THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY literally popped into my head one spring morning as I drove across the Point of Rocks bridge that spans the Potomac River, linking Virginia to Maryland. It takes maybe a half-minute to drive, and in that time the whole concept and much of the story came to me.
That was near the start of a 12-hour drive north, so I had a lot of time to play with the parts and flesh out story elements. Over the following summer, I did a good bit of research refining the concept, learning the science as it then was (it’s changed a lot since, though not so much in the sense of going in different directions as in bringing to fruition possibilities that some saw even then.)
I had some free time that fall between consulting projects, and wrote the first draft in a month or so (I’m sure I still have those manuscript pages and time sheets boxed away somewhere.) I revised over the winter, some of it refining the writing, some of it cutting away what didn’t fit.
Initially, I had envisioned Austria as the ideal setting. I’d been there several times in various seasons, and knew locales that would be a perfect fit for the kind of setting it needed — with mountains and a cold, spring-fed lake, and not easily accessible, eitheir in nor out.
We went to Austria the following spring to pick up some of the color, take photos, get some fresh sense of the place and the people.
More revising, then still more revising, in between other projects.
I finally sent it off to an agent who found it exciting, and gave me a very detailed edit— mostly on more stuff to cut!
And then she sent the manuscript off to the big publishing houses in New York and elsewhere. After some back-and-forth, the bottom line was, loosely summarized: “Everyone knows that such a thing as proposed in this book is simply not possible.”
They were right, in a way: at that time, the core of the story in THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY was not possible. Then.
So, after some more attempts, I put the manuscript in that drawer where all good (and bad) stories go to sleep, some forever.
But as I followed the news, I saw more and intriguing actualisations in laboratories around the world nudging “real” experiments and outcomes toward what I had only imagined earlier. (Actually, not so much “imagined” as “spring-boarded” from earlier discoveries to what might later become.)
Along the way, I continued collecting news clippings and references in scientific journals to these various breakthroughs, and the file folders and boxes built up.
Finally, I dug out the old manuscript (saved as a pack-rat such as I would) in both paper and electronic formats. The old 3.5 inch disks were outdated, but the scientific possibilities buttressing the story had gone beyond what was then to what was now.
More tinkering, more editing, more cutting, some new scenes and new scientific approaches and technology, and THE LIFE AFTER LIFE CONSPIRACY is now out in the world.
Some things changed from the early versions: on second thought, modern Austria seemed too , so I moved the setting to a tightly-run, unfriendly dictatorship in what had been part of the former Soviet Union. I had toyed with a setting in the Caribbean — Haiti would have been ideal, with the legends of Voodoo and (is it zombies or other). But I had never been to that part of the Caribbean, and frankly didn’t want to go.
Another big change: I’ve reviewed all those reams of clippings, papers, links to articles and TV documentaries. Some are outdated, some are very current, and a few are maybe five or ten years old, but are interesting in pointing the way. I am pulling the best of them into a form easily accessible from this website— not the articles, I can’t reprint them, but I can provide the links. You’ll find them listed by topic in the sidebar at the right of this website:
http://www.lifeafterlifeconspiracy.com/
I’ll be adding new articles via posts as I come upon them.
I don't want to be a kill-joy and spoil the surprises of the story, but, as you'll see in those links, among the topics included are, consciousness and what it is; mind, body, soul; quests for eternal youth or eternal life; medical and legal ethics in fields including human-primate cross-species experiments, and use of stem cells; regeneration of human organs and body parts; chimeras (human-chimp hybrids); theories of memory and where it is located; Near-Death Experiences; Out of Body Experiences; Persistent Vegetative State; Multiple Personality Disorder / Dissociative Identity Disorder; hyperbaric therapies; sensory deprivation experiments.
