About Me

Well hello there. My name is T.J. Marcotte. I’m an aspiring writer and novelist who enjoys sci-fi, (some) fantasy, mystery, and satire. I have two main projects I’m working on right now, and another one on the back-burner. Updates will be forthcoming.

As of yet I’m unpublished, but I promise you’ll all be the first ones to know if I do.

I was born and raised in a small town in southern Massachusetts, which makes me a Yankee. Not one of the Harvard/Boston hipster-type Brahmin Yankees, mind you. I’m talking real old-fashioned, “give-me-liberty-or-give-me-death” Yankees–the kind that would tar-and-feather King George’s tax collectors in the morning, then set sail in the evening to go hunt whales with their bare hands and make it back home in time for musket practice with the militia…or something like that.

I originally became interested in writing through reading tons of books and thinking, “gee, I wish I could do that!” So I started writing around age 10 or so. It was an uphill battle, full of embarrassing poetry, crappy dialogue, and a constant struggle with the slimy many-headed demon of procrastination, but eleven years later, it’s starting to bear some fruit.

Sort of.

I have two big projects I’m working on right now: a sci-fi novel and a detective story set in a “hard fantasy“-type setting. I also have another project tucked away on the back-burner that I’m really excited about. So much so that I want to go back to it once I have a clearer grasp on my capabilities.

Aside from that I spend most of my free time reading. From time to time, I may post a review or two of a book as I work through it. But I don’t intend for this to become a very literary blog. It’ll probably end up being a melange of all manner of topics, all cobbled together off the top of my head into a towering edifice of word-vomit. I have a wide range of interests, so expect musings on all sorts of different topics–science news, cultural commentary, writing troubles, humorous stuff, the works. Sometimes, it may even get political.

Okay, that’s a lie: it’ll get very political.

Sometimes.

It may help if I just explain my general position, so you can get the gist of where I’m coming from:

I was born into a fairly conservative and staunchly Catholic household, and went to Catholic school all the way up until 12th grade. But in high school, I started to drift away from that upbringing. By the time I graduated, I had serious doubts about my faith. So I did a little more reading on religion, from mostly non-religious sources. By the time I reached college, I’d become a staunch atheist, and had begun to get pretty deep into the subculture that’s developed around New Atheism: Dawkins, Hitchens, etc.  But after about a year, I began to have doubts about the New Atheists, too. They began to seem too sure of themselves, too dogmatic for my tastes. You might say I was too much of a skeptic for the skeptics. So eventually, religion and I reached an understanding of sorts. I still don’t believe in any higher power, but I concede that popularizing atheism is impossible, and probably undesirable. The religious impulses in the human brain are so powerful that even most atheists have merely refocused them onto something else. Give the average man atheism, and he won’t become a rational skeptic. He’ll just swap out dogmatic belief in Jesus or Vishnu for dogmatic belief in something else, like the mall, or Social Darwinism, or the inherent goodness of voting Democrat. So it’s best to just live and let live.

At the same time, I’d begun experimenting with radical politics, as a way to rebel against my parents. I spent about a year and a half as a hardcore anarcho-capitalist before losing half my friends and realizing I had to tone it down. I realized that life was too short to waste getting angry at the government. So now I just laugh at them instead.

As for my views, I guess you could probably still classify me as a libertarian, although I have a few hang-ups with the movement itself. I believe that the government causes a lot more problems than it solves, and should rule with as light a hand as possible.  Likewise, I strongly believe that we should all have the liberty to think and act as we please. Where I differ from the average libertarian is in three ways:

1) I support controlled immigration rather than open borders, for reasons best explained in some other post. Suffice it to say that liberty won’t work for everyone, and the people liberty won’t work for have the potential to ruin it for everyone else.

2) I see liberty as a quality, not a quantity.  It’s not something intrinsic to human existence, it’s something intrinsic to human effort.  You get what you put in. For the most part, typical libertarian rhetoric involves blaming the state, socialism, bureaucracy, “teh bankerz,” etc. for social ills.  I think that’s a counterproductive way to look at things. All that sort of dialogue really does is to divert attention from the human actor’s own choice to be stupid and/or short-sighted. Agitating for more liberty is missing the point–when you decouple liberty from agency, civilization falls apart.

It’s complicated, but not that complicated.

So every once in a while, you’ll see me comment on some sort of political shenanaigans or pick apart a political meme. If you don’t agree with me, that’s fine. Please feel free to comment and let me know. There’s no censorship here. I’ll even let trolls in, so long as they’re entertaining. This is the Wild West, mon ami. Prepare for anything from tender poetry to scathing satire.

We’ll have fun, I promise.