Book Projects

THE SIGNATURE OF GOD — Initially named The Rock of Affliction — this is complete through 5 drafts. Written as a follow-on sequel to The Second Coming, it tells what happens to humankind and their planet during the first several years after the murder of Dove and the arrival of the asteroid.

People who've read it without having read The Second Coming tell me it works well as a stand-alone novel. And (heh heh!) that they'll be on the look-out for a copy of the prequel (currently out of print).

First what it isn't: It isn't churchy. Nor is it a focused novel designed to pack in as much action and intensity as possible.

Instead, SIGNATURE IS a hard-edged human panorama, a tapestry in words, a smörgåsbord of ideas, and a physical depiction of the human spirit clothed in primate identities, living, dying, soaring, limping — learning. In form, the novel consists of more or less interwoven subplots, of people experiencing, reacting to, and creating, following a planetary calamity. Emphasizing what Ngunda Aran had stressed in the prequel: he hadn't come to save us, but to give us a fresh start. From there on, it's up to us.

And that fresh start includes an evolving sense of what's important and what isn't.

The manuscript is currently with an agent, who is working on a marketing strategy.

For a taste of it, click The Second Coming.

My current writing project (aside from blogs} is the novel ARMFELT, which I've researched periodically since 1970 (including a 4-week trip to Scandinavia to visit story sites). With Signature done, I'm really rolling now on Armfelt, the story of a grueling military campaign in 1718, during the Great Northern War, and hope to have a draft completed before the trees leaf out. I've been told this story is as exotic, to most Americans, as science fiction.

If you'd like to visit the first 20+ chapters gratis, you're most of the way there. Just click on Armfelt.

Another project, this one currently hibernating, is OF TIME AND PLACE: Tea River Stories. Science fiction readers tend to read more than science fiction, notably history. But history books tend to treat with major figures, eras, and events, and generally skimp on the details of life. I’ve had the privilege of being close to a period and place which most historians know nothing about: the pioneer settlements of the early 1900s, in the region that surrounds Lake Superior, and stretches far westward across Minnesota’s Lake Agassiz country. It was a colorful period and process, which many Americans would find interesting and exotic. The project was inspired particularly by my early years in Koochiching County, Minnesota, on the Canadian border. This is not the famed canoe country, but the great bog region that borders it on the west.

I came to know a number of the original settlers, and their offspring who grew up there in the 1910s and 20s. I heard about, and occasionally observed, interesting stories. Tea River Stories are set largely in the 1930s, near enough to my own observations to be less of a stretch.

The village of Tea River was inspired by the real-life village of Little Fork MN, but Tea River is not Little Fork, and its people live only in my imagination. This frees up my creative juices, and allows me to include ideas inspired by the colonization projects of northern Wisconsin, Upper Michigan, and Minnesota’s north shore. All during the same era but in more or less different circumstances.

The existing chapters are in a draft not yet suitable for posting. I'll try to polish up some of the exploratory chapters, for inclusion here in a later update.

I'll close by mentioning an ambitous non-fiction project that may never see a publisher. I'd love to see it published, and I've invested even more time and research in it than I have in Armfelt. The working title is THE WAR FOR THE WOODS: a Perspective. It is rooted in my early years as a logger, followed by bachelors and masters degrees in forestry, and a PhD in plant ecology, and it's lain dormant since 1997. I have a number of chapters in a decent draft and a skeleton draft of the rest. I pitched it to various public figures, and got some encouraging, even enthusiastic replies, but not from the literary agents I proposed it to. They tended to say "a tough sell just now. Books on the forest controversies haven't been selling. Make it sexier; take a position at one pole or the other. I should become another zealot? Well duh! Why do you suppose the public got disillusioned with books on the subject?

I've still got boxes of material on the topics, but a lot has changed over the years, and I'd need to revisit, rethink and restructure the concept. And at age 81, I can't quite see investing the necessary time.

The first several chapters can be read as essays on my blog site, at www.johndalmas.com. You might enjoy them. Click on "Areas," then on "Ecology." And if you like what you find there, go back to the home page, and on the main menu, click on "Clearcutting."

Oops! One more thing — an SF thing — a quickie I'll share with you. Sometimes I wake up half an hour or so before my alarm clock goes off, wide awake. And start my day on my back, hands clasped behind my head. Sometimes I "plan" my day, or flesh out my plans for what comes next in Armfelt. And sometimes, just lately... sometimes I play with ideas for a new, big, really different SF novel. Truly! I don't even have a name for it yet — it's just a vague concept — but it is WAY BIG. And ought to keep me busy for more than a little while.

But first I have old projects to finish, beginning with Armfelt.