Unblocking

Bob Uva

• 3 min read

Trying to unblock myself is an unspoken goal for me. The blog post I published on January 10th was my first in a long time, and it came from this need to get myself going again, to avoid procrastinating. The result was a somewhat stream of consciousness effort to unload from my mind some of the history thoughts that have been piling up after reading history books, most for the trade market. History is just one of my interests, something I inherited from my dad. After reading many a book about the first half of the twentieth century, mostly traditional history of wars and politics and economics, and jotting my own thoughts or notes down, I felt it was time to start getting my thoughts out on virtual paper. Thus that relatively short post.

To step back for perspective on me, I retired from a software engineering career that goes back to the mid-1980s. That career probably should have been cut short in the late 1990s and certainly by about 2010, but I kept soldiering on, rather than following the many internal signals that I was not on the right path. There were successes, for sure, and I had good instincts for doing programming. Yet, I yearned for more personal fulfillment. This topic deserves a more full account, which I'll write at a later time, but suffice it to say I explored college adjunct teaching and learning guitar as ways to seek that fulfillment. Both were enjoyable, except that having a full-time demanding software industry job, and a family, made them difficult.

Now that I've been retired for about five years, I am starting to see how this retirement thing works. My wife and I travel each year, a lot of regional and local travel and occasionally a flight somewhere. I learned guitar early in retirement and continue to procrastinate on taking it to the next level. To be fair, I hurt my wrists from over-exercising them, but that's mostly in the past. We bought, and then sold, a vacation trailer with which we explored different parts of the Pacific Northwest. Most recently, we signed up for a writers retreat in the beautiful ponderosa pine forests of central Oregon. Maria has a novel to finish, and I thought that fellow writers would be good inspiration for more journaling, and maybe a fiction or non-fiction piece. That October, 2025 retreat was such fun and, yes, great inspiration for our writing. It's only been two and a half months, and with the holidays over, it's time to revisit how my writing adventure has been going over that time.

I have to admit that I went into the retreat with the idea of writing some fiction. Having just read a novel about a Polish physicist, his medical doctor sister and others trying to stay alive as the Great War burst upon Europe in 1914, I was intrigued to find a good subject among the many scientists and engineers who lived in the twentieth century. I chose Claude Shannon, an American mathematician who revolutionalized the study of information by creating Information Theory, sometimes called Communications Theory, with a highly original paper published in 1948.

After a deep dive into his life, I decided that he wasn't a good candidate for a thrilling novel (I had hoped to write something politically juicy given the Cold War atmosphere of the late 40s and early 1950s). Shannon was clearly a genius and lived a quirky life creating all kinds of gadgets and games, but I couldn't find a way to write something which I hoped would be historically-accurate with a small amount of fictional adventure and danger. But, who knows, after developing more self-confidence in my writing and creative abilities, maybe I'll revisit Claude's life.

Around mid-November of last year (thanks to my personal journal for keeping track of when I thought something), my interest in Weimar Germany and the interwar period in general led me to consider writing a story set in Berlin. Since then, I have read some books and accumulated a small library of books about or from the 1920s. These include a history book on Weimar Germany by Eric Weitz, and a few memoirs:

I'm using a Remarkable Tablet for taking all of my notes. It's a lightweight tablet which helps me avoid looking at a lighted computer screen, and for a small fee, synchronizes with Remarkable apps on all of my devices.

The notes have piled up, including 'creative riff' exercises, lists of possible protagonists, timelines, and story line ideas. Yet I haven't been able to really knit together a good story. At one point, the frustration was so great that I just switched gears and tried to convince myself to just write non-fiction pieces. It's only been a couple of months, but now I may be able to move forward given my plunge into publishing my thoughts here on a public blog.