Today I was off, because I'd worked three days worth on monday and tuesday. The maintenance crew of a hospital had shut down an air conditioner, without knowing their actions would fry a RAID5 system in an IT room serviced by that very air conditioner. There was a backup, but access to it was too slow for the doctors' tastes. They never were very 'patient', that's why they're doctors. Since I'd written the original jukebox software, I was called in to write a restore program to bring back to life the 4.5 Terabytes (4.947.802.324.992 bytes) of medical images.  It worked, so today was my day.....

Woke up at 7:30AM, filled to the brim with energy. Did the laundry, and moorelife.nl, and then sat down to write, with the media player on Ayreon. I just love that music. And then it occurred to me that we lightworkers have it easy: we see connections instead of boundaries and obstacles, which kinda gives us the edge. Because let's be serious: if you voluntarily limit yourself to a subset of the whole, how can you hope to defeat that very same Whole? By divide and conquer maybe, but no matter how tough your boundaries are, there's always someone or something able to pass them. This was most eloquently described by a Dutch band called the 'Small Orchestra': They sang about the Berlin Wall when it was still very much a reality, except for the birds: they don't care about a bunch of concrete that stops ordinary men and women! They just fly from East to West whenever they feel like it.

Thus, we can relax, and just go about our business: not only does not worrying give you much more energy left over to work on stuff that really does make a difference, but it focusses you on the tasks at hand in a far more effective way.  Today's writing session thus proved to be highly effective, leaving me a manuscript that for the moment covers no less than 146 pages, with ideas to easily reach 300 pages, which is my minimum target.

But an observation has crept into my awareness: I'm no sensation writer! My stories don't revolve around all out drama and disaster. Just can't do that, because it takes me out of my comfort zone. Some writers are great at that, Stephen King comes to mind. And though I at least enjoyed him immensely in the past, it just isn't my cup of tea anymore. Mine is a world of Innuendo, just like the Queen album that currently playing on my media player quite by accident. I'm a guy of synchronicities, wanting to show that deep and intimate interconnectedness of the world around us. 

Heck, even love between my two main characters doesn't exceed PG13! Not that I wouldn't love to, but it is not within my comfort zone to write about that stuff to untold millions, without first having created that same comfort zone around it. And that zone is hard to capture in the written word. Maybe I'll succeed, who knows. But for now, I'm just trying to finish this novel.

Laura told me something interesting the other day: That it is not all that difficult to become Holland's most famous scifi / fantasy writer: she went looking for Dutch writers in this genre, and came up blank! Well, that at least lowers the bar. Unless of course I crank it way up there again by wanting to rub feet with Asimov and Heinlein....

Love your Light, 

Dre', a.k.a. Sander R.B.E. Beals

P.S. For the introduction of the novel my publisher eventually requires fifty valid E-mail addresses of people willing to receive a one time promotional E-mail about the novel when it comes out. If you're game, please mail me your willingness at andre@moorelife.nl. Your mail address will not be used for any other purpose.