Adam Oster, Novelist

One of the primary purposes of this space has always been to keep you updated on my life, whether you liked it or not. To keep with that tradition, here’s my Christmas card letter for you, which, like all Christmas card letters, you can skim over to see if you’re mentioned before tossing aside.

Merry Christmas in July!

I should probably start this off with the answer to the question I get asked most by those who have enjoyed my books: Am I still writing?

Although the past few years have felt like the writing has taken a back burner, the reality is that I’ve been quite prolific. In fact, I’m putting the finishing touches on a book right now. Yes, I have been working on this book for the past six years, but The Right to Liberty(title pending) is something special, something I’ve been pouring my heart into, something which, I believe, takes my writing to a whole new level. I honestly believe it is the most well written book I have ever pieced together. It’s fun, it’s folksy, and I believe it will cause you to pause at least briefly and think about the world around you. I could write an entire post on this book and how excited I am about it…and I will. For now, just know that not only have I been putting out books, short stories, and plays over the past six years, I’ve also got one big, game-changing book on the horizon.

The Family: It’s no secret that my family is the most important thing in my life. Six years ago my youngest was a baby, still not even able to crawl. Now he’s an amazing little man who loves to read so much that I literally had to rip a book out of his tightly gripped hands this weekend so he could get ready to go to the pool (which, I’ll add, was his idea in the first place). The other two kids need at least two hands to tell me their ages and are becoming their own incredible human beings. And all three of them have been bitten by the writing bug. They’ve promised to share some of their writing here on the blog, which I am so freaking excited to share with you.

The wife is still the wife. Sure, that’s a boring sentence, but six years with three kids is a long time for a marriage to continue to work (not to mention the 8 additional years today with varying numbers of children and the three years we were together before being married), meaning this is an amazing accomplishment. I can barely handle hanging out with me for a couple hours, and here she is at over 17 years of it. She’s still the amazing supportive partner who keeps me well fed and I wouldn’t trade her for anything.

And me…well, I’m still pretty much me. I’m always working on something. Over the past six years, I’ve taking to learning multiple computer programming languages (and a few human languages, which I’m far worse at), leading me to one of my favorite non-writing (but still writing) projects: a program which analyzes the text of a book and will write a completely new book in the style of that book. It’s pretty rough yet, but also only about a month-old. Here’s a sentence it just wrote, in the style of The Agora Files: “Providing a tizzy. Too are sluggish. Very very interesting for in training to quickly.”

And I think that’s pretty much it for updates at the moment. There are countless other minor details I could expound upon, like how I’m in school again, how we’ve been using peaches to save the world, or how we moved to a farm and then back to the city, but I think all of those deserve their own post. And sure, there are always those less-than-happy moments in life, which, who knows, maybe I’ll throw some of those out here as well.

But for now, that’s the quick overview of what I’ve been up to for the last six years. Where have you ended up since we last chatted?