Dear readers! I hope this message finds you well and thriving. I want to thank you for your continued support and interest in my writing.
I’m excited to announce that I’m now offering a free gift for all new subscribers: an ebook of one of my short stories. It’s one of my very favorites: “The Last Man to Believe in God.”
But because you are already part of this journey, I couldn’t leave you out! Your support has meant the world to me, and I want to thank you with the same gift.
“The Last Man to Believe in God” is a story that took me ten years to write, yet it’s one of my shortest works. It delves deep into themes of faith, belief, and the human spirit, and I’m thrilled to share it with you.
Going forward, you can expect more tales and thoughts on constructed languages and societies, reviews of books and films, and musings on plots, characters, settings, and ethics. I write only when I have something meaningful to say, so you won’t be inundated with notifications.
Thank you again for being a part of this journey. Your readership and engagement mean everything to me, and I look forward to continuing to share this adventure with you.
Warning: Major Spoilers
Since this is a writing blog, I thought it would be only fair to include some notes about the inspiration for this story and why it took me 10 years to write it. Necessarily that means spoilers, so: read the ebook first!
FINAL SPOILER WARNING
Ok, here we go.
I first started writing this story in 1996, and it didn’t reach its present form until 2006. I was trying to answer a simple question – Do souls teleport? — and I knew what the answer had to be — NO — and I knew I wanted to try to convey the strange horror of being alive, and yet having no soul. I also knew that the fact that souls didn’t teleport had to be sprung as a surprise at the end.
This made the story extremely difficult to write, because the whole point of the story had to be hidden away. In other words, the story couldn’t be about soul teleportation, or that would ruin the surprise. Instead, the story had to be about something quite different — and yet compelling, and related enough that the ending wouldn’t be a complete non sequitur.
The first draft was about the scientist who actually invented teleportation. I don’t remember who he was originally working for, but he decided to defect and sell his services and his secret teleportation technology to the other side. I couldn’t get this to work, and I set aside the story for a few years.
Then about five years later, I thought things began to fall into place: the scientist’s father had died in a teleportation accident, and rather than believe that the accident was caused by an omnipotent God, the scientist became an atheistic control freak. The scientist stole the teleportation technology and defected, and sold his services to a group of terrorists led by a religious fanatic. The fanatic was actually a prophet, though, who really did talk to God all the time, and knew things about the scientist that he could only have discovered through paranormal channels, which the atheistic scientist found very disturbing.
In the final scene, the terrorists and the scientist teleported into a major military installation to sabotage it. When they teleported, however, the religious leader naturally lost his connection with God, and collapsed in grief. The scientist figured out what happened, realized that God must be real… and couldn’t accept it. He was such a control freak, he couldn’t handle the idea of God controlling his life. To escape God, he committed suicide.
That might be a good story in the hands of a better writer, but I had a terrible time trying to make it work. My big problem was that I just didn’t like my main character at all. I’m not a control freak, and I don’t have a lot of sympathy for control freaks — or people who work with terrorists for that matter. So I set it aside again.
Finally, I tried once more in the fall of 2005. I was tired of trying to fake out the reader by pretending to be writing about one thing, and really setting up a surprise. I wanted the story to be ABOUT what it was ABOUT. It needed to be about faith despite evidence to the contrary, and how that’s turned into evidence for faith.
After that, the story suddenly wrote itself.
