And...finally something

It has been a long time, a very long time indeed, since I have had the opportunity to sit in a quiet room and scribble a few thoughts down in this magnificent blog of mine. An apology is in order. I realize there are three or four devout fans who have been let down and for this I must humbly apologize and supplicate for forgiveness but I do have a rational excuse, such as it is, that might atone for such a long and bitter disappointment. I have finished The Meteorite. It is the longest piece of work I've ever cobbled together and I struggled mightily to keep it philosophically consistent, plot-driven, internally sound, complex but easy to read, fascinating, informative, cogent, germane to our complex and difficult times and sparkling with the shine of the twenty-first century while built on old and solid, well-hallowed ground.

I am proud of the book and if I can one day find an agent willing to represent it perhaps I can reach a wider audience. A selfless dream might be that it could inspire another person to see the world in a different way than they might have otherwise. A selfish dream is that one day I might be walking through an airport somewhere and pass through the bookstore and...there it is! The Meteorite (hard cover, of course...it is a dream so forgive me a few lush extravagances) right between Patterson and King. That would be a very sweet day indeed!

It took about 16 months to put this one to paper (word processor) and the blog suffered inversely as the more I wrote the book, the less I wrote the blog. Life is a series of choices I suppose. But now I am doing far more editing and trying to generate professional interest, if at all possible. I have a lot of hope and very few leads but am consoled by the fact that this is far better than the inverse proposition. Like a Canadian in late March, hope springs eternal.

What is it about? It is about a plague that arrives on the back of a meteorite and rapidly spreads across the globe infecting the vast majority of humanity with a soul-wrenching dementia that robs us of our humanity. If that doesn't make you smile in the morning I'm not sure this is the book for you. As the world grows dark, a weary band of the unaffected must come together to try and work out how this happened, why they haven't grown sick and, more importantly, why it happened.

So it's a big picture kind of novel but written among the smaller worlds of individual men and women and played out within the myriad connections they make throughout their lives. This nearly invisible tangled web of interconnectedness is a microcosm of the world writ large and is a major theme of the novel. I wanted to bring together a medical thriller (for instance, The Andromeda Strain) with a great work of literary fiction (perhaps, Moby Dick)-a strange blend I admit but it seemed plausible. A little audacious, but plausible.

Anyway, I hope to be far more active on the blog this year. Please let me know your thoughts! I believe it is possible to email me directly at gmail from this website. I'd love to hear from you. In a very strange sense, this blog could be a wonderful way of keeping up with old friends and family. If it were never anything more than that, it would still be a tremendous achievement and a very good thing in my life. We are bound to the people we have loved in this life and yet we are also set free to achieve great and marvelous deeds because of the people who we have loved in this life. They keep us as they push us out the door. They ground us and they rocket us into the stratosphere. These small communities of interconnectedness are the web of the soul and the quiet inspiration and engine of the spirit. Our country, our community, our friends, our family-all of this girds our hearts in a tough world. As I write this blog, I find myself thinking back to elementary school, high school, college, medical school, residency and everyone that has graced me with their presence or bruised me with their force. I cannot help but smile and be grateful for the time I've had. I hope for plenty more and I hope that this book may one day see the light of day if for no other reason than that it too might be thrown into that giant universe of connectedness and be a force of good in the world-an actor on the stage. I figure it must be so because if I were wrong, you wouldn't have read this far and if I am right, than you just paused and thought a little. I hope you smiled too.

You see, this blog isn't totally useless after all.