Opening Round

Welcome to "Pushing a Snake Up a Hill"!

Although I have maintained a web site for a good number of years, this is my first entry into the blogosphere. If you've come here from my web site, you already know that I write science fiction and may be familiar with my books. If you stumbled in here by another door, you probably know nothing about me. So please allow me to introduce myself.

My name is Jeff Carver, and I've been a working professional writer for not quite thirty years. In that time, I've written and had published 14 novels and a number of shorter pieces. Not a huge output by the standards of many of my contemporaries--but then, I've always been a slow writer. I like to think that some of my work is pretty good, despite the infrequency of publication. My most recent novel, Eternity's End, came out a few years ago and was a finalist for the Nebula Award. I've been working ever since on the fourth book of a series called The Chaos Chronicles, and have been contending with difficulty in finding enough time to write (while I do other kinds of writing and editing to earn a living), as well as struggling with the book on its own terms. (It feels a little grandiose to say that I've had writer's block, but is probably accurate nonetheless.)

I expect I'll have more to say on all this in later logs.

The title for my blog comes from an expression my wife and I have been using for years--inspired by the difficulty of moving young children along toward completion of tasks (such as getting to bed!). Our kids are older now, in high school and middle school, but we still use the expression all the time. "Pushing snakes" has become shorthand for any Sisyphus-like chore. And there seem to be way too many of those in daily life!

In the coming days and weeks, I hope to note some of my thoughts on writing, on home-schooling kids, on home repair(!), on science and politics and religion, and whatever comes to mind. Let me know what you find of interest, and we'll talk.

Jeff