I can’t believe it’s June and that my last entry was March! Oops! I guess that should tell you how intensely I’ve been trying to finish the third D Generation. Before I get to that though, I should give you the news that I failed to win the ABNA contest. The reviewer thought that I was offensive not funny–he/she took his/her romance quite serious. The Nanman is a romantic COMEDY, and if you have doubts you can read it yourself for free (for a while longer) by downloading from the ‘free’ page–see side menu. Some people thought it was fantastic and humorous and left kind reviews on Amazon before the title was submerged into some hidden database of failures, and the reviews with it. Bummer. I am undeterred, though. I know the Nanman is the beginning of a series of blockbusters that will transform the stay-at-home dad stigma from dead-beat to chichi.

Speaking of dead-beats, I was recently called a privileged dead beat dad–yes, me!–by my not so endearing long xed-partner. I am still laughing about it. Laughing! Without living in my shoes you have no idea what I experience in the course of a day, and be grateful. For instance, the other morning I received a stack of roofing tin and hauled it up and screwed it down to the 32 feet of shed roof before noon–being the dead beat that I am. I thought “Wow, that looks impressive and most people would think it was pretty hard, but writing The D Generation III was a lot harder than that.” Spending the last week putting up fence, weeding the garden and doing upkeep to the buildings was a relief after the mind bending concentration it took to spin out D Gen III. That said, I wish I was back at it. See, I’m a dead beat that likes to work–go figure.

As for privileged…I’ve seen privileged, and if I am, then I wish someone would slap me awake to it, because I’m not feeling it. I feel average, or what average should be. See, if having one adult member of the family partnership working while the other is taking care of kids is privileged than this country is fucked. I do feel lucky, but not privileged. I think of my stay at Berklee College of Music one summer with just enough money to buy raisin bread to eat for the week, while listening to the guy down the hall say “Daddy just bought me my ninth keyboard,” and it tells me I have a ways to go to reach privileged status. When I pray to the God of tractor starters to “Please! Once again, start my tractor today!” because my wobbling tractor is over fifty years old and eats batteries like the wildlife around here eats stray chickens, I know my dream of farming profitably is a farce, but if I was privileged I could farm. That’s fucked, too. Just like the idea of me being privileged is fucked. And there you have it. I guess in some people’s mind, if I’m not working fourteen hour days, and I have the time to write this down, than I’m privileged. Wake up! I’m not privileged, you’re oppressed!

Anyway, who cares.

I finished writing the third D Generation. I had the goal of sowing up loose ends from books I, II, and ones newly created in III. I also wanted to talk about GMO’s, alternative power, aliens, evangelical fanatics, pagans, and few other things. I’m being urged to cut back on some of it, and told I have too many characters. All I can say is that the D Generation I is an ungrateful beast that came into this world as a surprise demanding to be heard and uncensored. That beast reeked havoc that took some serious puzzling and weaving to mend. D Gen III, which is longer than the first two put together, succeeds in my goal and if you have to meet a few more characters, I guarantee they’re worth meeting–like Cody and Kate who you will love, and Andrew and Peter who you will despise.

What surprised me from the third, was that I was planning on ending it, and I found instead the doorway to where I really wanted to go. So as much as book three finishes the story, it also creates the perfect set up to a completely different D Generation in book IV. It is hard to articulate without giving away too much. Let’s look at it like this: When I first started writing music I wrote a very complicated song that sounded like crap. Later, I wrote one of the best songs I ever produced in about five minutes. The song was better because it was clean and simple. I’m not saying that Books I-III are crap 🙂 Okay, I’m laughing now–writer paints self into corner. No, I’m just saying there is a hell of a lot going on, but book IV is clean and simple.

Okay, let me redeem my privileged dead beat writer self. I just have to say that I loved writing The D generation III, and the feedback I”m getting so far is that it MOVES with an electric vibe. Great. I’ll let you know when its ready for publication. Where’s my illustrator?

The bad news is after I produce the third D Generation I’m going to take a (short) break from the series. Originally, I wrote the first book with a complete lack of censorship in mind—both in language and in subject. I was also inclined to do very little research for it which made it extremely fun and easy to write. However, old tendencies (such as my own brand of “perfectionism”) crept in and I’ve found myself doing a ridiculous amount of research to produce the third.

The effect of this research has led to six things: 1) Anxiety for the future; 2) Excitement for the future; 3) An appreciation for people who can find solace and hope in their religion; 4) An understanding that 99% of religion is myths that have arisen out of the miscommunication of primitive science, a few inspired spiritual leaders, and the need of powerful entities to either maintain or gain control; 5) A solid perspective of humans not as the height of the evolutionary ladder, but somewhere around the middle; 6) A need to see in my lifetime an honest factual accounting of world history based on ALL the available data, with a few speculations and no assumptions like “pyramids are tombs” and other unlikely ideas.

So, what’s the big deal right? What does learning everything is false that you’ve always believed is true have to do with taking a break from the D Generation series? If you’ve read the books you know that concept fits right in with them. So what the problem?

Nothing, really, I love that shit. In fact, I intend to read and study a lot more of it to get a better understanding of what the truth is. We are bombarded everyday with noise that supports the illusion within our reality—the present dominate cultural perspective. However, as information technology continues to permeate our lives, so does the potential for people to have access to information outside the “box.” Based on social trends, it appears that people are becoming less religious, which on one level I see as a good thing; let’s look at facts not superstition. On another level, as a person whose spirituality is very important to him, science’s inability to qualify the spiritual experience fully (yes, they’ve begun to perceive its surface qualities, but no more) creates the danger of misleading people in thinking that a spiritual realm does not exist. This is already evident in many scientists’ complete dismissal of psychic phenomenon, and intention based healing arts. In the 1990s when I was looking for scientific evidence on these subjects the information was scarce, but already in the 2010s the data has become overwhelming—so to those scientists who are still skeptical, I say, do better research. You’re a scientist goddamn it; don’t reach a conclusion until the evidence is in!

All that is to say that there is a lot of information I want to look at, but also that the information is emotionally intense and I want to play ostrich for a while and stick my head in the sand—speaking of culturally excepted ideas that are actually false.

The D Generation IV—and yes there is one—is a departure from the previous books. Because of certain circumstances, which I’m not going to tell you, the subject matter is more focused on James’ hunt for truth about his encounters of the fourth kind, and less about surviving in the post-apocalyptic Republic of Vermont. Unlike earlier books in the series which I have simply sat down and written, this one is going to take a great deal of planning to pull off what I want to achieve properly. I better stop thinking about it, because I’m already excited…and it’s not up next. It’s not even up after the next book.

Right. I’m taking a break because I want to write Ardis, the fantasy story of a half-breed pubescent who accidentally kills his teacher when a strange power erupts out of him, and as a result runs away only to wind up a slave. A little intense, but I need to inhabit the fantasy world for awhile. The other “issue” I’m going to run into is that I’m selling The Nanman this year, which will probably mean I need to write a sequel. That’s okay, I have one percolating in my brain, and everyday my kids give me more material for it.