I am so thankful for you kind people who are following my vlog series on my building of my stone cottage. My latest episode is below:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=B95_3rYZuU8%3Fsi%3DOF2Fryex9w9t_n2w

( a link that will make this downloadable is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJeaVlnbUto7vtD27RiIOQA )

If you are interested in my writing projects, and I’m not assuming you are, I have an update below.

On Writing

Believe it or not, a little over five years ago I created this blog specifically to discuss writing. At that juncture, as I was wanting to take fictional writing more seriously and I needed a blog to discuss my writing and future books. Well, as Paul Harvey used to say, you know the rest of the story. My cancer created a major distraction and rarely have I discussed writing since.

I was able to complete and publish three books during this period, Christiania Athena, the Girl with the Headaches (a parting gift to all my great patients), Ristretto Rain, my attempts at writing a “feel-good” novel as that seemed what the market was demanding, and lastly, The Stones of Yemen. This last book was different in several ways. For one, it literally saved my life. I was in a very dark place, feeling awful, physically, a daily drudge against an all-encompassing cancer, and quite alone. Denise was working 12-hour days, and I had orders not to leave the house (due to COVID and a high probability that it would have been deadly for me). I, the captive audience as a writer, did more research and editing than any other book by far. I did complete re-writes twenty-two times. Then I splurged on a high-end editor, retired from a major publishing house.

I had the concept for The Stones of Yemen since I got up in the middle of the night on August 9^th, 2018, and saw on the BBC website that a school bus had been bombed in Yemen. That was a year before I had cancer, so the idea of the book had haunted my mind long before I started writing it. But as I neared the time to start putting down words on paper (or digits on a screen), and it became clear that I would never work as a PA again, my bone marrow transplant having failed, I decided to make the protagonist a PA as my parting gift to a profession that had served me so well.

However, the writing of The Stones of Yemen, left me a bit disillusioned with the publishing industry. I will have to say, the publishing world seems unfair (isn’t life itself unfair?) but it is not unjust. To have a book picked up by a major publishing house requires an agent to represent your work. The agents are overwhelmed with submissions, one saying they get 1,000 request per month and might take one or two. Since the agent’s livelihood comes from the success of the book (they get a percentage of revenues), they follow well-crafted algorithms that predict which books will sell. Unlike what the lay public might think, these algorithms are not based on the quality of the writing. That may have worked before the invention of the web. Now, the number one predictor of the success of a book is the notoriety of the author. Taylor Swift could write a horrible book about the mating habits of crickets and it is a 100% chance it would be a best seller. More likely publishing houses have been approaching her to let their talented editors ghost-write a book for her, and still pay her a million dollars for the privilege of putting her name on the book cover as author, knowing that they will make millions in revenues. Agents want to see your websites, agenda of your speaking engagements, number of followers, etc. Based on those factors, I don’t have a chance. I am a nobody. A hermit. The woods are full of writers like me, some better, some worse.

So, my editor, with decades of experience in the publishing world, was confident that my writing was as good or better than most book picked up by publishers. However, in the end, after approaching 35 agents, not one wanted to see my manuscript based on my personal credentials. That’s why the publishing world seems unfair, but it is reasonable. Agents and publishing houses are not selfish or cruel, but must make a living as well.

These days you can publish a bad book with very little investment. However, I know that I must have a good editor in the end. I’m sure that there are some authors who function as their own editors, but there is a saying in healthcare that the medical provider who treats their own diseases, has a fool for a provider.

Good editors must also make a living. Editing a big book is labor intensive. So, it takes many thousands of dollars to hire them for their work. The second problem with a book published by a small publisher (Mount Erie Press) and written by a nobody, is marketing. Books don’t sell themselves. For a no-name author such as myself, marketing puts you underwater, meaning that for every dollar spent on marketing, you might get ten cents or less in royalties.  Out of vanity, or just the love of getting my story into the hands of as many people as possible, I’ve re-invested every penny of my royalties into marketing and then some. When people ask me how many copies have sold, and if it has only been in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, it feels like they are judging the quality of the work by the number of sales. If life was fair, well-written books would sell themselves. But how will people know about such books?

While I love writing, and writing has saved my life in the past, I can no longer afford to publish an edited book and to do the necessary marketing. My only hope, going forward, is being picked up by an agent and that’s where my disillusionment sets in. I’ve been at a crossroads about writing. I have started three books and will describe them below. It is doubtful if any of them will ever find themselves between the covers of a published paperback.

A Whisper in the Holler

It had been suggested to me that since I grew up in such a culturally rich area of America, Appalachia, I should set a story there. A Whisper in the Holler, draws immensely from my own childhood with one exception. In this story a tragedy befalls upon a six-year-boy that becomes a family secret the holding of that secret, destroys each of their lives, somewhat like the story The Prince of Tides by Pat Conroy. This never happened to me of course and I may have to use a pseudonym so people will not assume it happened to me. The other reason I may have to use a pseudonym is that the book will be brutally honest about growing up in the south in the 1960s, including the homophobia, racism, and misogyny . . . as well as the good, decent people who live there.

Post Christian

I have been interested in the phenomenon of people leaving Christianity. We are now living in a post Christian society and Christianity and the church will continue falling in relevance to the greater society. I personally see this as a positive development because what is being shed is the convoluted Christian culture and not the historical Jesus. This book would be a roadmap for the individual for the coming new world.

After I wrote my book, Butterflies in the Belfry, (which was picked up by a major publishing house, but I–maybe foolishly–turned them down because they set the price at $38) I vowed to myself that I would never write a nonfiction book again. The hate mail from dogmatists was painful. Not one seemed to have a clue what I was writing about in that book, but they just knew, somehow, it was from the devil. That is my only hesitation about writing this book. Religious people can be cruel. Not doing the due diligence to understand, but just accuse.

Herculaneum papyrus #127

This would be a historical novel based on the factual findings of over a thousand papyri baked (by the volcano Vesuvius in 79 AD) in a structure called The Villa dei Papiri (The villa of the Papyri ) in the ancient Roman city, Herculaneum. These papyri have been unreadable because they are rolled up and cooked into a what looks like chunks of burnt firewood. However, recently, micro-CT scanning with the help of AI, these scrolls are being read.

In this fictional story an archeologist takes scroll #127 to be read and to her amazement, it is most of the New Testament, making it by far the oldest New Testament manuscript we have (writen within decades of Christ and the authors). While there are differences in manuscripts that we have, in this scroll, the passage I Timothy 5:23, where Paul tells Timothy to drink a little wine for his stomach, this version has an additional verse that also tells those women in the church who find themselves pregnant, but cannot care for the children appropriately, to drink turpentine as an abortive (which was one way they did abortions in the Greco-Roman world). This creates a scandal within the world of Biblical scholarship, that quickly comes to violence.

The point of this story is to illustrate how much of what some Christians call “Biblical” is culture and is not addressed in the Bible at all. But, it is projected into the Bible by the minds of those who have adopted the cultural dogma. The Bible says nothing about abortion or the value of the unborn (such as the reading of Psalm 139:13-14 is claimed to give such value, via a misreading), yet this is the most important issue for evangelicals. Of course murder is clearly written about, the murder of the born, so implied. But abortion is so much of an issue for the evangelical, that they have abandoned the princples that are clearly written about in the Bible, the actual teachings of Christ, in order to vow an allegiance to those unscrupulous politicians who promise to mandate their cutlural view of abortion upon all of society. Take for example the recent Alabama supreme court ruling on embryos. The idea of the value of human embryos is certainly worthy of much discussion, but to say that the Bible teaches that abortion is sin, or that an human embryo exactly the same as an adult human, is simply false.

In this novel, the protagonist, the archaeologist, is framed as a fraud by the Christian community, (look how the Christian comunity treated Anita Hill, e.g. calling her a “whore” because she had dirt on a pro-life judge) who create numerous conspiracy theories (as they did about COVID and vaccines) and threats are made on her life. In a great irony, a Christian “Pro-life” militant group ends up killing one of her children.

Mike