The Story Behind: The Story Behind

I haven’t talked a lot about my upcoming book The History of Soul 2065. Hell, in another month the word “upcoming” will no longer be appropriate, which strikes me as extremely weird — I’ve been anticipating it for so long that, psychologically, I feel almost as if it will never actually happen.

But it’s gonna be available soon — June 11th, to be precise — and I thought it might be nice to provide a little background for each story, just to provide a little extra interest. I’ll talk about which of the characters are based on real people, which incidents are based on something that either happened, or that I was told happened — and which stories are pure, unadulterated imagination.

So I will soon start with the first story, “The Clearing in the Autumn.” But first, I thought I’d give a bit of an explanation for the book as a whole.

The History of Soul 2065 is what has been called (appropriately, I think) a mosaic novel. In other words, it’s a collection of stories that are woven together by a common theme. It came about when (with the help of a friend named Carolyn Fireside) I began to realize that many of the characters in my various short stories were either the same person at different stages of their lives, or individuals from different generations of the same family.

So a couple of years ago, I began to pull the stories together into what I hoped what a coherent whole. I organized them, reorganized them, created two family trees for each of the two families they represented, and then reorganized them several more times.

In the end, the 15 stories (out of 20) that were previously published have all been altered in some fashion. Some were only tweaked very slightly; others went through somewhat more radical alterations (for example, one was switched from first to third person). The five stories that are original to the book have either been written specifically to fill in a few blanks, or were simply never published before. I’ll let you know which is which.

Finally, I want to be absolutely clear that, while several of the characters here are based on people in my family, none of the characters represent a real, whole, once-lived-or-still-living person. First, I couldn’t recreate a living person if I wanted to; the inner lives and the experiences of individuals are theirs alone, and not something that I have access to. Second — these are all fictional stories. Like many writers, I simply started with a person I knew, or something I had heard of, and went from there.

So there it is. Next up: What was behind “The Clearing in the Autumn,” the first story in The History of Soul 2065.

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Want to read The History of Soul 2065? Here are some links:

Amazon | Barnes & Noble | IndieBound | Powell’s | Google Play

More links, and direct purchase of ebooks, can be found at Mythic Delirium.

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