I am on page 868 in War and Peace. However, in reading it, I find myself believing that it has not soaked in. Perhaps I have tried to read it too quickly. I have stressed myself on it because I have so wished to write The Firebird Unchained. Because of this, I am thinking of, true, finishing it first. However, then I shall read A Treasury of American Folklore for a children’s book I want to write, Jeanie and the Gentle-Folk. According to The Celtic Twilight by W.B. Yeats, Irish peasants call fairies the “good people” or the “gentle folk.” In the book, Jeanie enters “Other World,” to get away from “Father Ogre” an Ogre who ostensibly adopted her when she was abandoned at birth, but who actually planned to eat her. The “Gentle Folk” adopt her and she takes a world wide journey in which she meets such folk figures as St. Francis, Paul Bunyan and Judge Ooka. I will leave no more spoilers into Jeanie and the Gentle-Folk.
Yet I still have it in my head that I could read up–starting with Mark Twain’s work–for the story of Zach Gold in Star Dust. Zach’s story is a biography, told by the personalities of friends, relatives, acquaintances he has–and enemies. His dream is twofold: to create a kind of corn oil which works as clean energy, and to use it in trains in the future. To replace the trucking industry with clean trains is his idea. However, if Zach has his dream, his “everything,” he also has his Achilles’ heel, his beloved Daphne, the woman who both loves and dislikes him, and yet somehow is necessary to his existence. He does get her to marry him–yet being married is not the end for them. It is only a kind of beginning.
For The Firebird Unchained I am–as yet–reading War and Peace. It is about an author who lives in Russia during its communist period, and who tries to get his work published underground. The story is the stories of his stories… and to tell more would unduly spoil the story for any future reader.
I am now publishing three more The Bible According to Eve books, sequels to The Bible According to Eve: The Women of the Torah. I am also publishing the book Faust in Love, satirizing modern politics and in particular the Trump phenomena. I don’t know how to tell my friends at my synagogue (some of them are arche-Republican), but I am not a fan of Donald Trump, and years ago I wrote Faust in Love the year after he was elected.
Anyway, those are my “projects.”
Wish me luck.