Welcome to the Horne

 

A short story I wrote after a very strange experience at a hotel in 2021.  Some of the events in this story actually happened, though obviously not the more supernatural bits.  I'm going for a Lovecraftian feel here, more the "dreamlike" Lovecraft than the "looming horror" Lovecraft, in this piece.  Without further ado:

Welcome to the Horne

by R. N. Kohn

I find myself in a crisis of perception. From a young age, I made myself a serious student of the natural world, and my belief that everything could be explained through careful observation and rigorous application of the scientific method led me to reject not only all mysticism, but also many of the harmless flights of fancy that my friends in youth deceived themselves with--much to my own dismay, at times. Yet now, after years of work in the natural sciences and a decent record of publication, I discover that I have experienced something I find impossible to describe through rational means. The vivid memories would be relatively simple to dismiss by themselves, as a particularly memorable dream perhaps, but the scars carved into my hands turn that vividness into an irresistible urge to believe that those memories are real, although I cannot find a suitable explanation for them as they stand in my mind.

I Guess I'm Back!

 My last post here was back in 2014, and I guess I'll just give a little background.  Around then, I was finishing up my Ph. D. in physics, or at least trying to, and things were bleak.  So I had spent some time writing to help deal with the bleakness.

By the end of 2014, it became clear that yes, I was actually going to graduate, and so I threw myself into writing my dissertation and didn't really have time to do fiction works anymore.  I finished my Ph. D. in the spring of 2015 and got a job in the fall as a real, no-kidding professional scientist.

This brings us to today.  If you look at my Blogger name (or whatever it's called), "Liberty's Advocate," you might guess I'm a freedom-loving guy.  So working as a professional scientist was fun, but it was also working (essentially) for the government (technically I was a contractor), and I didn't want to do that forever.

Then 2020 happened and it became clear that the government would do horrible things to us, seemingly for kicks and giggles.  I spent 2020 and 2021 becoming even more certain that I needed to get away from serving the government.  By the end of 2021, it looked like they were going to demand I give up my medical privacy to keep my job, and I declared my intentions to leave before that became mandatory.

It turned out that it didn't become mandatory.  The drop-dead date got pushed back a couple of times, then disappeared.  But I was already moving along this path.

So, as of the start of October 2022, they found a replacement for me and, after helping to train him on the experiment I was working on, I'm out and I'm going to be working on writing up a bunch of projects I've been building up and sitting on while I had a full-time job.  So anyone who might happen to read this blog can expect to see new pieces start appearing.

Sorry for the lengthy re-introduction, but it looks like I'm back in the fiction-writing game!  I'll be doing some non-fiction too, but I'm not sure what exactly I'm going to do with it.