I thought this would be a good time talk about the comments I received from visitors to this blog. Overall, the response has been outstanding! Thanks to you all for your remarks and kind words. Your thoughts about Heaven’s Ant Farm are spot on. But this trait of clever insightfulness and observation does not seem to be coming from all corners.
And the usual response I get from a group of slackers (and you know who you are) is “this project isn’t the right fit” or “this does not seem right for me” or “don’t feel that I could represent your work with the requisite enthusiasm.” Maybe they find the controversy between science and religion unsellable. Or maybe, they don’t want to offend someone or worst still, in this troubled day and age, they are afraid of the consequences. Maybe agents are just too timid about such things. Sigh…Mel Gibson, where are ya?
But I digress. I suspect that this group is not really a bunch of loafers but rather they are just too busy reading hundreds of queries each day. And each query they see reads about as dry as the one before.
Maybe they don’t have the time to uncork a rich, bountiful Cabernet and ensconce themselves in a novel that as William Greenleaf (the science fiction author of The Tartarus Incident, The Pandora Stone, and Starjacked!) says is “fresh and unique, explores new territory and is hugely entertaining.” Even the Reverend Jim Sell earlier this year christened Heaven’s Ant Farm as a “riveting saga of time, space and faith…albeit, from [my] own imagination and with [my] own spin.” Thank you father.
Then there’s the feedback I got from someone who summed it all up by saying, “This is a clever, philosophically satisfying, and almost epic parable about the mysteries of consciousness and creation and the dangers of religious zealotry.” Swear to you know who, I’m not making this stuff up! This person, who saw an early version of Heaven’s Ant Farm provided many more comments and I’ll probably publish them in a later post. But I was pleasantly surprised when she felt the need to take note and write about the “very funny exchange in the book between Yahweh and the old, curmudgeonly doctor in which the old doctor snaps, [at Yahweh saying ] ‘Young man, I’ve been doctoring around this world long before you were shot out of nut city.'” This reader went on to call another scene “hilarious and insightful” where in the Garden of Eden we witness the internal thoughts of both Abram, a villager, and Yahweh as they experience limited success communicating with each other verbally and think in their own prejudiced way that the other is a simpleton. Blasphemy, Blasphemy, BLASPHEMY! 🙂
There are many more comments like this and I hope that everyone (and that includes you slackers) get a chance to read Heaven’s Ant Farm. And yes, yes, it’s true I’m tooting my own horn here. But after all, if I don’t fly the flag, who will?
