Tag Archives: evolution

Ancient Agendas – Humanity’s Role in the Universe!

                     THE SERIES CONTINUES

Ancient Agendas takes you to that point thousands of light-years distant and slightly above the galactic plane where Carmen had detected an intense concentration of consciousness at the end of Inheritance. What the Sunaj scientists discover there takes you further into the realms of the impossible.

Emergence, Factotum and Inheritance form the foundation for humanity’s expansion into the galaxy, and what they will do when they go there. Sam Baxter’s tongue-in-cheek comment at the end of Factotum that humanity is “Factotum to the Cosmos” is a harbinger of     what is to come. In Inheritance we see an example of the role humanity will play when they   venture out.  In Ancient Agendas that role is more fully established.

In writing Agendas, the possibility of another book became clear, and I have already finished the first draft of The Urritan Legacy.

So read Emergence, Factotum and Inheritance if you haven’t, and buckle-up!

Humanity is on its way!

Inspiration for Emergence & the Janus Unfolding Series

You will find several themes in Emergence and the Janus Unfolding series each with its own source of inspiration.

Foremost is the mysterious Jim Post in Emergence. The mystery and the and the beginning of the book came to me in a new small emergencedream. A wealthy and mysterious man had built a grand home in Southwest Washington State in our near future. The locals knew nothing about him.

The home was on fire, and burning so hot that the fire department couldn’t put it out. When the fire finally burnt itself out, there was little left of the house, and the fire crew found a body inside.

When I woke the next day, I started to write about the man and the mysteries surrounding him, including about whether it was his body they found.

The book and series developed around additional themes. Evolution is a prime one. What would you do if evolution took a turn to develop a better model of human and you found that you were one of them? What would you do if you found you weren’t?

When we think about evolution, it is usually about what has happened in the past. What will happen in the future? Technology and Social Media are making changes in our lives, but what about the basic human. There were a number of different hominids in our past, and our model emerged to be the dominant one (with traces of the others in our DNA).

Is that it? Does evolution stop with us as we are? Why not a new and better model?

The new humans might have readily identifiable improvements: a little stronger and maybe faster, physically. Perhaps they could reason better and faster as well. What more would they have, and where would these other abilities take the human race. de chardin

I’ve taken the liberty to stretch the concepts I found a number of books. Three that stand out are:  The Phenomenon of Man, by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Entangled Minds, by Dean Radin, and Mindfulness in Plain English, by Henepola Gunaratana. Also I found the ‘k-space’ notion in James P. Hogan’s The Genesis Machine helpful.Entangled Minds cover

MindfulnessOf course, when thinking about an evolutionary change, one wonders what triggered the change. The characters in Emergence and the other books of the series Factotum and Inheritance are curious about that, too.

I must warn you in advance, that my books create a hopeful scenario for our common future.

Friendly Thoughts

Pictures, Dickinson Quote and Scrivener

The quote from Emily Dickinson in the photo below is typical of posts I started making this week in response to Shari Stauch of Where Writers Win, who suggested I post on Twitter at leastAlpine Lakes Wilderness by Scott Kranz Emily Dickinson quote once a day.

I was searching for content. I posted one of my book covers occasionally with a quote from that book. Too much of that is spam. I knew I had to look elsewhere for additional content. So I made my own.

People responded favorably to the posts. I began getting more followers on Twitter and likes and comments on Facebook. One person on Facebook ordered all three of my books in response to the posts on the day I used the Emily Dickinson quote.

The positive response is wonderful, but the most beneficial outcome from the effort has been the feeling I get from creating something beautiful and from the quote lodging in my mind as I approach my writing for the day.

Scrivener – I have been writing in MS Word. I wrote chapter descriptions, chapters and character descriptions in separate Word documents and kept them all in a file folder. The process was a little awkward, but it was working.

A few authors mentioned that they use software called Scrivener. I gave it a try. It doesn’t have all the features that Word has, but it has an organization scheme that keeps all those separate files in outline form on the left while you are writing.

It took a couple of days to learn Scrivener and to wrestle into a form that would work for me. I’m going to use it for my fourth book.