River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part one.

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.

The Purpose of My Fiction

For reasons I explain on my science blog, I have decided to publish my fiction on Kindle. The advantages are numerous, and they follow an ecological and evolutionary pattern: for me, my cultural evolutionary fitness would be greater on Kindle than it would be if I continued to pursue traditional routes of publication.

What I want to write about here is the purposes of my fiction. I am not writing fiction that is merely entertainment or escapism. I want my fiction to be significant in the lives of readers. On the other hand, I don’t want it to be heavily scholarly or pedantic. My fiction is, and will continue forever to be, fun and funny. Laugh and learn. This is my philosophy as a retired educator, a scientist, and now as a writer of fiction.

I want my fiction to lift people up, to help them deal with their lives by watching my characters deal with, or fail to deal with, their lives. I will also confront numerous political, social, and environmental issues, without (I hope) being preachy. Readers should feel better, and more empowered, after reading my fiction than they were before. They should also learn a lot.

To take just one example, which I have released on Kindle: the novel Meet Me in Strasbourg. One of the two protagonists is a young woman who is painfully shy and gradually breaks out of her shell. Maybe some of my readers will identify with her. She is also trapped in poverty and medical debt. This is an important issue in America, one that seldom happens in European countries. And she, and her young male partner, discover how music can express the meaning of life. There is so much fiction that degrades and discourages people; I want all of my fiction to lift them up.

I also champion the people who are less than beautiful. The young woman in this novel can hardly be described as sexy. (Most of my other novels have beautiful women in them, however.) In most of my novels, the protagonists are not socially or politically powerful, even if they are beautiful. If you feel like everyone else is more powerful or more beautiful, read one of my novels and feel encouraged and uplifted. That is what I hope to accomplish.

This novel, and all my others, also defends the concept of True Love. Love is not just an excuse for lust. It is a reality that is so strong that it can totally transform the lives of lovers. The young man pursues the young woman halfway around the world. There is so much fiction that is cynical, and it almost gets the reader to distrust everyone, to not love anyone. In my novels, readers will see that love is worth taking a chance on.

And one other thing. Modern fiction almost never takes religion seriously, whether for good or bad. Most modern fiction considers religion to be irrelevant and stupid. But in my novels—almost all of them—religious issues are vitally important. The meaning of life—yeah, I’m serious about that stuff. Usually, the powerful religious leaders have it wrong; and they are not just silly but evil. In my novels, the reader is not left in comfortable atheism, but is forced to confront religion—even if they remain atheists.

As my novels become available, I will announce them, and target readers to whom questions about love, the meaning of life, and of religion are important.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part three.

Now, in the final sections of the novel Glass Cathedral about which I have written previously, Misty and Emilio have to figure out how to tell the world that God appeared in the sky. They decide to build a glass cathedral out in the desert, near the site of The Appearance of God, and invite people to come and find out about what happened. This undertaking is more humorously difficult than either of them had guessed it would be. Misty and Emilio ended up with lots of money and had to figure out what to do with it. They planned a religiously-themed restaurant that served Jesus Pizza with lamb, tomato sauce, and Ezekiel 4:9 crust. They also planned to make their glass cathedral a giant tropical greenhouse. Both Emilio and Misty—now pushed far outside her comfort zone of shyness—went on speaking tours.

Dan went out into the desert to visit Misty. They meet in the desert springtime and see the flowers that grow rapidly in the rain then die a few weeks later. Misty realizes that Dan is in fact doing what Jesus said to do, but what few Christians do: to consider the lilies of the field. Dan realized that just one of the little wildflowers was more beautiful than all the works of man. Job had asked why God put beautiful flowers out in the desert where nobody can see them. Both Dan and Misty realize that this is a very good question.

But mainly they organized a gigantic opening ceremony with hundreds of high school bands and choirs. They supposed they had thought of everything, but with a hundred bands (several hundred tubas) playing the fundamental note of the resonant frequency of the building, the cathedral shakes from its foundations and blows away in a storm like a jellyfish in the surf. In the ensuing chaos, Misty gets trampled and disabled.

Once again, it’s not supposed to happen like this. But Emilio remains ever bubbly in his faith. No more giant cathedrals. He runs a homeless shelter in L.A. along with his nearly unresponsive wife Misty. When all the main characters unite at the end, including Margaret who has married Dan, they all agree that what God wants us to do is just to help make the world a better place.

You all knew this, of course, in principle. But in this delightful novel, you can watch diverse characters discovering this simple truth for themselves.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions, with Humor, part two

Two of the main characters in Stan Rice’s Glass Cathedral are Dan and Misty. Dan is the atheist and Misty is the Christian, only of course it is not that simple. They are real people who are working through big questions, not like the stifling two-dimensional characters of Pilgrim’s Progress.

By the time God appears in the sky—or not—outside the California desert town of Susurrus, Dan is already an atheist. So what he sees is an unexplained natural phenomenon. But he does not arrive at his atheism thoughtlessly. His whole view of the natural world began when, as a kid, he saw a horsehair worm several inches long protruding from the anus of a cockroach. Nature, he realized, was an arena of struggle and parasitism. (He thus earned the name of Buttworm Boy.)

He did not have a comfortable atheism. He meets, is fascinated by, and is then attracted to a Mormon girl named Margaret. Dan never alters his strong opinion that Mormonism is the stupidest piece of illogical thinking he had ever encountered. But Margaret is not stupid. And as they slip into a physical relationship closer than either had expected, Dan finds himself wanting to believe as Margaret does. But he cannot. Dan’s background story is truly funny. He and Margaret end their contact as he goes to the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Misty, also at UCSB, begins as a dreamily idealistic Christian who lived for her weekly Bible studies and for her fiancé Dwayne. Dan meets Misty just long enough to fall in love with her. Misty and Dwayne plan a mission trip to Ecuador, to convert Catholics to evangelical Protestantism, something of which the Catholics were not fond. Neither were the communist terrorists, who kidnap Dwayne. Just as they release him back into Misty’s loving arms, the communist terrorists shoot him dead, splattering Misty with fragments of the man who was her life.

It’s not supposed to happen this way, Misty thinks. Long after Dwayne’s death was no longer in the national news, Misty visits her old UCSB Bible study. She has changed; they have not; and she realizes how they all had such easy answers to the big questions. She grabs a Bible from one of them and reads from the book of Job, in which God Himself tells Job, you think you have all the answers, don’t you? Well, you don’t. That was her message to her former compatriots as she stomps out.

Misty encounters Dan and they have, despite their religious differences, a truly meaningful conversation. They end up working at the same newspaper out in the desert, where God appears—or not—in the sky. This event seems to wipe all doubt away from Misty’s heart. Or does it? Does it need to? That’s what the rest of the book is about.

Glass Cathedral: A Novel that Faces Deep Religious Questions with Humor, part one.

Usually, books that address such questions as Why does God allow suffering and Why does God hide Himself are preachy and heavy. See, you are already bored with it, right? This is true whether the books are Christian (or Jewish or Muslim), or atheistic, such as the books by Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris. These books all have their place.

But in the recently published novel Glass Cathedral, Stan Rice uses humor to explore these questions. It takes the form of a three-way banter among an evangelical Christian (Emilio), an atheist (Dan), and a Christian who has recently had her faith severely shaken (Misty). They more or less agree that the problems would be solved if God would just appear in the sky and explain Himself.

Or not. Would this make any difference?

This is the author’s summary from Amazon:

The newspaper staff writers of a small desert town assume the strange light in the sky is merely sunlight refracted by ice crystals: atheist Dan Hardy; the spiritually-searching Misty Barbour; and even the confirmed Christian editor Emilio Villanueva. Then the light turns out to be God—maybe. This is enough to make Misty leave her doubts behind and marry Emilio. Dan, who was hoping to win Misty’s affection, is skeptical, especially since God showed up on no photographic images, and everyone in town saw God differently. The government authorities declare the light was a mass hallucination.

Emilio and Misty raise money to build a glass cathedral in the desert, near the place they think God appeared. When thousands of people come for the inaugural celebration, a storm pulls the glasshouse into the sky. Misty gets trampled. At the end, Emilio and Misty, who is now disabled, conclude that God’s work is to help people, not to build a cathedral, and even Dan agrees.

 

The setting is that a bright light appears in the sky in the eastern California desert near the town of Susurrus. Dan assumes it is a natural phenomenon. Misty doesn’t care. Even Emilio does not suspect the light is, in fact, God appearing in the sky. God appears only in Susurrus, appears differently to each observer, and refuses to answer questions. But Emilio considers it a vindication of his faith, and Misty is convinced and marries Emilio. Dan, and all the civil and military authorities, consider every possible physical explanation. Meanwhile, Emilio and Misty decide to start a ministry to tell the world that God appeared in the sky in the desert.

As part one of the novel (The Susurrus Event) ends, Emilio and Misty have to confront the fact that their message is not, in fact, a fundamentalist Christian one. There is a part of the gospels in which Jesus says, if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out. You can find this in Matthew 5: 29-30. Emilio and Misty flee from a fundamentalist church that does precisely this: plucking out their eyes and chopping off their hands.

There is hardly a page without humor. For example, a heavenly chord fills the sky when God appears. But it is not what humans would consider a beautiful chord. As a matter of fact, it sounds “as if a cosmic butt had seated itself upon the celestial organ keyboard and unstopped every note.”

These discussions and events do not take place on blank slates. Both Dan and Misty have life experiences that strongly determine their reactions to these events, and to one another. That is what my next essay will be about.

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part four. Eternity

There are some other advantages to self-publishing, both of which surpass anything available to species in the wild.

First, you can make changes in your book even after it is published. I haven’t tried this, but I assume what you would have to do is to take down your original book from Kindle, and replace it with files with the appropriate changes. Or updates. Your book would therefore never go out of date. In nature, once seeds have been dispersed, they cannot be called back. A tree might be able to make slight alterations in the structure of the seeds from one year to the next, but not much.

Second, your book will never go out of print so long as there are at least a couple of people buying it. Amazon has always provided this service to the community of readers. If a used copy of a book can be found anywhere, you can find it on Amazon, which links to the book stores or individuals who have these rare items. In nature, seeds eventually die.

My books, including the Kindle books that do not exist in print form, are my legacy to the future, aside from a little bit of money and a lot of love for my kids. After I have died, the only thing anyone in the world will know about me, apart from increasingly faded memories, will be my books. Somebody who does not know me might buy a copy of Rima and find out what I have learned about rain forests, for example. My legacy will also include my website, which, if the host gets paid, does not itself know whether I am alive or not.

Alas, Kindle books cannot be exactly what the author would want them to be. You have to be careful with non-standard text. I read T. C. Boyle’s Tortilla Curtain, in which he inserted some lines in Spanish. Spanish questions end with a question mark, but also begin with an inverted question mark. Boyle correctly included the inverted question mark. But Kindle always inserted a nothing-symbol (a zero with a slash through it) just before the inverted question mark.

In particular, illustrations tend to be extremely messed up in Kindle books. Every kindle book I have read, by other authors, have incomprehensible illustrations. My four Kindle novels have only one image in the book itself (not counting the cover, which is usually pretty good) and that is my author photo. No matter what I do, Kindle inserts it sideways. I can just pretend that it is because I am an avant-garde tradition-breaker.

But even with these faults, a website or a Kindle book (or any other book) is a better remnant to leave for future generations than a gravestone which can be fancy even for the meanest sons-of-bitches who ever lived. A good book, however, cannot be faked.

I will mention for the readers of this religion blog that, alas, this is the only kind of eternity that a person can expect. 

The Ecology of Fiction Publication, part three: Quality

You cannot just put your books on Amazon and expect people to find them, even if they would have enjoyed reading them. An author is not only competing with thousands of human authors but with computers that can generate AI garbage a hundred times a second.

An intelligent customer might want to verify that the author of a book is not an AI bot by searching the web for an author website. AI bots generally do not have author websites, though I could be wrong about this. But the author has to make it easy for the customer, who is usually busy and tired when looking for a book.

You have to promote your book. This means several things.

First, you need a platform. My platform consists of a brand new website designed by my son in law which, thus far, has only my non-fiction books on it; two blogs, which have collectively had over a million views; a YouTube channel, in which I pretend to be Charles Darwin; and Facebook. This does not mean I can just scatter announcements all over my platform. People read my blogs and watch my videos because they can learn something, usually about science, from them. If they suspect I am dumping cheap advertising on them, they will stop visiting. I have to make the announcements of my fiction books relevant to the platform. In my case this might be easy, since much of my fiction focuses on science (particularly, Darwin and evolution) which is exactly what my science blog is about, and faces a lot of religious questions, which is exactly what my religion blog) is about. This is exactly the same situation as a tree faces out in nature: it has to have fruits and seeds that match the animals it is expecting to patronize them, rather than just random seeds.

Second, you need to catch their eyes in a pleasurable way. I will do this by having really attractive covers and short summaries.

The covers will be colorful and eye-catching and often create just enough cognitive dissonance that they will wonder what the book is about. I am fortunate that I have literally five decades of photographs from which to choose. I could never have guessed I would use them as book covers. It is also important to adjust the photos, not just with cropping, contrast, and coloration, but with special effects, which are now easily available on PowerPoint.

The short summaries must excite the reader and make them want to read the book. Here is an example of the first sentence of a summary, from a novel I wrote about Charles Darwin being a vampire: “You just thought you had seen the last of Charles Darwin.” The summary does not have to have everything in it. The summary of my novel The Confessions of Conseil take a swipe at the exalted image of Pierre Arronax, narrator of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. In Conseil’s voice, I call him Arronax the Arrogant who thinks his servant Conseil cannot possibly have a brain or a life of his own. Now this might create cognitive dissonance, therefore interest, among the thousands of readers who grew up (as I did) loving Jules Verne. I also portray Captain Nemo as a Marxist revolutionary.

Third, you have to deliver the goods. It has to be a good book—a good plot, good characters, good everything. I have to make readers feel good, even when unpleasant things are happening in the book. I have to remember I am writing for my readers, not for myself. I have to remove anything that is interesting only to myself, e.g., lists of plants. Only then will a reader—maybe, just maybe—remember my name and look for another book by me. I include a lot of humor, not gratuitous but as part of the plot and dialogue. I also frequently have sex, not pornographic but as part of genuine human encounters, and very rarely the full sex act. The sex is never degrading. And never gratuitous—it has to have a reason to be there. The Bible is my guide in this respect. There is a lot of sex in the Bible, but there is always a reason for it. Fiction should never have any gratuitous anything.

Will this fiction publishing venture work? I have made a conservative estimate that I will earn at least $75,000 for thirty books, which is $75,000 more than I would earn with my track record with commercial publishers. If it works, it will not be because of my business acumen but because I took my inspiration from the evolutionary success stories of the trees.