Shannan Sinclair - Author

As an indie author who just finished a 4-book sci-fi series, I’m supposed to be promoting and marketing it.

But I’m not.

Instead, I went straight to writing again.

Every morning, I sit down and write. This used to be difficult for me. I was a master procrastinator. But not anymore.

I’ve been thinking that writing has become a coping mechanism for me. A form of dissociation. I step out of the current reality and into a world of my own making. Because in my story, there is structure. There are causes and consequences. Events move toward meaning. I have control over outcomes.

The real world doesn’t offer that kind of certainty.

And the idea of stepping into the machinery of marketing—algorithms, constant promotion, constantly selling and promoting, turning my imagination into product—is soul-crushing. It feels misaligned with why I started writing in the first place.

But stories have always been how humans make sense of the world. Long before marketing departments and social media campaigns, we told stories around fires and kitchen tables to process things that were too big or too frightening to face directly.

Science fiction and speculative fiction have always done this particularly well.

1984 processed authoritarianism.
The Matrix processed systems of control and awakening.
Dune processed power and religion.
Star Trek processed social change.

These stories create distance so we can look at difficult truths more clearly.

Over the last several years, I finished a science fiction series that explores themes like consciousness, systems of control, psychological manipulation, and what it means to wake up in a world that isn’t what it seems. When I first began writing it, those ideas felt abstract—interesting questions to explore through story.

Now, watching the world unfold, those questions feel far less theoretical.

We are living through a time when people are questioning institutions, information systems, technology, power structures, belief systems—even reality itself. In many ways, we are living inside the themes science fiction writers have been exploring for decades.

Interestingly, as I finished the series, I found myself pivoting in a completely different direction. The next story I’m working on isn’t set in another dimension or a distant future. It’s grounded in the real world—on land, in family history, and in the complicated emotional landscape of midlife.

If the series asked big questions about reality and control, this new story asks quieter ones: reinvention, forgiveness, and what it means to come home to yourself after a lifetime of running.

Both stories, in their own way, are trying to answer the same thing:

How do we live meaningfully inside uncertain times?

Now that I’m writing this, I’m realizing maybe what I’m doing isn’t escapism at all.

Maybe writing is simply the one small space where I can build meaning deliberately.

Not a retreat from reality—but a way to process it.

A way to rehearse hope.