HIGH HEART ... a lucid tale of love and discovery

For the last decade I've mostly been writing fiction aimed at the suspense or thriller genre - thus my last four novels, ending with Higher Forces. That's the basic story that I came back from my Guatemala adventure possessed by - and it's gone through several different renditions as I've struggled to get to the heart of the characters and the just-emerging mythic undertones. Higher Forces manages to merge just-emerging Silicon Valley mood-modification technology with ancient shamanic methods of influencing people's thoughts and emotions. This intriguing merger is what ignites the novel's power.

So that version of the story got published - and then six months ago I had a literary breakdown and awakening related to that long-term project, and to writing fiction in general.

I've now rather impulsively re-envisioned and rewritten Higher Forces. First I shifted totally into first person narration, which eliminated half the plot and freed me to focus on revealing my main character Jack's thoughts, feelings, visions, compulsions and so forth from the inside out. This deeper level of narration feels like my true fiction voice. All I had to let go of was my commercial intent to write a mainstream blockbuster - and instead, just write.

But what's most important in this new High Heart version of my Guatemala adventure is that I became empowered to finally truly reveal the mysterious main female character, Mahalena. I now openly admit that as a male writer, I am by nature pushing intense feminist/liberation themes. My male character, freed from overmuch macho action, now goes through a number of jolting awakenings regarding his own macho programmings - and step by step he becomes brave enough to let Mahalena lead him into sometimes bizarre but deeply heart-touching experiences that transform his sense of who he is. Finally he comes to realize what Mahalena, as a new type of female hero, is pushing constantly to manifest.

Quite honestly, High Heart is a spiritual tale - a new type of tough non-religious post-New Age adventure that lays bare the underlying struggle for true equality in relationships, utter fairness in business, and the kind of psychological revolution that spiritual leaders like Krishnamurti have been advocating for far too long. It's time for our new myths and heroes, novels and movies to take the leap and authentically lead the way into a new era - and I'm offering High Heart as part of that leap.

You can still buy and enjoy Higher Forces for its intense suspense-genre action - and it's probably what the film or miniseries version will draw strongly from for plot complications and all the rest. I still love suspense plots and remain deeply engaged in the struggle to make sure tech doesn't take over our emotions in the name of anxiety and depression reduction. We're all too close to getting seriously brain-washed by psych-tech inventions just now emerging in the pharma industry. Higher Forces exposes all that in action - and challenges us to get heads up and refuse to get sucked into subtle mind-manipulation products.

But I now offer High Heart as a deeper dimension of that theme - the psych/spirit dimension where Mahalena gets to finally speak her mind and share what's in her heart as she leads us and inspires to take the leap Buddha and Jesus were really talking about - the leap into fully mindful decisions and actions where sex and spirit unite in an explosive sense of newness and potential.

For the High Heart version of this saga I've changed the subtitle to: 'A lucid tale of love and discovery'. This new edition delves into Jack's inner experience in ways I've never explored in fiction before. This is now indeed a lucid tale - we get so deep into Jack's inner experience that at times even he wonders if he's perhaps losing his mind in order to gain some primal union with Mahalena ...

Rather than wait a year for High Heart to be published in New York, I've gone with a California publisher who's getting the book out very fast. I'm also working with a film agent to get the HIGH HEART Treatment read, bought and produced. That's the vision - a limited series for cable where we can do the film version unabridged. Yeah, it's going to be a deeply sexual film just like the novel, with the ancient ceremonial jade phallus from the highland Mayan tradition front-center.

If you know just the right film people for this project, just drop me a line!

And click on the book cover or click here to order your own copy.