FREE E-BOOK I have some news for you. I’m going to be offering a free e-book this summer. The book is an essay about the rise of the surveillance state. It that topic doesn’t interest you…no worries. Some people read my books strictly for entertainment and there is nothing wrong with that. There are flashes of memoir in the essay. I include a brief description of how – and why – and began to transform my life: ********************************************** Very few people knew that I was working on the novel and the only person who watched me write it was my teenage daughter. Worried about her father and curious about his new fictional world, she would sneak into my room when I wasn’t home and read each new chapter on my computer. For the first drafts of the book, I kept my birth name off the title page. The old me wasn’t writing this book. Something was different. Something had changed. I had always admired George Orwell, and had read his collected essays and letters countless times. When Eric Blair become Orwell, he was set free, liberated from his Eton education and colonial policeman past. And there was another factor about the title page that troubled me. I was telling my future readers that privacy was vanishing forever, and that they should resist this change. It would be hypocritical to go a book tour or appear on a talk show blabbing about my life when our private lives were under attack. Years earlier, I had wandered through a forest at dawn and had stumbled on the nesting place of some red tail hawks. Twelve hawks rose into the air and circled me – one coming so close that the tip of his wing brushed against the side of my head. That was a profound incident for me – a totem moment – so I decided to call myself John Twelve Hawks (John was the name of relative). I scrawled that name on a title page and smiled for the first time in months. This felt like a significant step in my practice of the Dharma: give away everything, including your name. Only this present moment is real. When The Traveler was published in over 25 countries, the blogosphere decided that I was either a con artist or insane. One reviewer concluded: “After reading this, I am convinced the author is a paranoid schizophrenic, in need of serious clinical help.” But as the other two books of the trilogy appeared, the public perception began to change. Creating a fiction, I had shown a future reality. youtube/watch?v=y4hPnZUMBwA#aid=P-AmoviVLY8
Posted on: Fri, 18 Apr 2014 15:52:27 +0000
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