Eyeless In Luminary

My newest novel is currently being made ready for publication.  It will be available in hardcover, paperback, and Kindle. I'll let you know the minute it goes live.

"The Genre I am writing in is “meta fiction or magical realism”. To some extent, I have tried to avoid the pro-forma and formulaic writing, and have inserted some unusual techniques that may entertain or may bother. I do not view my story as a wide net cast to retrieve the greatest number of readers, rather those few who want to travel down the same road with me, for whatever portion of the trip they find interesting.

The “Theme” of my story is presenting reality and magical realism and to have them pass through each other with that special moment when they blend undifferentiated, becoming inseparable, suspending disbelief, and then when exhausted, separating again, leaving in their wake the semiotics to be pondered.

The Audience I am writing to is macro and noncommercial; creative writing groups, friends, family, and myself. I do not anguish over the clarity each word will have with the “reader”, knowing full well of their capacities to form their own unique interpretations.

The following Summary is a statement covering what the story is going to be about, what my story means to me, and what I hope for it to achieve.

This story is about a present-day Southern university professor of archeology and paleontology, Dr Sark Saint John, his assistant Davio Gonzales Garcia, an autistic savant (who will amaze and entertain you and me), and the historically retro villagers of an undiscovered Slav settlement, who are in benign conflict with their environment and their fear of the outside cultures. All three entities will come into conflict and there will be debatable paths of individual morality.

 The University asked Sark to resign from his teaching position because of his lackluster attitude to his university obligations. Davio, an autistic savant, was a “leftover” from an aborted Psychology Department study. The Slav settlement has passed culturally stagnant, encapsulated, through peripheral historical upheavals of civil and national wars, forced migrations, and unwanted responsibilities. They live, having been forced by their fears, both rational and irrational, to hide themselves for the last hundred and forty-three years from the outside world, in a richly endowed and astounding Cumberland Plateau valley.

For my own reward, I am attempting to bring onto the page some of the “ingested metaphors” of my own life for examination. I want to achieve, quoting John Gardner “ … modern writers often speak of their work as somehow outside their control, informed by a spirit that; when I read my writing later I cannot identify as having come from myself.” That is “Magical Realism.”

In summary, this is a metaphoric expression of a philosophical concept:  The Level of Observation Creates the Reality … Change That Level of Observation and You Have Changed the Reality. My tribe observes from one level and your tribe observes from another, is that so difficult to understand?"  --Walt Crabtree