Alan Zendell's Blog: It's About Time - Posts Tagged "telepathy"

This writer especially. Down with the old ways. More guest posts and blog tours. Bite the bullet and use social media the way my kids do. With a little gentle urging from Trestle Press (Giovanni Gelati) I'm doing just that.

I'm also trying a new approach to getting my writing out there. Working with Trestle, I'm going to serialize Element 42, a novel I've been working on for several years. The truth is that in this market, it's too long for traditional science fiction publishing, but this book means too much to me not to find a way to make it available to readers. I plan to have the first installment ready by the end of July, and we're going to release new ones every three weeks thereafter.

So get ready to meet Steve and Brock (a benevolent alien), and the Luugs (some not so benevolent aliens). And you'll see telepathy and telekinetics in action, not just as parlor tricks, but as powerful means of communication that are sometimes good and sometimes dangerous. Mostly, get ready to search for the meaning of life for humanity. Element 42 dares to ask some tough questions: how did we get here? Does God exist? It even proposes some answers.

After three science fiction novels and a political thriller, I've also decided to write something different. I know Giovanni will approve. I recently published A Boy and His Dog - An Unfinished Love Story, a short memoir about...well, the title is pretty self-explanatory. I've since penned the first eight chapters of a full-length memoir about traveling through life. Literally. Traveling on trains and airplanes and in automobiles, and the experiences I encountered along the way. I'm finding that my life's been a lot more interesting than I thought. It's definitely time to try something new.

I began writing "Element 42" thirteen years ago. In the intervening years I've revised it, boiled it, chopped and fried it, but I never changed the basic story, which was the one I always wanted to tell. It's still long, but it's lean and meaty. All the fat's gone. It's still enough to fill a trilogy, almost 900 pages, but Trestle Press convinced me that I should join the current trend of serialization. So instead of three novels, it's being released as 25-30 episodic ebooks. The first one appeared on August 20, 2012.

"Element 42" is about Earth's first encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence. It's about beings who think and communicate very differently from us. You'll meet the Guardians, a highly ethical species who view themselves as Masters of the Galaxy, though they are senescent and genetically trapped in a downward spiral of racial paranoia. You'll also meet the Luugs, who are just humanoid enough to remind us of ourselves, and who embody many human-like qualities, only exaggerated. And finally you'll meet the lovable, introspective Kraalig-Veys who, having evolved on a planet perpetually shrouded in dense clouds and had no idea there was an entire universe up there, were forced to turn inward

"Element 42" is also about the ultimate search for the meaning of life and the reason humans exist on Earth. Are we the prized creation of an omnipotent deity? Do we have a special destiny? Maybe.

The first volume, The Stranger, is available for Kindle, http://www.amazon.com/Element-42-Volu..., and Nook, http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/eleme...,

It will be available for iPad, iPhone, and other e-readers as soon as the other retailers post it.