Thanks to all who have said so many nice things about the fiction I posted here. It’s very gratifying to get appreciation for one’s children, you know.

Currently I am 80,000 words into “Babe in the Woods,” which looks likely to become my first completed novel since Messenger. I am very tempted to post it, a bit at a time, but really I should at least try to find a conventional publisher first.

“Babe in the Woods” is the story of my week at the Monroe Institute’s Gateway Voyage, 15 years ago this month. I tell people, that week in December, 1992, was the beginning of my life as a conscious being. Everything in my life changed after that, slowly or quickly, but thoroughly.

As I write it, I am repeatedly awe-struck, for I am not souping up the story but, if anything, toning it down. I wrote up one set of visions and reminded myself, “that really happened!” Indeed most of what I include in the novel really happened, and nothing in it is exaggerated for “woo-woo” effect. If anything, just the reverse.

The narrator is a large part of me, but not me. There is, after all, a difference between fiction and journalism! So, Angelo Chiari (George’s brother) is Italian, a reporter, middle-aged, discontented with his life, and afflicted with asthma. His experiences are roughly mine, though simplified in some directions. He meets a woman and finds that his inexplicable feelings for her are rooted in what are called past-life experiences. He leaves the program utterly (but still largely potentially) transformed. Et cetera.

The odd thing is, my experiences in real life were more complex, more far-reaching, than I can plausibly write in the novel, mostly because some of the side-trails would stretch it beyond manageable boundaries.

In any case I have been enjoying myself hugely, but it has taken its toll on the amount of blogging I have been doing!