My publisher (Urlink.pub) is talking about selling my first sequel to The Bible According to Eve: The Women of the Torah. This sequel is The Bible According to Eve: The Nevi’im: The Histories: Eve in Search of Adam. This on the heels of sending the original The Bible According to Eve: The Women of the Torah to the magazine Hollywood Review. They also want to have me make an audio book for The Bible According to Eve: The Women of the Torah. All of this is exciting to me… I believe they are also interested in a novel I wrote, Faust in Love.
Although I believe The Bible According to Eve is the set of books I consider my best work so far, Faust in Love is the one I am most anxious to have published. Why? Because in it there is a portrayal of current day morals and politics that I want the public to be aware of while there is still time. Here is a spoiler: in the first chapters, Donald Trump is on television hawking “real estate in heaven,” if people will just give him money. I used the Faust plotline because the idea behind the book is that conservative religion and politics have sold their soul to the devil by supporting Donald Trump as president. The truth is, I wrote this story a long time ago, the year after President Trump was elected. This parallels Thomas Mann’s portrayal in Doctor Faustus of Germany selling its soul to Adolph Hitler. I have been very frustrated about finding a publisher, and I hope I have finally found it in Urlink.pub.
Right now I am putting other projects I want to work on on the back burner so I can work on a novel The Firebird Unchained about Communist and (I hope) post-Communist Russia… I also hope to write about Ukraine, but that may be a stretch. I believe Art lives in the world, and that is why I am so anxious to get Faust in Love published and The Firebird Unchained written. I will, however, give no spoilers about The Firebird Unchained until it is written. I only desperately hope it can be researched quickly and then written. To this end, I should have the first 400 pages of War and Peace read today, and I am finished that by reading 100 pages each day I can have it written by next week… yet it is one of a large number of books I want to read for The Firebird Unchained… I may cut down the amount of time on the research time taken by only reading Russian fiction, from Pushkin and Gogol, to Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, to Chekov to a couple of modern writers who have written in Russia.
I will skip such writers as Isaac Babel, however, because from what he wrote what might as well be called propaganda for the Communists before eventually being destroyed by them himself. As such reading him might be the equivalent of reading Goebbels. Apart from no heroism in him, there is no truth. That said, I believe I will have to take the step of reading Karl Marx’s Das Capital, as despite my negative feelings of the book it played a major role in shaping the ideas of Communist and post-Communist Russia. I also plan to read Main Currents in Marxist Thought, or at least I think that is the name of the book.
I am very worried about how I can get my research and writing of The Firebird Unchained finished in a timely way. I can only read 100 pages per day–that is my limit.
I feel I owe it to two causes to write The Firebird Unchained. One is Ukraine, whose plight with Putin’s invading is both heroic and piteous. The other is American. It is necessary that we believe in our best ideals–freedom of speech, democracy, and self-determination– in every generation. If we allow totalitarian to rule abroad when we are the most powerful country in the world, than we are letting both our ancestors and our descendants down. We will become a “banana republic” ourselves. Therefore The Firebird Unchained is about what is not like America. Russians are not free. Despite the fact that traditional Russian culture has its own beauty and uniqueness, its history is tragic because the place has always been ruled by autocracy. Yet if Russia is in chains, even more so its neighbors–Poland, Ukraine, the Czech Republic, Slovakia–have lived in the tragic slavery of being ruled by an autocratic state which is not their own. They have only recently gotten their freedom, but they deserve to be free. Everyone does. And that is why America must help them, and why I must write my book.
More, Donald Trump received Putin’s aid to be President. If Putin gets to rule the roost in Europe and pick out American presidents, than we are no longer free. This cannot be allowed. It is truly tragic that American politicians and commentators are willing to sell out American freedom for their power, and that is why the people listening to them must be warned. For when we fought Adolf Hitler, it was partly for our good, and when we fought the Cold War, it was, too. Now destiny calls upon us again.