At it’s core, in it’s current draft, Connection Terminated is about the way things end. Lives. Stories. Games. But it’s also about how things go on – how we deal with legacies, on living based on what came before and on what will come after.
For me, that always loops me back around to history, a subject that is so complicated to us.
I always think of Alaska as having both the longest and shortest history of any of the states.When put in context of America – of the United States – we’re so, so new. We’ve only been a state for a little while, and we didn’t have kingdoms before we were a state.
But then, we have Alaska Native history, which reaches back before there was time, to the point where it’s not a history anymore but a mythology, or maybe legend. In fact, most of it is legend – oral stories passed down for generations, fantastic details that now are just unreal.
In writing, I have a hard time imagining living somewhere that has a history that blends with the legends, where certainty about some things but not all things is the norm. The idea of that sense of history – of previous lives having passed in that very house, or neighborhood, or city – fascinates me.
A strong history is like a haunting, but without the ghosts.
Maybe the same could be said about a strong story.