Is This How You Feel?

I normally have a re-blog on Sundays—a brief beginning of a blog post from someone else, with a link to their site (actually, I do this on Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday…)… 

Image Courtesy of Leonard Thury ~ http://www.freeimages.com/photographer/LeonardT-61763

However, I’ve been blessed to receive word of an amazing site that presents an incredible enterprise.

It’s a site from a group of Australian scientists presenting, not their carefully considered rational views on climate change, but Their Feelings about Climate Change…

They have a Twitter Campaign of Anyone‘s Feelings about Climate Change…

1. Handwrite your feelings on climate change
2. Take a photo of it on your phone
3. Tweet your photo to @ITHYF_Letters

There is even the Is This How You Feel? Blog…

And, after all that is a page for Now What?

Just ReBlogging a post from two months before my short novel was published—working on the second book in the series and could well apply these thoughts to the third book—once all three are out, my Work will be nearly done…

Notes from An Alien

I’m engaged in a discussion over in the forums of BestsellerBound about why the theme  of my soon-to-be-published book will make it hard to sell.

I knew as I planned and wrote it that it would be, at the very best, a niche-book–of interest to a rather small audience.

While I certainly didn’t even attempt to write it for the “general reader”, I do hope that some small yet significant group of readers will find it valuable.

It is a story, yet the Prologue says: “…this book is a story told in ‘notes’. Even though some readers may think it is a novel or a history, its form is difficult to classify in what are called genres.”

The working blurb I have is even more indicative of Notes from An Alien being a book that won’t appeal to a wide market: Start with a 500-year InterWorld War. Continue through ecological…

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Global Peace ~ Can It Happen?

There’s an insidious idea afoot that global peace is impossible. This post will point you toward resources that uphold its possibility and, perhaps, its inevitability.

Saying global peace is impossible depends on folks believing that “human nature” includes an ineradicable desire to be selfish and contentious. Some people feel that “human nature” is such that, given half a chance, any human will “naturally” use violence to attain their ends.

I leave it to you to decide what human nature is; but, what I must propose, what I’m incapable of holding back, is my belief that human nature contains the possibility to be as barbaric as an animal as well as  to be as divine as an angel.

It’s education and the human will that are critical in deciding which direction any human takes their potential.

My book, Notes from An Alien, tells the story of a civilization composed of both types of people; they just happen to live 12 light-years from Earth.

Readers and reviewers have agreed that my fictional tale has strong parallels to our experience on Earth and I urge you to read the book (free through the link in the left side-bar).

There are also Special Documents and Web Resources concerning global peace available.

I also need to call your attention to one particular site:

Global Truce 2012

And, I, with all my heart and mind, hope you will watch this video:

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Virtually Real Discussions

I’m still debriefing myself from the Thursday Global Peace discussion I host on Book Island in the virtual world, Second Life.

The discussions have been going on now for thirteen weeks and each one has its own texture. I’m learning about, even though I have lots of experience in, facilitating amicable group discussions.

Amicable is key in these global peace chats since most of the topics can be considered “hot-button”.

There’s even a joke circulating the Island about the fights that break out at the global peace chats :-)

The idea for the weekly peace discussions came from my recently published book, Notes from An Alien. It follows the torturous path of an alien civilization from a 500-year interplanetary war to enduring peace. It was written as a Message for Earth…

During today’s discussion, one participant did something I’ve been waiting for–he introduced an idea from the book into the chat about peace on Earth.

I should mention that folks don’t have to read the book to be in the discussion but I do offer anyone a free copy of the book if they’d like to supplement their idea-store on ways to achieve peace.

I wrote the book to give us humans a leveraging perspective on the challenges of creating a path toward peace–being in a situation can often fog resolution and entering a different but related situation can offer more light…

The first Sunday in August is the start of a second edition of the chats specifically timed to attract college students. Can’t wait to start the cycle of topics with them!!

One of the best parts of having these discussions in Second Life, rather than up the street, is we have folks from all over the world attending. Rather appropriate, eh?

Do you engage in productive conversations about what it will take to achieve a lasting peace on Earth??
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How I Had To Change Myself In Order To Write My Book…

Eleven years ago, I was 54 years old and just beginning, finally, to mature.

I’d been seriously studying the issue of Global Peace for about twelve years.

I hadn’t quite got the principles from my head to my heart…

I saw a Tweet the other day that said: If the author doesn’t cry, the reader doesn’t cry.

Eleven years ago, I did, in fact, start letting myself cry more…

In the post, Publishing Day Thoughts…, I gave a timeline for all the major writerly events that led up to my publishing Notes from An Alien yesterday; but, the deeply emotional transformations I made on that path, the psychological and mental growth that the feelings led to, and the application of Principles of Peace in my daily life weren’t in that post…

It’s one thing to have a Theme burning in your heart and tantalizing your mind; it’s quite another state of affairs
to live through the changes necessary to turn that Theme into a Plot alive with Characters who live the story.

I had to become, in essence, the characters I would eventually meet once I hand my hands on the plot. I began meeting my characters about a year ago. They were all aliens living in a star-system twelve light-years from Earth.

Acutely appropriate for a guy who’d usually felt like an alien himself :-)

Most importantly, I had to use what I’d learned of resignation and sacrifice during ten years of growing up and make a place in my mind and heart for Sena Quaren, the “co-author” of the book.

I think an author has to have a submissive ego to truly let their characters come alive. If the ego can’t get out of the way long enough for the author to form a relationship with their characters, the book will either never get written or be written in a hackneyed and stilted style.

Until eleven years ago, I’d been living a hackneyed and stilted life. Even though there were eruptions of authenticity over the years, I was more amorphous than substantial, more tentative than responsible, more dream-like than imaginative.

I salute the pain suffered in that crucible of preparation. I see it all as a worthy discipline–my paying of long-deferred dues…

So, all-told, I’ve been studying and learning how to live Peace for 23 years and all that effort has reached a culmination in a rather slim book—dense with promise, pregnant with its successor, facing a World of greed and war and holding aloft a banner with words uttered by one of its characters, Morna: “Patience is our weapon of choice.”
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