As some people here might have heard, I've been off work for the past several weeks because of issues with my neck and back. I'm still trying to deal with them. Had injections in my spine to reduce swelling and even now waiting for them to have an effect. I'm scheduled to go back to work after this coming Friday.
Ugh. It's going to be very difficult all the way around if these treatments don't work. The more I use my left arm, the more I hurt. The more I hurt, the less I want to be around people, particularly in a work setting.
It's going to be a challenge, that's for sure.
But during the time I've been off, I've been working on a new novel. I finished it twenty minutes or so ago. This is a record for me. From start to finish it took barely five weeks to write. If that. And yet, for all its speed, I think it's the best book I've ever written. It's so much different than not only anything I've ever read, but also anything I've created in the past.
As with all of my projects, it combines elements of both fantasy and science fiction, and draws its inception from my overreaching Infinity Project.
This novel, currently entitled "Legacy," tells the story of Rune, the child of the vampire Raven, one of my favorite characters, and his wife, Val. Rune's existence is more or less miraculous in the first place, since vampires can't breed as normal humans and his mother, being an immortal, is almost completely infertile except in very specific circumstances.
Rune comes about thanks to the intercession of Raven's best friend, the Lord Immortal ArchAngel, the most powerful being in the sidereal dimension of Starhaven.
Despite the power of his parents, at thirteen Rune is performing at far below his potential in both magic and psionic disciplines. He's adept enough at his other studies, but the metaphysical or mystical side of things seems to leave him grasping for success he cannot achieve.
Worried, his parents send him to study in a place where their approach to magic is completely different than the culture of his birth.
It is there that he is contacted by something he has reason to believe is the very spirit of magic itself, a consciousness that people have theorized might exist, but have never been able to verify. Under its influence, he returns home, tells his parents he's leaving, and leaps to the past in a parallel or "variant" Earth, appearing in all places at the Monterey Pop Festival.
Rune has, up until now, been a mediocre student of history, and much of what happened on Earth before the great migration to Starhaven by the immortals and many of the paranormal and preternatural beings that hailed from their version of Earth remains a mystery to him. Before the Cen War that changed their Earth--"Earth Prime," as they call it--the history of the world held no fascination.
But the magic has a plan for him and he's drawn into it whether he likes it or not. He is confronted with some facts about the human race he doesn't like at all, introduced in a way to racism and sexism that shocks him to his egalitarian core.
Because of the relationship between him and the entity that supposedly embodies magic, he is able to do things no other mage has ever been able to do without intense study. He can make things that seem impossible happen without even trying, though it's debatable whether it's him or the magic doing it.
Led by a hippie girl he meets at Monterey, he leaps forward in time to hear one of Martin Luther King JR's speeches and just happens to be in the right place at the right time to prevent his death, though the man is paralyzed from the waist down.
Afterwards, they are confronted by two men who claim to be FBI agents investigating the shooting, but are subsequently identified as 'time agents' sent from the future to prevent interference in history. Not that this has any affect on what the magic has planned for him. It guides him into his next leap and he and his companion, along with a strange cat that appears to act as a kind of mentor, into the future once again.
The year is 1983, and this small company is introduced to a young man with a seemingly impossible dream. Dane Campbell is barely out of his teens, an orphan living in a blue collar community, a white kid who idolizes Martin Luther King and believes that the world could be a better place if people would just learn to consider how their actions affect the people around them.
The two alleged 'time agents' appear on the scene and try to kill Dane this time, and only through swift action does Rune and Daphne manage to prevent his death. It is here that they begin to detect a personal element to what the two agents are doing. Dane Campbell is very important for some reason, and whatever their vendetta is against him, the two agents are bound and determine to get him out of their way.
Guided by the magic once again, Rune gives Dane and his circle of friends and followers the ability to work magic themselves, but is prompted to warn them against trying to use it to gain social or political influence, somehow knowing it would destroy everything Dane is trying to build.
They then jump forward in time once more, to the year 2008. The world is in chaos. The economy is teetering, a war is being fought that should not have ever happened, and it seems that many of those in positions of power are being replaced by androids. Curiosity and the magic lead Rune to a secret sub-basement of the White House, where he finds the President and First Lady being held captive while his job is being performed by a remarkably inept android.
With the older Dane's help, they free the President and Rune takes him to his home on Starhaven, into the future. In the time between when they met him and the time they returned, Dane has become a well-known "self-help" guru who insists that what he does isn't about "SELF-Help" at all, but about helping everyone.
Dane is in the middle of carrying out a very personal campaign against an organization known as the Monarch Corporation, and their investigation leads the bunch of them to the conclusion that Monarch is somehow behind not only the android replacements, but many of the things going wrong in the world. After working fast to prevent the replacement of either of the possible Democratic candidates for the Presidential nomination, the group gathers and tries to put together a plan for putting an end to the conspiracy once and for all.
Recruiting the help of not only his father, but the greatest mage-engineer on Starhaven, Rune and his rag-tag team launch an assault on the Monarch Complex with the President of the United States along for the ride. What they discover in the very bowels of the Monarch Complex leads them into one of the most astonishing revelations in history. All the chaos and madness that Monarch had bred seemed to have a specific purpose, and beneath its shimmering tower are held secrets that could forever alter the future of the human race. For better or for worse.
Together, a thirteen year old boy, a hippie girl, a vampire, a mage-engineer, a recovered alcoholic would-be mage-physician, a self-help guru, and a not-so thoughtful man who would have been President but never had the chance, not to mention a cat apparently channeling the very spirit of magic, and a smart but more or less ordinary dog, are left to negotiate the destiny of this universe's branch of humanity.
The stakes? The imminent collapse of human civilization. Death, destruction, starvation, disease, and possible extinction. The price? Beyond imagining.
I couldn't believe how this novel unfolded as I was writing it. The social and political aspects seemed to spell themselves out in a way I'd never encountered before in my work. I knew the messages I was trying to relate, and I really believed in the characters. We could have used someone like Dane Campbell in this world. Maybe if we'd have had him, things would be different now.
The next step is to compile the chapters into a whole and send it over to my wife for editing. Then I'm going agent shopping. It's going to be the first work I'm trying to take directly to the big houses, and I hope I can find an agent with a progressive enough world-view that he or she can see it for what it is.
I'm excited about finishing this book, and wanted to share this much with the people here before some of the excitement wore off and doubts set in. This novel is something different and part of me fears that it'll be TOO different for the market to bear. On the other hand, it could surprise me and become something more than just another piece of speculative fiction.
Wish me luck.
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