The Book: Published

Okay. It's done. It's out there. My one and only completed novel: *Delivered to the Ground (also a *Kindle version).

It's a time-travel adventure and a year ago I wrote about the inspiration for the novel here: *Amazons and a Novel Idea.

The book has a gender-swap angle and that was an older idea that I hadn't gotten around to. It emerged from a writers' group I participated in during the early 2000s. We had been discussing finding "your  woman's voice" (or man's voice if you were woman) and how some authors pull it off well and others not so much. I certainly wasn't very practiced at it nor could I claim I was in touch with my female side, so it occurred to me to write a sequence where an alter-ego of myself somehow gets transformed and is forced to experience the world as a woman. What would be different? What would be the same? Beyond obvious stuff, I wasn't sure.

I knew the idea wasn't particularly original. Some well-known authors had indulged it -- Virgina Wolfe with Orlando, Robert Heinlein with I Will Fear No Evil, Gore Vidal with Myra Breckinridge, Angela Carter with The Passion of the New Eve -- but none of those efforts seemed all that satisfactory in terms of exploring the experiential differences between men and women. Could I do any better? Probably not, but it might be fun and revealing to try.

I wanted the main character in my novel to be woman so I thought I'd experiment with the gender-swap angle as an exercise in finding my woman's voice. I figured once I was moving along with some confidence, I'd ditch the gimmick and proceed in a normal fashion. I grabbed a ballpoint and a composition book and started writing.

The problem was that, almost immediately, the story took on a life of its own. In previous fiction-writing efforts, I'd had things come to life for me but nothing like with the zing here.  My mind burned and the story seemed to write itself. I believe, for a few months at least, I had become genuinely manic. That kind of energy doesn't come around very often so I ran with it. In my spare moments, if I wasn't writing I was researching, if I wasn't researching I was thinking about characters, plot points, settings and so forth, and if I wasn't doing all that I was typing my scribblings into the computer.

The passion ebbed to a slow burn long before I finished but I had developed a  writing habit -- a couple of hours a day at least I was cranking away at the novel. I knew what I wanted to accomplish, I had the end in mind and I was determined to get there. About half way through the first draft, I felt like I needed some kind of feedback just to make sure I wasn't going totally bonkers.  So I enlisted the aid of my sister, Jenny, to whom I fed chapters one at a time. She thought the story was good and provided ongoing criticism and corrections (which was really rather awesome, actually).

A year and a month later, the first draft was done. That was May 2017. And so began the slow process of soliciting feedback and revision. That's stuff maybe for another post.

Did I succeed? Is it any good?

[The gurus of modern marketing and self-promotion instruct me to stuff my doubts, insecurities and self-critical nature into a can and bury it deep.]

Damn straight, I succeeded. It's a ripping good yarn and folks ought to get themselves a copy.

Insect Politics

I slap a mosquito and flick it off my arm.  I squish a spider and wipe it off the counter. I use a paper towel to grab a centipede, wad it into a tight ball and throw it into the trash. Ick. Good riddance.

But what is it I'm doing?

Occasionally when I'm reading a book, a passage will twang something deep. Hugh Raffles' *Insectopedia, a book that garnered some notoriety a few years back, contained a number of bits like that, but one in particular really hit home. Here Raffles is paraphrasing a popular Japanese science writer named Yoro Takeshi:

Each tree is its own world, each leaf is different. Insects taught him that general nouns like "insects," "trees," and "leaves" and especially "nature" destroy our sensitivity to detail. They make us, conceptually as well as physically, violent. Oh, an insect, we say, seeing only a category, not the being itself.

The being itself. An insect. Millions of years of evolution producing a biological marvel we don't fully understand and, I would argue, can't fully understand. It's just and insect.

How much more of the world and the beings in it do we diminish with our categories, our nouns?

This is a philosophical can of worms that goes back to at least Plato. I can't claim to have sorted it all out but, for my part, I have reached a peace accord with the insects and arachnids: If they don't bother me, I won't kill them.