I sent the following out to readers of the ARISEN series today.
Happy New Year / Audiobooks / 26.4% Better / Love
Welcome to your ARISEN update for the very last hours of 2015!
Happy New Year
First of all, a very happy new year and all the very best to you and everyone you love. Have a great time tonight - and, most of all, STAY SAFE. Also wishing you your very best year ever in 2016. For ARISEN, it will be the year when humanity will either be saved - or lost forever. One way or the other, this is it…
Audiobooks
Good news! Books Seven & Eight on Audible are imminent. Podium Publishing wrote yesterday to report that the hold-up was due to a slightly protracted negotiation with Audible over contract terms, which has now been resolved. And so, "Any significantly delayed Podium audiobook titles will be submitted to Audible within the next week for pre-release!" Yay!
26.4% Better
Speaking of which, I celebrated today by taking a 12k run during which, I swear to you, Book Eleven got 26.4% better in an hour. That is, after weeks of feeling like I was drowning in the depths and possibilities of these last critical stretches of story arc, I suddenly came up with what I hope are some of the very best and most powerful story turns of the entire series. I may finally be getting this storytelling lark down. It is a very deep well. As too is…
LOVE
Between running and sinisterly muttering voice notes into my arm-mounted MP3 player, I also heard this song come up (below; if you haven't already noticed, music is a critical input to writing ARISEN). I found this one to be equally beautiful and true - and a wonderful reminder, at this fulcrum point in our lives, of what's really important. And, at bottom, love is what ARISEN is really about: how love, and life, are stronger than death - and how "under the worst of circumstances the human spirit is magnificent." So too is our capacity to love one another. Here's hoping there's lots of love in your life - tonight, next year, and always.
- Michael
And so my resolution for the New Year is to love better.
And I wish all the same things above to all of you reading this.
For me, I was truly blessed with today's NYE run – out in the cold air and snapping wind and brilliant sunshine, feeling the magnificence of using the body, believing that I'm slowly, falteringly, hitting my stride as a storyteller.
On the last leg back, I saw a woman chasing her hat down Grenville Place. Another women dashed over and made a grab for it – but totally missed. Point: hat, which carried on rocketing down the street. So I angled to intercept. Muhahaha – I intended not only to scoop it up and end its bid for freedom, but I was going to do so at a dead run, without breaking stride… and so surely did I, but unfortunately that rapid clip I was moving at took me straight into the hat's owner, who was chasing it from behind… Between us, we mitigated much of the collision – and she got her hat back. Result, as they say around here. “Happy New Year!” I shouted over my shoulder, running off into the last of the setting sun.
Happy New Year! Happy New Year!
