I’m often asked when I’m going to write my next Claire related work.
As most of you know, and some of you were involved in, I wrote and published the first 5 books which became The Claire Saga in approximately 4 years at the beginning of this decade.
During that time, I felt compelled by a certain desperation. The publishing door opened a crack. There was a sword of Damocles hanging over my head that at any moment could drop down upon me and prevent me from finishing Claire’s story. So, I wrote at a furious pace, and brought trusted people into my inner circle that selflessly read what I wrote as I wrote it. This process forced me to keep writing until it was all done. Thank you all for that. You rock.
When I finished Book 5, Where The Ley Lines Meet – https://allthatsinteresting.com/ley-lines – a title which derives from the character Bobbi’s identification of those Ley Lines on the back property of Casa Claire in Book 1, The Wise Ass, I felt like I had completed this circuit of the story line.
As with all of the books, I left a cliff hanger at the end of WTLLM that would provide a basis to launch the next series based upon the surviving next generation of characters that had been raised together as part of the surrogate family known as the motley crew. That story is percolating somewhere in Lynn Taggert’s The Field and will be shared with me to scribe when it is ready.
Now I have the basis for a stand alone novel I am intending to write as a literary palate cleansing one off before I attempt to write the next Claire related series. It’s all there, I just need to sit down and start writing.
My writing process and output is very visual. I see it playing as a movie in my head with the characters doing whatever they want and me just racing to capture their dialogue and action.
But I can’t start that next series yet (or even the one-off). Claire won’t let me.
Claire knows that about half of the humans today just don’t read. On a purely first hand, anecdotal level, my experience has been that whenever I’m talking books read for pleasure, the men in the room take on an almost feral appearance of a trapped animal looking for the first opportunity to escape. You can smell the desperation.
Most of the pleasure non-readers are men. I’m not suggesting that men are not literate. We all read daily for work. But it’s a more goal oriented, linear, and less intuitive process. Getting from a to b to c, etc. Solve the problem. Complete a task. Move on. There are no feelings involved.
Sure, women do that too. My daughter, Jackie, a rising meteor in the business world, can out produce most men’s daily business output, before they take their first coffee-fueled pee break in the morning. But she does that for sport. Like beating them at chess. Or in a race. Or basketball. Or in a fist fight. She is her mother’s daughter. But I digress.
Most women, have a distinct advantage over men. A gift. They remain more intuitive, and therefore can still seek pleasure in the effort of reading. I believe females maintain this gift by coveting making the final decisions about how the fine nuances of a written word translates into visuals in their minds. Fifty shades of grey. Their imaginations are the one place where there isn’t some thuggishly dominating male trying to force them to see a world or character from a purely masculine perspective. As a lifelong fan of the purely feminine mystique, and an aficionado of their aesthetically pleasing physical form, I applaud their almost hostile preservation of that cerebral testosterone free interpretation zone. Indeed, I wrote The Claire Saga just to see them use their feminine gift to take that story to a higher level. I’ve witnessed their transcendental testimony in their reviews. Anyone who has read the series quickly understands that it is the female characters that drive the narrative train. The men are just along for the ride.
The really smart men know how to sit back and enjoy the female ride. Just ask Jimmy Moran.
IMHO, that is why 95% of my readership, extrapolated from the percentages of women to men leaving written reviews for my five books, are women. They just get it.
Added to that natural demarcation in pleasure reading as between the sexes, is the very real male issue of pursuing instant gratification through crack-like dopamine hits from 30 second, max, social media doom scrolling. This has shortened most human males’ attention span and rendered them incapable of sustained interest in just about anything that requires innate interpretive thought, never mind 300 pages of the written word that their imaginations can no longer translate.
That’s right. Most men can no longer imagine anything from scratch. That may account for the skyrocketing rise in the on-line porn industry. At least that’s what I’ve heard.
Therefore, Claire has commanded, like the Great and Powerful Oz before her, that I cannot write another word about her or her motley crew until we recapture and/or regenerate the missing half of humanity’s ability to interpretively imagine something in written form.
So, ladies (yes, I’m old so I can use that term without being canceled) I am desperately in need of your help.
A gun to their head will not make the average man pick up a book and read it. It must be snuck past their defenses.
As a result, I am releasing this clarion call out into the Universe to allow for some brilliant female film producer and/or director to discover The Claire Saga and bring it to the big screen – a term understood to include Movie Theatres and the major cable stations like Netflix, Amazon, Apple, AMC, etc. – and for that prescient woman to use her amazing and still fully functional imagination to translate all of those words my minions of out of work shoemaker elves have typed while I have slumbered peacefully before my computer these past five years.
Show those men what they are missing. Spoon feed them fairy dust until they again know how to fly. Bring The Claire Saga to life in a way that still allows the man to use their hands to eat popcorn, not turn pages. And then, once you have stretched their imagination muscles back to the length of five complete films or five bingeable seasons of cable series, each woman must turn around, look them straight in the eyes, and coo in your most mysteriously seductive (yet slightly smug) tones, “Oooohhh, the books were so much better.”
Of course, you may need to shout “Bazinga!” so the men don’t catch on that they are being played.
I’m confident that if we can get this plan into action, by the time the credits roll on Kissing My Ass Goodbye, the men you have led down this merry path will be reaching for the first two books in the series. Maybe even read ahead, just to see what the women in their lives really know. Pablum for babies until they eat delicious solid foods. But the trick is that the films you wonderful creative women create will give the men a visual road map, laid out carefully with a woman’s eye, on which to learn how the written word should be interpreted.
Ladies, don’t just do this for this old useless male fuck of writer. I may not live long enough to appreciate the end results. Do it for humanity. For your husbands, brothers, nephews and sons. They need you.
Claire, one of your universal Ya-Ya sisters, needs you.
Who knows, this experiment may ultimately rewire the male’s brain so they can fully appreciate Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath. Surely, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” Make that step The Claire Saga. The men will never see it coming.
So, all of my fine, five readers that may be women, please spread the word to all of your female friends until, like a proper virus, it infects just the right film industry woman that will make this happen. The one or two males who check out my blogs are welcome to, like Paul Revere, share the plan with their wives, sisters, nieces and daughters. Then, like that silversmith, sit back and let the battle take its course.
And when it all comes together, it will be one more bit of feminine verification, that this old man captured lightning in a bottle way back in the last century when he first discovered God’s gift of woman.
Thank you God (who is clearly a woman).
And on that miraculous note, let us all go out there and make today a great one.
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