Visualizing Visionary Fiction

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Many years ago Bob Friedman, John Nelson and I put our heads together to try to solve a problem for the publishing industry, and for the metaphysical (New Age) community. We were unable to have the impact he hoped to have, but perhaps the cause is not quite lost.

The problem is this. Suppose you’re someone new to metaphysics and you come across, say, “The Celestine Prophecy,” or “Jonathan Livingston Seagull.” You go to your local bookstore (assuming you still HAVE a local bookstore and probably you ask what else they have by the same authors. But after a while, when you’re read everything James Redfield or Richard Bach had published, you might want more of the same, by other authors. You know (or anyway you assume) it exists. But how do you find it?

Continue reading Visualizing Visionary Fiction

While we’re waiting….

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

It’s taking a while to get the website completed. While we wait, I thought I might as well provide a preview of coming attractions. Here is one, the novel I recently completed.

 

Babe in the Woods

We’ve all heard of mystery schools, places where people can go to further their psychic and spiritual development. In our day, there are not a few people claim to be able to provide such training, but – as in most things in life – caveat emptor. Let the buyer beware.

But – how can the buyer beware? On the one hand, you don’t want to be giving your time and your money and your sincerity to something that is only self-delusion, or, worse, a sophisticated con. On the other hand, how can you judge something that (if real) is by definition beyond your ability to judge it? Sometimes there’s nothing to do but to jump in and see for yourself, and hope for the best.

As it happens, I have been fortunate enough to attend a sort of modern American shorthand version of such a mystery school, namely a series of week-long courses at The Monroe Institute. (A week is not a lot of time, but in the right circumstances it can be enough time to get you the tools you need. Then you spend the rest of your life applying them.) This novel is my attempt to give readers the flavor of the experience. 

Continue reading While we’re waiting….

An alien life-form

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This is from a newly tweaked passage in the novel that I call Babe in the Woods, based on my experiences at the Monroe Institute’s Gateway program back in December, 1992. I wrote it in a couple of months (or in 15 years, depending on how you wish to count) and sent it to friends for a critique, and am finishing revising it. I am surprised, a little, at how much I had wanted to say that I neglected to say, and at how many things I never thought to say in the first place. Ah well, little by little….


There’s a thought. I came to a fir tree just as a prolonged burst of wind began tossing it back and forth. I moved to Interface, and instantly thought, this is another life form, after all, as alien to us as anything else, but no more so. Why shouldn’t I be able to communicate with it?
 Continue reading An alien life-form

Babe in the Woods — preface

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

By way of a teaser, here’s the preface to Babe in the Woods, a novel.

Prologue

March 24, 1995

Friday night

It was about six when I walked into the newsroom, a typical Friday night in progress. Joe Lampman looked up from his keyboard, saw me, and said, “Well! Back from the dead! How’d it go, Ace?” I grinned at him and made a waffling motion with my hand, and didn’t even slow down. A couple of other reporters and I exchanged nods, and then there I was at Charlie Reilly’s desk. I’d seen him glance up and register my presence and then go back to whoever’s copy he was editing. By the time I sat myself in the chair next to his desk, he had already saved the copy and was giving me the usual – the piercing appraisal, the challenging grin with the sparkle in his eye, the indefinable attitude that made him look like reporters must have looked 50 years earlier. He should have been wearing a battered fedora, cocked back and to one side, maybe with a little feather in the hatband.

“So, Angelo,” he said. “We friends again?”

I was biting down on my own grin. “Yeah, you’re forgiven, maybe.”

“Do we have a story?”

“I do believe we do.”

“Do we have a good story?” Continue reading Babe in the Woods — preface

Babe in the Woods — finished

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

Finished revision three today, third time is a charm. Now to get it published.

I didn’t expect this novel to proceed so straightforwardly and well. At 115,000  words, it’s considerably longer than my previous novel, Messenger, and considerably more complex. Yet it was a very easy novel to write in certain respects. I knew the people, I knew the situation, and I really knew what I had to say.

So now I’ll give myself a little rest and perhaps I will post the first chapter here after a while.

Emerson on our times

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

In the midst of revising Babe in the Woods I came across a quote from Emerson that might almost be a commentary on our political season, and certainly is a commentary on our times. Written in August 1847, if you can believe it.

The Superstitions of our Age:

The fear of Catholicism;

The fear of pauperism;

The fear of immigration;

The fear of manufacturing interests;

The fear of radicalism or democracy;

And faith in the steam engine.

Proposed future production

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

The other day, I sat down and sketched out the books I have written and those I have yet to write, and came up with the following list. This ought to keep me busy.

Titles of books not yet written are in [brackets]

Fiction

Messenger George Chiari in Tibet learns about inner worlds

Babe in the Woods Angelo Chiari in Virginia does an Open Door

[Conspiracies of Men and God] George and Angelo fight to defend the C.T. Merriman Institute from a conspiracy to destroy it Continue reading Proposed future production