Since September 2017, I’ve been writing a novel that takes place on New Island, my imaginary island-nation in the Indian Ocean. For several years I’ve wanted to ‘complete’ New Island, and a friend of mine suggested that, since the island is fully represented with many many paintings, why not create a story that takes place there, fully illustrated with my paintings, maps and other artifacts.
So I did.
The result is "The Hum" - a full-length older-young-adult magical-realism novel will be released at some point in 2020 or 2021...
The Beatty Ruins are a frequent stopping point on the North Bight Path.
Twenty years before my story begins, archaeology student and witch-herbalist Roselle Beall discovered an ancient library in the Beatty Ruins (above) on New Island's northwestern coast. She and two other Putney University seniors found 88 books and 34 scrolls wonderfully preserved in a tomb-like room under an old tower. It was the first writing ever found from a vanished prehistoric civilization known simply as the Old People.
Roselle managed to translate a certain thin book from the library. She found that the Old People knew themselves as the Kwanlin. She also discovered that the book she translated was a scientific treatise on the physics of The Hum, a pleasant, often healing sound that Islanders have heard ever since their ancestors arrived in 1799. The book further revealed that The Hum is where matter and energy intersect at the core of every subatomic particle throughout the Universe - the core of quantum physics.
Then Roselle discovered that the book, which she calls the Kwanlin Codex, also explained, in step-by-step fashion, how to manipulate Hum energy. Translating this part was her undoing…
In 1964, a fifteen-year-old named Gordon Broome had a strange and powerful dream that brought him to New Island. Gordy was In shock over the possible self-inflicted loss of his mother, and passed out in his bed, and suddenly found himself escaping a tsunami on a raft. After a three-week bardo-dream trip from Southern California to the south Indian Ocean, the raft was wrecked in a storm. He woke up on a beach on New Island's southeastern coast, not far from the Russian naval base at Kronstadt.
He was immediately captured by a Soviet Navy shore patrol, interrogated as a possible spy for the Americans and put in a holding cell. (The story takes place in 1964, in the midst of the Cold War.)
Two civilian food service workers recognize that Gordy can hear The Hum!. They see Hum energy in his eyes, and then they get him out.
Thus begins the narrative - Gordy learns a lot about Hum energy, about friendship, Love, and the people and culture of New Island.
More later...