Welcome to The Mystical Underground

Dear President Obama,

The election results of November 4 were undoubtedly depressing for you. With the Republicans now controlling the entire congress, it means you’ll be much grayer by 2016. It means you will be using executive veto more often. It means you’re being blamed for events and circumstances over which you had little or no control.

This is the first time that a sitting president’s hometown governor has lost since 1892.

In 2008, my husband and I waited three hours outside a Fort Lauderdale venue to hear you and Joe Biden speak. Your audience was hungry for change. We were blown away.

By 2012, when you were re-elected, when we voted for you again, we were disappointed that many of the changes you had promised had not panned out. You set the bar too low for health care coverage. Instead of setting the bar at Medicare for all, you included the insurance companies by making health care mandatory. The insurance companies salivated at the opportunity to sign up 50 million new clients. Gitmo remains open to this day. Yes, you got us out of Iraq – sort of – and are supposedly going to get us out of Afghanistan. But you were too conciliatory with the Republicans, too willing to engage them, and all they did was stonewall you and everything you stand for.

The media pundits are calling the Republican wins tonight “a wave,” as in a tsunami. It’s going to be a wave, all right, a wave of utter disaster for the middle class, for health care, for any hope of a raise in the minimum wage, for more tax loopholes for corporations, for more of the middle class descending into poverty, for more war, more of the U.S. as the world cop, for more stonewalling on climate change. It’s going to be a tsunami for the unborn, who will claim “personhood” even though they are no larger than a comma in a womb. Well, you know all of this.

So, while greedy capitalism is going to flourish, when trickle down economics will resurge, the planet will drown, the economy will shrink, the Republicans will cut Medicare and Social Security, the elderly and the poor and the young will stagger. As one of my writer friends emailed me tonight: “I will never understand this country. If I didn’t already feel half dead, I’d hang myself.”

I know what he means. In the next two years, we may find ourselves living in a Philip K. Dick novel like Blade Runner. It’s one of the grimmest Dystopian novels ever written, where corporations are the true kings and the rest of us are as disposable as Kleenex.

The media pundits are calling this a “rejection of the president and his policies.” But as a Republican strategist said, “The Republicans don’t really have an agenda except to reject everything that Obama wants.”

We are pretty much screwed for the next two years. The old paradigm, it seems, is not going out with a whimper. And unless the Democrats run a powerful candidate in 2016 – Elizabeth Warren instead of Hillary Clinton, for instance – we’ll have four more years of Republican policies that benefit the one percent. And in the end, the one percent will be the only ones who can afford bunkers they’ll run to when the oceans rise, when the planet rebels, when the poor and the disenfranchised take to the streets. It will be the opening paragraphs of The Road, a Dystopian novel by Cormac McCarthy that won the Pulitzer prize and that might be more depressing than Blade Runner.

 If I could afford to move to another country, I would.

Best,

Trish MacGregor

P.S. I apologize for the tone of this email. Tomorrow when the sun rises, when the perfect Florida weather dominates, I hope it will be easier to look at the bright side.

It’s election day in the U.S. – midterm elections. Typically, fewer people turn out to vote for midterm elections than for presidential elections and yet, there’s a lot at stake with this one – whether the Republicans will take over the senate and control the congress.

In recent history, this has happened three times with two-term presidents – under Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. During Republican Reagan’s second term as prez, the midterm elections turned the tide and the Democrats won enough votes to control congress. During Democrat Clinton’s second term, the Repubs took the congress. Under Repub Bush’s second term, the Dems took the congress. Now Dem Obama, in his second term, faces the possibility that the Repubs will take the senate and control congress. The Repubs expect to win and are already fighting over who will be majority leader.

If history repeats itself, I suspect the top priorities of the Repub congress will be to:

1) Impeach Obama – but for what? The conspiratorial suspicion that he was born in Kenya?

2) Overturn the Affordable Care Act – so that 10 million people or so lose their health care

3) Overturn the federal minimum wage increase to $10.10 an hour. Do the math on that one. Can a family live on $404 a week? And that’s before taxes and social security are taken out.

4) Overturn anything and everything that helps people.

5) Vote to make marriage between one man and woman the law of the land

6) Declare that personhood begins at conception

7) Try to institute more draconian laws concerning the right of women to govern their own bodies in terms of birth control and abortion. Give these mostly white men enough power, and they’ll hurl the country back to the Dark Ages.

Rob and I voted on Sunday, the last day of early voting in our county. It was held at our local library and there seemed to be a lot of hoops you had to jump through to do this. First, you had to fill out a form with your name, address, precinct number. Then you sat in front of one of perhaps ten poll workers, who asked for your driver’s license or voter registration card. Your name was run through a device and when it showed up on the screen, you signed your name and were directed to one of the printers, where your ballot was printed out.

Now: the ballot. Since the 2000 voting debacle in Palm Beach County that ended up in the Supreme Court, the county has redesigned their ballots several times. Now we’re back to paper ballots and a pen. A felt tip pen. Next to your candidate choice, you use the pin to darken the line between a broken arrow. It sounds ridiculous. It IS ridiculous. But, hey, okay. We get it. The Diebold voting machines used in 2004 were rigged and that election was stolen. When I punched in John Kerry’s name, Bush’s name came up. Not once but three times before my vote registered for Kerry.

At stake for Floridians is the governor spot. Our current governor, Rick Scott,  was convicted of Medicare fraud some years back, has been against everything that might benefit the state –Medicaid expansion, which would enable more Floridians to get health insurance for a reasonable price; the restoration of the Everglades, and job creation. The man is a jerk with a big dopey smile.

Charlie Crist, the Democratic challenger, has been governor of Florida before, as a moderate Republican, who was socially liberal, and was actually a decent governor. He was on the short list for VP when McCain ran for the prez, got raked over the coals by the party, and eventually changed his party affiliation. Flip-flopper in that regard, but the alternative would be much worse.

One of the amendments on the ballot was for the legalization of medical marijuana. Rob and I voted yes on that one. Twenty-three states have now legalized pot for medical use. There’s plenty of evidence that it helps mitigate nausea in chemo patients, relieves pain from glaucoma, nerve pain, headaches, helps in the treatment of seizure disorders and in the treatment of Crohn’s disease. Colorado and Washington have made it legal for recreational use, and I suspect that’s going to happen in even more states. It shouldn’t be classified in the same category as a drug like heroin.

In Colorado, the first state to legalize weed for recreation use, the crime rate is down more than ten percent from 2013, with a drop of more than five percent in violent crime. That pretty much shoots a hole in the argument that legalizing pot would spell the end of the civilized world.

But if the Repubs sweep the senate and control congress, you can bet they’ll try to overturn all these state laws. In their worldview:

1) Pot leads to the use of heroin and oxycontin- but hey, alcohol and guns are just fine.

2) Women are too stupid or hormonal to make decisions for themselves

3) Minorities shouldn’t have the right to vote

4) All immigrants should be denied the right to become citizens

5) Climate change is NOT happening

6) Corporations are gods

This list is actually pretty long, but I’ll end it here. You get the idea. If you live in the U.S., please vote in this election for the party that actually speaks for the people, for the party that instituted Medicare, Social Security, the minimum wage and just about every other law that actually helps people. For us, but especially for our kids and grandkids, the stakes have never been higher.

Obama hasn’t been a perfect president, hasn’t been the agent of sweeping change we had hoped for. But can you imagine where we’d be if McCain/Palin (wink, wink) had won? Or Romney?

This afternoon, after working for several hours, I asked Rob if he felt like going to Barnes & Noble. I was hoping to find the newest edition of Mountain Astrologer and to peruse the current releases.

When we walked into the store, there was a guy sitting at a table to the right, a bunch of books stacked in front of him. When I first saw him, I thought his eyes were shut, that he was actually snoozing. Then I realized he was an author doing a signing that consisted of: We’ll give you a table near the door, you stack you books on it, and sell whatever you can sell.

 Rob and I stopped at the table and the author said, “Interested in buying some great books?”

Let’s call the author John Smith. In the late 1990s, he sold an unusual novel for which he was reportedly paid a million bucks. The only reason he registered on my radar was because at one time, we shared the same publisher – Pinnacle (Kensington) Books and he and Rob had had some sort of email interaction in the past. “We’re also authors,” Rob said, and introduced us.

No response from John. He has these large, dark eyes that stare and stare, but seem empty of almost everything, like he’s shell shocked or suffering from PTSD- which is what many authors are suffering from these days. He obviously didn’t remember the email exchange he’d had with Rob, in which he eventually tried to convince Rob to buy into his wife’s Acai juice pyramid thing.

“Who was your editor at Kensington?” I asked.

He named an editor whom I had met.

“Nice guy,” I remarked.

No response from John.

“My editor at Kensington died,” I said. That was Kate Duffy. I did 12 books with her.

”Who’re you with now?” he asked.

“Not them,” I replied. What I should have said, what he would have understood, was that my last three books were with TOR/Forge.

“We’re at Crossroad, a small, independent publisher,” Rob said.

I tapped the table. “This is depressing work.” Meaning that signings like this were depressing work.

John’s smile was quick – there and gone. “Yeah, it is.” Yeah, it really is.

 I hurried off to the magazine section, remembering one of the first signings I ever did at a Walden’s book in a mall. Four excruciating hours at a table, people coming over, picking up my novel, reading the back cover, asking how long it had taken me to write the book. I sold two copies. I never did another signing like that.

I never found my magazine, either, but did buy Russell Brand’s book, Revolution, and returned to the table where Rob was still talking to John. I flashed the cover of Revolution. “Love this guy.”

“Did you see him on Howard Stern?” John asked.

“Nope. On MSNBC.”

I stood there for a few minutes afterward, listening to Rob trying to engage this guy in a conversation. But John’s face was a blank. He seemed shell-shocked, as if he’d been through a war. I think he has realized he isn’t Stephen King, JK Rowling, John Grisham, or any of the other bestselling authors displayed on the shelves at B&N. He has realized that he doesn’t have a movie platform like King, Meyers, Rowling, and all the other author whose books are so prominently at B&N, that his million dollar advance nearly 20 years ago was a fluke, that he is just another writer with a story to tell that may or may not find an audience.

As Rob and I later walked into the coffee shop to buy a couple of cappuccinos, I said, “He’s a brick wall.”

Rob shrugged. “He doesn’t want to reveal anything about himself.”

“No, he’s traumatized.”

I had wanted to go to B&N to find my astrology magazine but had encountered, instead, my mirrored self from three or four years ago when I stopped by B&N to see how many copies they carried of Esperanza, or maybe it was of Ghost Key. I felt these novels were the best I’d written, complex characters with a mythological backdrop, paranormal and yet real in the spectrum of human emotions. B&N carried two copies of Esperanza and zero of Ghost Key.

When we left the store, I glanced toward John and waved. And I have to say, he’s more courageous than I am, sitting there at that table, hoping that readers stop by and actually buy his books. It’s demeaning that so many of the people who generate the stories, the people who are the fuel for agents, publishers, and bookstores, for an entire industry, go home from a signing like this feeling like crap.

But it is what it is. One way or another, writers write, storytellers tell their stories, and every day new, independent publishers find ways to sell books and promote their authors.

The publishing paradigm is shifting, for sure.

Bernard Beitman is a visiting professor at the University of Virginia and former chair of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Missouri-Columbia. He attended Yale Medical School and completed his psychiatric residency at Stanford. He took a look at me  library angel post from a couple of days ago, dissected it, making some interesting points.

We’ve written about Dr. Beitman on a few occasions because he is one of the few academics who not only takes synchronicity— meaningful coincidences—seriously, but is developing an interdisciplinary study of coincidences.

“I am a kind of invisible father of coincidence studies,” Beitman told a reporter for Epoch Times.

Part of what that means is that he categorizes coincidences. Initially, Beitman divided coincidences in the following five categories:

• Synchronicity – when a thought is mirrored by a meaningful exterior event;
• Serendipity coincidences – finding what you need right when you need it;
• Seriality – a string of similar events that are noted
• Simulpathity – feeling another’s distress at a distance
• Instrument – synchronicities or serendipities that motivate you to make a change or changes that work out to your benefit.

Now he has a different means of grouping coincidences.

Form:  Most come in pairs, usually a mental event surprisingly matches an event that is taking place in the environmental. Some come in a series of three or more like a string of butterflies.

Process: Or how they happen. Like “sitting down next to a stranger”, or “doing something different” or through public and personal media  or through encounters with nature.

Explanation:  Many people think they are caused by God. Others believe they are nothing more than random events.  I have noticed that some coincidences are unknowingly created by the person or persons involved. Better classification will produce specific explanations for the various types instead of broad generalizations.

Use:  Coincidences can help with decision making, psychological understanding, interpersonal relationships, creativity, spiritual development, employment, scientific discovery and health. They can also be funny, or inconsequential. They can also lead to negative consequences.

When Dr. Beitman read my ‘library angel’ synchronicity, he took an interest in it because the library angel phenomenon is something that he has experienced himself. It’s not surprising, though, that he also went about categorizing the two coincidences in a series of e-mails.

Essentially, he took away the angel’s wings! Here’s why.

“I’m thinking about this-Rob’s two synchros are more mind-matter matches (synchronicity) than library angel, to me. Your Ecuador time travel find is more library angel–finding needed information rather than matching mind with book.

Later…

“I have thought  about it more. It is a perfect example in the range of the problem of similarity between mind and context. He got an exact match. The trouble with some coincidences is that the similarity is stretched, more in the mind of the beholder than actual.

Still later…

“There is more to Rob’s coincidences.

Tonight, Saturday, Nov. 1,  I’ll be on Coast to Coast again to talk about BUMP IN THE NIGHT. Actually, it will be early Nov. 2 for me – 1-3 a.m., since Florida is three hours later than Oregon, the site of the broadcast. Coast to Coast is the largest late night paranormal talk show. It’s also available on the Internet at the Coast to Coast site.

This will be the third time in less than two years that I’ve been interviewed for C2C, once with Trish for Aliens in the Backyard, once with Bruce Gernon, my co-author of The Fog. We talked about the lost Malaysian Airline Flight 370. Oddly enough, I had written Dave Schrader, host of Darkness Radio in Minneapolis, about BUMP, not the producer at C2C. It turns out Dave was scheduled to sub as host there Saturday and invited me to join him.

Here’s the kind of story I’ll be talking about on the air, and the kind you can read about in the book.

During the making of “Ghost Rider: The Spirit of Vengeance,” Nicholas Cage supposedly got so into character that he decided to spend a night in Transylvania’s infamous Bran Castle, aka, Dracula’s Castle. In the movie, stunt motorcyclist Johnny Blaze (Cage) hides out in Eastern Europe where he is called upon to stop the devil, who is attempted to take human form.

“We were shooting in Romania, Transylvania, and he just went up there to spend the night,” recalls costar Idris Elba. “True story.”

When Elba asked Cage about it the following morning, he told her he’d stayed in the castle to ‘channel the energy’ in preparation for filming the movie.

It’s not the first time Cage has been associated with the paranormal. In 2011, a photograph of a man from the American Civil War era went viral on the internet because the man looked nearly identical to Cage. Bloggers speculated that Cage was a time traveler or even possibly a vampire. Supposedly, the original of the photo was offered for sale on eBay for $1 million.

Between 2007 and 2009, Cage lived in a haunted house that he had bought, hoping the ghosts would inspire his efforts to write a horror novel. The house had once belonged to Madame Lalaurie, an infamous 19th century socialite, who was notorious for murdering her slaves.

Apparently, there wasn’t much ghostly encouragement for his creative endeavor. In spite of the estate’s eerie past, Cage admitted that he didn’t get very far with the book. Hm, possibly he needs a ghost writer!

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BUMP has a surprise at the end, a lengthy chapter of a future book called Alien Light: The Better Side of Contact. The chapter describes in depth the story of  ‘Sandy,’ a retired vet who has experienced alien and spirit contact much of her life.

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From Trish: I’ll be serving coffee and Cuban pastries. Do stop by!

This story certainly fits the spirit of Halloween!

We recently put up a doppelgänger story and one of the comments,by Adele Aldridge,  was so intriguing we told her we would like to bring it forward as a post. Her story seems to underscore how little we actually know about the nature of reality.

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I never experienced a doppelgänger for myself but had a most interesting experience with what seems like one.

At the time I was emotionally and psychically obsessed with a man who was unattainable for a variety of reasons. The connection was powerful which would be a long long story in itself. The man never left my mind and sometimes I felt it like a buzzing in the center of my forehead, where the third eye is supposed to be located.

One time I had a meeting with him for a day. He lived in another state. The next day I had a dinner date with an old beau. I’ll call him Joe which was not his name. Joe knew me well. We had our love affair that had ended badly and then eventually became friends. Seeing him now as a friend was easy for me because my mind was occupied all the time with this other soul connection that made me feel crazy. I could not discuss this with anyone.

Joe and I went out for dinner, had a very good time, came back to my place. All of a sudden Joe looked startled and said, “I just saw someone sitting in that chair.” I looked at the chair which was quite obviously empty. Joe continued to stare at the chair. Joe does not remember his dreams, did not have psychic experiences, was not interested in any of the subjects you write about here on this blog. In other words, Joe was not prone to even thinking about such a thing as a doppelgänger or any such related far out subject.

My mind was still buzzing with the soul mate connection that I could not be with and not talk about. I asked Joe to describe what he was seeing. What did the man look like? What was he wearing?

I was wondering if Joe maybe just had too much to drink or smoke so was surprised when he responded with a clear answer that described the other man, including how he sat and the hat he was wearing. After a pause, while I listened in astonishment, knowing exactly who Joe was describing, he said to me, “Adele you go to far! You go too far with this psychic stuff. YOU GO TOO FAR!” Joe was very shaken by seeing this ghostly image in my living room.

I wasn’t DOING anything. I thought Mr. Mystery man, if anything, was going too far. After that experience I stopped worrying about the buzzing in my head – or whatever was going on. All this remains a mystery to me to this day which was years ago. All I know is that when we have an unexplainable experience that sounds unbelievable it doesn’t matter because no one can erase the experience no matter how illogical it sounds to the so called “normal” people. And no, this never happened to me again.

As you might imagine, that story has more story behind it. There has to be a lot of two-way energy going on to have an experience like that. Long before that happened I had been invaded by the sense of the presence of this ghost man who was very much alive but miles away. We did not write or talk on the phone.

I constantly questioned if I was losing my mind. This was something beyond love as well as inclusive of love. But when Joe saw this ghost image of the other man, he was freaked out, while I stopped thinking I was crazy and accepted the fact for what it was. If another person saw what I had been feeling for months, that was fabulous. I never told Joe who the man was.

This event just proved to me that our energy does go out and perhaps some of us have more energy than others and more at different times and for sure, a lot more with a few special people.

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Lauren Raines commented in Adele’s post and her comment is also fascinating:

I completely believe Adele’s story, because I had something similar, in that there was a time in my life when I was “in love” with a married man, and he also was obsessed with me. Our connection was so inexplicable, and I came to the conclusion we must have a lot of past lives together or something………We worked together, as did his wife, and we never openly talked about it or became physical. The situation did not lend itself to any kind of discussion. But a number of times I felt him next to me in bed. It was very disturbing, and I since have met half a dozen women who had a strong emotional/sexual issue with a man and had the same kind of experience.

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Supposedly, something similar can develop through deep meditation, in which a being created by the mind manifests into temporary reality, seemingly as a physical entity. Monks in Tibet have called these beings Tulpas.

I received an e-mail recently from Charles Fontaine, the Quebecois man who I wrote about here in the Quebec Encounters series here that later formed the heart of Aliens in the Backyard. Essentially, Charles has concluded that aliens are demons from the spirit world. His comments, which I’ve included in a slightly edited version below, compelled me (Rob) to consider the question of what lies at the root of the alien encounter experience, and about aliens, in general.

I think there is a connection between aliens and the spirit world. They seem to have access to it in ways we don’t comprehend. But I also think aliens are physical beings. Though some may have the ability to be both physical and non-physical.

I don’t know what aliens are or where they’re from, but I firmly believe they are not all the same—not physically, not mentally, and definitely not of the same intentions. They can’t all be lumped as either benevolent or evil. The same goes for humans, of course. And the same goes for human races and nationalities. Categorizing with specific attributes, whether positive or negative, only goes so far before such ideas start to unravel.

To say that all aliens are various forms of lower spirit beings – demons or Satan or fallen angels – then we are essentially saying there are no aliens. There are only lower, under-evolved demonic beings that appear as aliens.

It’s an interesting premise and the opposite of the ancient alien theme that implies all spirit beings and their revelations are cases of mistaken identity. It’s all aliens and no spirits. (I won’t even go into the skeptical/debunker perspective, which nullifies both possibilities!)

I think it’s much more complicated than either viewpoint – all aliens vs. all demons.

So here’s Charlie’s perspective. He makes references to people involved in his story, such as the pharmacist, the medium, and the ufologist (Jean Casault). Although I don’t agree with Charles, I think it’s worthwhile allowing him to express his thoughts and feelings, which are closely linked.

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Remember what the medium told me when I’ve asked: Why me? He said they (the spirits) were telling him to tell me that I should give myself time and I would understand,  because I’m well grounded to the earth.

They (aliens) were and are no good and here is how I’ve found out:

The third time that I met with the Pharmacist, I asked him: How did you find out that something related to aliens was going on with me and how could you point out exactly what was going on? How could you? He was amazed and confused for a moment and said: I thought that you had told me.

The same with the neighbors…. and the same with the medium with the dog’s left paw. All the strangers starting a discussion directly related to the subject.

Then there was the bang on the woodstove and the loud screaming coming out of the stove at 3:00 AM, and the black shadows.

Think of it this way: it is all the same, they want us to believe in different things such as, Bigfoot, Aliens, Vampires … you name them all… I believe they are all the same and Evil…SATAN

They possessed all the people coming to me. They used them to communicate with me. Tell me why the Pharmacist would not remember that he had asked the question directly?

They want us to believe they are good. Remember the medium had told me that they were good. But they talked through him to lie to me about their identity.

We (my wife and I) have lived through a horror movie. Why would they be connected with my visit to the graveyard?

Demons can make themselves appear in multiple images. They use people around their target to communicate. They probably took me to the book store so I would connect with you as well, because this is what they wanted.

I haven’t lost my senses. On the contrary, I realized as time went by that they are here to steal our souls.

Casault is wrong. He is saying that people such as me are cowards, and that we should not be afraid. The aliens are good. The problem is that Casault is saying openly that God does not exist. This is exactly the message that they – ALIENS (EVIL ONES) want us to tell throughout the community.

A couple of weeks ago, I dropped by Barnes and Noble to cruise the shelves and find out what new books were on the market. I usually make note of them and then check out the e-book version, which is always less expensive. But for some reason, on this particular day, I picked up The 5^th Wave by Rick Yancey and read the back cover:

They know how we think

They know how to kill us.

They’ve taken everything worth living for.

Now they’ve come to take the things worth dying for.

I opened the book to a quote by Stephen Hawking: “If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.”

Next page:

THE 1^ST WAVE: Lights Out

THE 2^ND WAVE: Surf’s Up

THE 3^RD WAVE: Pestilence

THE 4^TH WAVE: Silencer

Then I read the first page and knew I was going to love this book, that Rob would love it, that Megan would devour it. I was right. This book and its sequel- The Infinite Sea – went to the Florida Keys with us and after Megan got her hands on it, I never saw the hardcover again, so I downloaded the e-book and its sequel and Rob and I read it on our iPads.

Granted, I enjoy Dystopian novels, but The 5^th Wave is probably the best novel – Dystopian or otherwise – I’ve read in the last 20 years. The story is riveting and the structure and pacing of the story are impeccable. It’s the kind of story that sticks with you even when you aren’t reading it. You can’t help but think, What if? As one writer friend put it, The 5^th Wave is a sophisticated version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. It’s actually a lot more than that.

In essence, an alien race takes over the planet by implanting the consciousness of their individual citizens into the bodies of human fetuses. The alien consciousness lies dormant in humans until the early teens and then co-exists with the human until the 1^st wave occurs – lights out.

But it’s not just the electrical power grid that goes down. Nothing electrical or mechanical works- cars, iPads, cell phones, computers, planes, boats, nada. Back to the Dark Ages. This part of the story is told through the perspective of 16-year-old Cassie, who loses her entire family – except for her younger brother, Sam, who is eventually taken away in a bus by military types to Wright Patterson Air Force base. She’s a compelling, complex character.

Another perspective in the story is that of Evan Walker, who looks human but isn’t. He rescues Cassie at one point and falls in love with her, definitely not a component of the alien agenda. Walker may be one of the most intriguing characters in the novel.

Then there’s the perspective of Ben Parrish, a high school kid on whom Cassie had a crush when the world was normal. He is inducted into the 5^th wave army at Wright Patterson, where children as young as five are trained to kill the “intruders.”

To say more than this would give away some essential plot elements that are so deftly crafted you anxiously turn pages just to find out what happens. As Megan remarked when she finished the book, “This story is a mind trip. The author leads you in one direction and suddenly you realize the direction is something else entirely.”

Yancey has done his homework – or has experienced something himself. He knows about the importance of owls in abduction scenarios. He knows about utter terror of the unknown. He understands the human psyche, the human soul.

As a writer, I came away from this novel with a deep appreciation for how important it is for a novelist to write the story as you envision it. Yes, an agent and editor can help to fine-tune the idea, can urge you to dig deeper within yourself to find the elements that transform the book from ordinary to extraordinary.

But in the end, a story is between you, the writer, and the characters you create. If you try to force the characters to do something that isn’t in their nature to do, they resist, dig in their heels, and your story falls apart. At no point in The 5^th Wave does the story fall apart. You, the reader, have questions and all of them aren’t answered in the first book. But enough of the questions are answered so that you buy the sequel.

Not surprisingly, The 5^th Wave has already been optioned as a film. I can’t wait to see how this shakes out as a movie. It’s an epic fated for the big screen.

ow I’m halfway through The Infinite Sea.

As authors, we’re surrounded by books. So it’s not too surprising that some of our synchros relate to the world of literature. Fiction and non-fiction. However, it’s a bit unusual to experience two such synchronicities within a couple of hours, which is what happened to me (Rob) today.

Last night we went to dinner with a couple that I met in my yoga class. Dwayne is a graphic artist and Rose works for pharmaceutical company. She’s politically active, volunteering for campaigns and liberal causes. She also likes to read political biographies and passes them onto us when she and Dwayne are done with them. That works for us, since the books she gives us usually are not ones we would pick up on our own. Such was the case last night when after dinner she handed us A Fighting Chance, by Elizabeth Warren.

Warren is the senior senator from Massachusetts, and one of the most progressive members of Congress. Trish is always saying that she would love to see Warren take on Hilary Clinton in a Democratic primary fight in the 2016 presidential campaign. Considering the timing of her biography, it could happen.

I like Sen. Warren as well, but wonder if she might be more effective as a senator. Once in the presidency, there seems to be little time for pursuing innovative ideas. Pressure comes from all sides and such ideas are watered down, ie. the Affordable Care Act, which was a compromise, actually originally a Republican concept to keep private enterprise at the center of health care.

All that said, I was curious about Warren’s book, but hadn’t cracked it open yet this afternoon, even though it was on the kitchen table within reach. I pointed at the book and commented to Trish that Elizabeth Warren was a smarty pants, a phrase that she said she’d never heard me use to describe anyone. I wasn’t sure why I said it, except I know Warren is very bright.

As Trish walked away, I reached for the book and opened it at random, turning to page 213. Here’s the first thing I read: I have two master’s degrees. I’m smart. A smarty pants, I thought. Synchronicity.

Well sort of. Actually, when I looked at the context of the comment, I realized that Warren wasn’t talking about herself, but was referring to someone else who had approached her. Still, it was another example of the library angel coming into play. You’re looking for a smarty pants. Well, here’s one. It just wasn’t a direct reference to Warren.

I moved on to my office and went back to work on a novel, one that I’ve been writing and re-writing for several years. I’m in the third version of the story, and this time it feels right. A while later, I got up from my desk, walked into the family room, which doubles as our library since the walls are covered with bookcases. My back was bothering me from some yard work I’d done so I went into a common yoga pose, a standing forward bend, letting my upper body hang, in order to stretch out my lower back.

As I hung there, a book on the bottom shelf of the nearest bookcase caught my attention. The title on the spine was upside down, so it took a moment to figure out what it said. It was just one word: DOMINION. I’d never noticed that book, even though it has the exact same title as my novel. I picked it off the shelf, and realized it was non-fiction. The sub-title is: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals, and the Call to Mercy. Definitely one of Trish’s books, I thought.

So again I opened it at random and jabbed my index finger at the page on the right. Here’s what I pointed at: “Dominica wouldn’t have any business as a member of this political organization.”

Wow! That too is a synchro. Dominica is the name of the antagonist in Trish’s last three novels: Esperanza, Ghost Key, and Apparition. Since a script of Ghost Key is now circulating, I hope that little synchro was a nudge in the right direction.

If you want to read more about the library angel, type that phrase into the search box at the right, and three or more stories will appear.

I think we come into life with an agenda, a checkist, if you will, of things we would like to achieve, experience, and do during our time on the planet in this life.

Some of us choose to work on personal issues – the evolution of our creativity, our spirituality, our ability to nurture and be nurtured, our craft. Other people choose to be born into this time and space to usher in monumental change. To help bring about a paradigm shift.

Russel Brand may be one of the latter. After seeing him on MSNBC with Lawrence O’Donnell, and hearing that he has teamed up with Naomi Klein, another revolutionary, I intend to buy his new book, Revolution. Brand’s premise is whether we should “ditch capitalism and save the planet or ditch the planet and save capitalism.” Why? Think about this for a moment: The combined wealth of the 300 wealthiest Americans is greater than that of the poorest 85 million.

That’s a depressing – and empowering – statistic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vV4LAzwykY4