excerpts from novels and stories I have written
First draft finished yesterday morning at about 111,000 words.
Now I need to let it sit for a few days, then re-read it making notes of what it needs to be a finished product. But I’m really happy with how it came out.
What really happens inside a mystey school? Or, to put it into contemporary terms, what happens when two dozen people spend a week together intending to learn how to access altered states at will? Continue reading Babe in the Woods
Getting there. Into the home stretch, now. In the past few weeks, I have written 105,000 words, and have only a dozen sections more to write.
This is by far the best writing I’ve done. Where Messenger was a pretty straightforward tale with only a few major characters, Babe in the Woods is intricate and far-ranging, with more than two dozen characters. It’s the fictionalized story of my Gateway at The Monroe Institute, the week that I often describe as the beginning of my conscious life. Continue reading Babe in the Woods
Thanks to all who have said so many nice things about the fiction I posted here. It’s very gratifying to get appreciation for one’s children, you know.
Currently I am 80,000 words into “Babe in the Woods,” which looks likely to become my first completed novel since Messenger. I am very tempted to post it, a bit at a time, but really I should at least try to find a conventional publisher first.
“Babe in the Woods” is the story of my week at the Monroe Institute’s Gateway Voyage, 15 years ago this month. I tell people, that week in December, 1992, was the beginning of my life as a conscious being. Everything in my life changed after that, slowly or quickly, but thoroughly. Continue reading Babe in the Woods
[Yet another beginning of a novel that links consciousness and politics and spy stuff and conspiracies…. Also unfinished, put here for those who may be amused by it.]
Chapter 1
This was back in 1984, before email, before cell phones, before home faxes. Hell, it was practically before answering machines. Not that any of those gadgets would have done any good. If the guy on the other end of the line doesn’t want to talk to you, it doesn’t matter. And we didn’t even have to ask, it was clear that Henry wouldn’t want to talk. So that’s why Jack Slade found himself, just at dusk, driving down a gravel road with a creek on his left side and on his right a fifty-foot ridge parallel the road, a little way back from it. He was in one of the most rural counties in Virginia, and for quite a while, even while still on the paved country road, he had mostly seen trees and not much else. Sequestered country.
He had been told “all the way to the end, and whenever the road forks, stay left,’ and he had come two and a quarter miles, and here he was. End of the road, and a little two-story wooden house nestled into the south side of the ridge. A light burning upstairs. A car parked in front of an outside wooden stairway to the second floor. Slade automatically noted that the car’s make, model and color matched what he had been given, and so did the license plate. What kind of car it was, I don’t know. Never saw it, don’t remember the description. That kind of thing doesn’t stick with me. Slade would know, though. He’ll know twenty years from now. Continue reading Slade’s Revenge, Chapter 1
[The prologue from one version of Conspiracies of Men and God, my unfinished novel of politics and metaphysics.]
Prologue: The year 2000
It was the night Al Gore conceded. My wife and the girls were out Christmas shopping, and I was in my living room with the two Georges — my elder brother George and my son – watching the televised culmination of the election that wouldn’t end. Gore finished and the talking heads started. I hit the remote and the tube died.
“That’s that,” I said. “They got away with it.”
“For the moment,” my brother said.
My 28-year-old son, who came home from his first semester of college a conservative Republican and never changed, said, “What do you mean, got away with it? The court decided, so the recount’s over, and Bush wins. How can you say `they got away with it’?”
“Wasn’t hard,” I said. “Mostly a matter of practice. If you start talking early enough in life, after a while the words come out sort of automatically.”
“Oh, very funny, dad. Just because the election doesn’t go your way, the Republicans `got away with it’?”
“Not the Republicans, George,” my brother said. “The people who are using them.” Continue reading George Chiari after Tibet (November, 2000)
Chapter Four
I didn’t try to conceal my bewilderment. “I still don’t get it. You say you’re in deep trouble. Somebody trying to put a quarter of a million dollars in your pocket in return for letting him publish your book, offhand doesn’t come out sounding like serious bad news to me, George. Maybe I’m missing something?”
“I don’t know how far it might go, Angelo. They’ve got a lot of good people, a lot of resources. If they find me, it might get really unhealthy to know me.” He took a note out of his pocket. “Here, read this and keep it with you. If you never need it, great, but I’ll feel better knowing you have it.”
The note said: “To Carlos Santiago and his associates. I appeal to your sense of honor to leave my family unharmed. I give you my word, they will not know where I am or how to contact me. They can do you no good as hostages or as revenge, and any act against them can only produce within yourselves reason for shame and remorse, without producing the slightest benefit to you. Without bringing you in any way closer to your desires. Additionally, I assure you I am not a pacifist in the sense of being inhibited against acts of violence to protect the innocent or to so revenge them as to prevent future outrages. I realize that this must seem a puny threat, quite insignificant. Contemptible, perhaps. All I can state is that I have resources unknown to you. I would prefer not to have to use them. But I will if necessary. George Chiari.”
I tried to look at him with new eyes, as I would if I were evaluating an unknown potential news source. “If this is a bluff, George,” I said, “it’s a damned good one. It almost convinces me. Continue reading Conspiracies, Chapter Four
Continuing, just for fun, with bits of an unfinished novel about why George Chiari left Tibet, and what he hoped to accomplish.
Chapter Three
“You keep talking about my life being in danger. Why should it be?”
“Because of what I’ve been doing since I’ve been back.”
“You keep saying that, too. But it doesn’t answer the question. Why?”
“I need you to do some snooping for me.”
“For the paper, too, I hope?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. Not for a long time, anyway, even at best.”
“Sensitive information?”
“Dangerous information.”
“Dangerous to whom?”
“Depends on what you find out. If it’s what I think it is, dangerous to you, for finding it. You’re going to have to go after this very carefully, believe me.”
I studied him. “All right, I’ll accept that. And let’s say I dig something up, what are you going to do with it?” Continue reading Conspiracies, Chapter Three