Getting Started Again

You start a blog with great anticipation, make some posts, and then get busy with other stuff, and before you know it, six months have passed without a word and Google has almost forgotten you.

Guilty as charged, but I'm back and this time with something to say.

I've just finished a novel titled "The Alien," about a creature stranded on this planet with no clue where he is or why, but with an embedded Artificial Intelligence to explain human behavior. I had to get inside the Alien's head to write this and get rid of all my culturally conditioned beliefs, attitudes and politics so I could look at human behavior from a coldly analytical point of view.

It was a harrowing journey that created a lot of questions and no answers. my hope is, if anyone else reads this book, that it will make them examine their own beliefs. I'd like to offer some of these questions in the next few weeks to get some feed back, but fair warning: they are controversial.

The premise is that if humans don't change their ways and their attitudes toward this planet, they are in for another mass extinction like the last, very soon--within the next two years. This will be the fifth time all life except some plants has been destroyed and evolution started again. The last time we got mammals, which was good, except for humans. If there were no humans this would be a paradise.

My Alien, who will be named Daniel eventually, hatches from a seed pod left behind by an outer-space exploration, 40,000 years ago. He is an experimental clone, made from a plant. He is a plant who appears human, but has no human biology, no sex, no organs. He functions like a plant with essential oils but he has extraordinary intelligence. He starts as a sprout and grows until he creates a cocoon and emerges as a human replica. He has to learn to walk, talk, etc. with the help of his embedded Artificial Intelligence. Luckily he's in the Rainier National Forest and it's summer.

During Daniel's odyssey he must elude a female assasain sent to destroy him, deal with gangsters terrorizing a neighborhood, human trafficking, survive a gang war, elude some determined police officers and learn how to play Texas Hold'Em.
To begin, here's a short scene witha boy he's befriended at a campground . They are watching the boy's mother prepare dinner.
"What's she doing?" Daniel's eyes were wide with fear.
"My Mom? She's peeling carrots."
"Why would she do such a thing?"
"I guess 'cause we don't eat the skins. Why?"
"They've been torn from the ground by their roots. They could be suffering. How do
you know they're dead?"
"Carrots aren't alive like people. They're vegetables."
''I'm a vegetable and I'm alive."

Until next time.