Anyone who knows me knows that I have been working on a novel for several years. I finished Carpenter’s Mark last year and decided recently to publish it as an electronic book on Amazon, iBookstore, and Nook.
It was an important step for me to release it, to have closure and to finally see this project complete. It’s not just a story. It’s my thesis, part of my contribution for having the honor of being alive on this planet in this marvelous age. It’s part of my own personal struggle with understanding the world, and my way of dealing with having discovered the deceptions that are so deeply a part of it.
People ask me in a polite way, “What’s your book about?”
I don’t know what to tell them, because the real answer could very likely be insulting to most people. The book is about showing the reader that our most cherished beliefs, God, Country, Money are all intentionally constructed and expertly controlled fabrications. It’s a book about being an atheist and what that feels like. It’s about wanting desperately to understand why we can’t get past what I call in the book our “choking cradle of theocracy.”
The premise of the book is expressed in chapter nineteen scene three, when the leaders of two elven families are arguing over the best way to control humanity, and I see the same ideas and arguments here in our own world. This is not only the fundamental premise of my novel, but the premise of this planet in this time. Can we be allowed our magic, or are we too brutish and instinct-driven to be anything but the batteries of the Matrix movies?
We have had moments of great advancement of mind, from ancient Greece to punctuated moments of the Renaissance, but this time feels fundamentally different. We have this. The Internet. A collection and collaboration of of mind that is profoundly unprecedented.
It’s changing us, and it’s changing the world, and it feels drastically important that we be a part of that change and direct it toward the greatest empowerment, happiness, and potential that we can achieve. If you will pardon a bit of cosmic hubris, it is the goal of the universe to awaken, to become self-aware, and it does this through us. We are mind. We are the magic of awakening star stuff, and yet we are snarled in icons, imagery, and protocols that keep our awareness distracted, docile, and dumb.
We are on the cusp of a crashing digital wave. It’s washing over us, killing books and the post office and physical recordings. We need to embrace and understand this. We need to change. Yet our money is old, fiat, debt-based, and artificial. Our religions are anachronistic, demeaning, and punitive. Our political structures benefit those willing to use power and money to hold onto power and money while carefully selling our own traps as freedom. Our energy is draining and our wells are running dry. We need the new, but we’re caught in old webs.
Understanding the trap is what the book is about. Estus’s struggle for magic is our struggle to change our world. Can we harvest zero-point energy? Are there better energy solutions? Can we exploit electro-gravitic effects to help us travel, share, and expand our world? Do our minds matter, or are we drones, cogs in the collective? We can only conceive of the new if we look beyond the old.
Estus’s final speech isn’t just an allegory of shedding our limiting religions, but of all of it.
I’m impatient. I want to watch the universe wake up and understand where that can take us.
And in the most mundane of ways, I’m impatient for myself to wake up. I’m in my late forties, and I find myself in a world filled with new voices that are unfamiliar.
When I was younger, being a programmer meant being part of a sacred elite, those who could dig into the cryptic labyrinth of operating systems and compilers and draw forth billable services for a company. We needed to be brave and a little arrogant, because what we were doing was both important and very hard. Now I find myself surrounded by young men and women who were babies in diapers when I was first coding for money. The industry is changing, and is not as fulfilling, in part because they don’t want heros. They want cheap, easy, and predictable.
There was a part of me that saw the milestone of publishing my novel as an opportunity to slide out from under the new unfamiliar voices in the world of coding and into the deeper, more meaningful pursuit of building new pathways in the wilderness of opportunity.
That’s what I did in the early days of programming. That was my magic, and now I want to program the world.
Except nobody is listening. I don’t even know how to speak in the new world that I want to help mold. Do I buy banner ads? Do I seek out book reviewers? How can I have a voice if I can only deliver my novel to a few supporting friends?
I know that the answer is to go viral, to reach the tipping point, to find an audience by being a part of the dialog, and not just lobbing a novel into the digital aether and waiting for it to go off by itself.
But I don’t know how. I can see the world shifting. I’m there, with a toe in. I wrote an app. I have books on Kindle, iBookstore, and Nook. It sort of feels like I’m part of the new world, but so far I’m just one little ant in a strange new digital colony.
Maybe it’s too much to expect to be a voice when I don’t have a podcast or even a reliable blog. What I want to say I’ve mostly already said in the novel, and what I want to say next needs people to get the first part.
Mostly I’m getting older, and growing disappointed with the world. Perhaps you can’t beat ‘em, and as we see in Carpenter’s Mark, maybe you can’t fight the dragons without learning to breath fire, but so far all I have is a cough and a faint taste of smoke on my tongue.