction, YA Dieselpunk at the moment. And a theme that runs through all my writing is machinery. The creation and operation of machines, large transport machines in particular, has always fascinated me. Trains, planes, automobiles and ships are our mind’s children and can be almost characters in their own right, as I’ve reflected elsewhere. They amplify our human qualities, strength and speed, good and bad. Dieselpunk is a descendant of SF in the sense of Science Fiction, but it could equally well be called EF or Engineering Fiction.