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NINE ELEVENS “SEQUEL”

First, understand that the novel NINE ELEVENS has nothing to do with the catastrophe of September 11, 2001. The novel’s title is a clue to how things work. Except for wrinkles in time, it is relatively normal to assume that the presence of sinister in life only exceeds by a smidgin the imagination of the monstrous holograph of whoever or whatever cooks life’s books.

The novel uses the sinister reality of date trails. The possibility of trails of the date 9/11 and its relation to catastrophic and meaningful events is the question I posed to the internet search engines simply because that possibility arose in my imagination.

As I dug into it I realized I was on to something. The trails began to materialize. One of the trails was of particular interest. Some of the dates in that trail appear in the book cover photo. For some of the dates it takes a moment for the importance of the date and its catastrophe to sink in.

For example, even Eduardo Galeano, author of Open Veins of Latin America (1971), was surprised when his book received an unexpected publicity boost in 2009 when Hugo Chávez, president of Venezuela, thrust a copy into the hands of the US president, Barack Obama, at a summit meeting in Trinidad. Obama read it. The date of 9/11/1973 is a date most people now easily recall as the date on which the legitimate government of Salvador Allende, socialist president of Chile, was overthrown and Allende died horribly. To the thousands who were “disappeared”, tortured, murdered, expelled from Chile that date was an important one.

“So, Anyway” as John Cleese entitled his memoir, the trail of dates was suddenly so provocative to me that every time I looked at one of the dates in the trail, another novel began to form in my head. A year later I was delightfully researching the story of al Andalus, having grown accustomed to delightful research studying the Maya people of Central America. As I say that my eyes come to rest on a book: Breaking the Maya Code by Michael D. Coe. I realize again what an incredible experience that was and how remarkable that a study of the Maya would lead me to make a couple of them the first to navigate to Europe from the Caribbean – with the aid of a 500 pound turtle who was headed that way “Anyway”. And wooden shoe know those two Maya lovers would discover, and become part of,  al Andalus, a society almost as advanced as their own.

Al Andalus was not fiction, friends. In al Andalus, the physical land of Andalusia, jews, arabs, and christians lived in harmony as they created the most extensive library the world had known. Cordoba received the second magnificent print mill exported by China. The first went to Baghdad. 70 libraries were sprinkled across southern Spain as al Andalus translated all the books of the world into arabic. Of course my fictional Maya heroes helped.

“So, Anyway,” what about any of that would provoke a sequel to my novel? Welllll!!! What would not!?!? Here is a clue. One of the things that has grown to interest me more is this. The Jewish people were almost exterminated. Most of them left Israel in the diaspora(?s) of the latter half of the first century CE before, during, and after having been nearly annihilated by the Romans. OK, I get that. But, how did they survive? THEY were the refugees of their time. Yet, they have not only survived. They have thrived. How? They have been scattered among the countries of the world. They maintained their integrity as a people. They developed the skills necessary to live among all kinds of societies and all kinds of people. OK, that is the simple answer. Yet, that answer just provokes more questions.

Some might suggest the first possibility is good government? Anyone really awake today in the USA, or Israel,  would be quick to reply to that suggestion with the suggestion that  governments do NOT resemble their people, especially in the USA and Israel. Others might suggest that the laughter generated by that suggestion would probably lead to laughter becoming the leading cause of death.

But, anyway, the question that provoked those suggestions was supposed to be the subject of this post. But, I have spent the equivalent of a couple of long posts just getting to the question.

So, the question becomes this. Can I answer the question adequately in another post this size or is it going to require a s-e-q-u-e-l????

Stay tuned!

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The Latter Day Saints of Maya Prophecy or Last Flight for Mercury

So, what about Maya prophecies whose time of fulfillment coincides with our date of 20/21 December of 2012? If asked, any hip Maya individual will smile knowingly and say, “those crazy gringos! What Maya prophecies?” Because no such related Maya prophecies really exist? Only conjecture? Granted, good money making conjecture? We will see!

And … without a knowledge of 21st century science when the ‘prophecies’ would have been made in the year, say, 700CE, what, minus exact scientific terms, would be the worst imaginable catastrophe a prophecy could fulfill that would occur in the week preceding the celebrating of the anniversary of the birth of Christ a la 2012?

So, two important questions: will the Maya prophecy, real or not, come true? and what is the worst possible disaster that could be foretold for 2012’s close out sale?

A short and pithy book will appear in a couple days on Kindle by CanDo Jack ( http://www.amazon.com/author/candojack ). The title of the book is The Latter Day Saints of Maya Prophecy. And, hey, if you have One Click Kindle Delivery you can get it fast and read it in time to light out for Mars should fear take control.

I will tweet when the book goes up.

The book considers: one, the idea that such a prophecy exists has a very interesting source story. And, two, the fact that a prophecy does NOT exist has never prevented greedy “prophecy experts” from making a buck off it and three, the fact that a prophecy does not exist has never prevented terrorists from using it as a date to schedule an incredible catastrophe. And, four, such a catastrophe could be the most devastating catastrophe ever experienced by humanity. And the most novel, and the most feared for the last fifty years by threat knowledgeable US Defense experts. And is more threatening now than ever before.

More on that beginning with a little background.

More than a year ago, I began researching Maya history for a fact filled novel entitled Nine Elevens. The term ‘MayaN’, capital N for emphasis, is reserved as an adjective for the language of the Maya people who exist, by the way, primarily in Guatemala. They have been there for certainly three and probably five thousand years. They are the reason you can have bananas on your cereal.

Not to get lost in word misuse and Maya abuse but here is a quote from a review of a review of Mel Gibson’s “Apocalypto.” The review of the review is at http://www.dailykos.com/story/2006/12/08/278950/-Maya-vs-Mayan

Quote:
One is a Maya, two or more are Mayans?

Well, no. Here’s the convention used by Mesoamerican archaeologists. Always choose “Maya” unless referring to a language, in which case the word is “Mayan” (there are at least two dozen living Mayan languages.)

The people are Maya, not Mayans. Our reviewer writes of “a Mayan urban center.” Those in the know would say “a Maya urban center.” He speaks of “Mayan culture.” Nope. Say “Maya culture.”
Unquote.

That entire gotcha may seem to be more archeological language detail than is required. But, keep it in mind for the next week or so because that detailed knowledge may be handy for making some judgments about the credentials of Maya Prophecy ‘scholars.’

My novel, Nine Elevens, began with my discovery that the Mountain Meadows Massacre occurred on a 9/11 date, 1857 specifically. The location, specifically, was about thirty miles west of Cedar City, Utah. Personally, until that point the only thing famous to me about Cedar City, Utah was that in 1993 I arrived in Utah from my home near Munich with two goals: one, sharing Utah’s weightless white wonderful ski slopes with my wife; and, two, renting a plane in Cedar City to fly her around the entire Grand Canyon.

Years later my interest in the Cedar City area was resurrected with the story of The Mountain Meadows Massacre and a trail of 9/11s which took me eventually back to the land of the Maya on the date 9/11/911.

I was hooked. My brain, joined by my heart early on, spent the next three months with the Maya. I was with them in the first great civilization, then through the classic civilization and six hundred years later to meet the Spanish Conquistadors.

By then my Classic Maya twin brother heroes Pacall and Exall had created themselves and gotten ship wrecked on a small island in the Caribbean. The island’s chief cannibal was explaining to the tree bound twins how he would prepare them for supper. Writer’s responsibility to ensure the story continued demanded that the twins be rescued. But, by whom?

Fortunately, the writer’s background brain delivered, under threat of an inaugural case of writer’s block, the character, Phoenix, the first Phoenician Jew. At least the first Phoenician Jew, sailor, explorer, cosmopolitan, dilettante, inventor, scientist whom the writer had ever encountered. And the first to reach Maya.

And neither Maya nor the Caribbean were ever the same again. And the etymology of Caribbean, cannibal, was restored if for no other reason than to honor James Michener, whose 672 page novel, CARIBBEAN, introduced those cannibals to the readers of the world in 1989. That tome sits next to its German cognate cousin, KARIBBEAN. They stare at me from my bookshelf to ensure I give them proper recognition. They stand shoulder to shoulder with an older sister, Iberia, whose Michener knowledge base and influence provides some help on the al Andalus chapters of my NINE ELEVENS. Remind me sometime to tell you the tale of how I happened to have in hand a half read copy of IBERIA when I arrived in Spain from Denmark in 1980 to work with Iberia Airlines. And forgive my typing a final sentence to this paragraph as my heart takes a brief leap back to high school where I first read Michener’s Bridges at Toko Ri instead of reading Chemistry, the only course I ever failed. Even then Michener wrote long books.

BREAKING THE MAYA CODE by Michael D. Coe introduced me to the cast of characters who did the breaking. The documentary by the same name is primarily favored by David Coe. Linda Shele’s extensive contribution and her taking a teenaged vacationer in tow. That charmingly brilliant kid became Dr. David Stuart who wrote the amazing book, THE ORDER OF DAYS: THE MAYA WORLD AND THE TRUTH ABOUT 2012. David’s knowledge and his tenacity in getting and securing that knowledge thrilled me and rescued me from a multitude of gotchas about the ‘Maya prophecy’ with the same vigor and analytical thinking that allowed my hero, Phoenix, to rescue Pacall and Exall, two of my Maya heroes from NINE ELEVENS.

At this point you may see growing in the knowledge that I have categorized the world of Maya ‘researchers’ into those looking for the long story of the real Maya and the short story of those looking for what can be boxed and sold in 2012 in time to be ready for the first social sensation of 2013.

But let me let Dr. David Stuart say what I want to say about that better than I can. I choose to let him say that in the book that will appear as mentioned on Kindle in a very few days.

And let me leave the laying out of potential events to that book as well.

For now, let this article persuade you go back to the top of this page and click on SHOP to buy my NINE ELEVENS and read it for yourself.

The novel has several adventures I did not even mention here. Ever been to Big Sur? It will take you there. Ever played poker with people like Jesus and his Papa, the Big Deal? It will take you there. Ever run off the cliff with lemmings, it will take you there? Ever steal a Spanish galleon from the conquistadores? It will take you there.

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Nine Elevens was published on 7/4/12

A fitting date. True, you may think now that is a lie. And as you read the novel you may continue to think that. Even as the story fills your mind with thoughts you never thunk before. You may think that the fourth of July was not a fitting date for this story to go public.

I am betting as you get deeper in and deeper into the last chapter you will complete the process that began with starting the novel. The process: you will be overwhelmed with MAGNITUDE. You will be overwhelmed with reason. You will agree that the Fourth of July, 2012 was a fitting time for the arrival of Nine Elevens.

Meet the author, Meet the book, Hit the one click button and begin reading the most important book written and published in 2012.

Get ready to meet some interesting characters.

Such as:
Pacall and Exall – Double Bubble Maya prophecy, Hero twins who have battled the lords of down below – bottom level, and returned – smiling.

Phoenix – the only six foot five inch Phoenician Jew to have sailed the Atlantic Ocean, east to west. As of the year 911 anyway. Phoenix rescues Pacall and Exall from the cannibals who have them on tonight’s menu.

Chen and Xul – two Phoenix University graduates, brilliant and in love, anticipating a great career as Missionaries of Reason. They have a little sailboat, The Expedient. They are the first to sail across the Atlantic Ocean, west to east, in any kind of boat. Before 911 anyway.

Ulla and Ix – two more brilliant lovers of course, who sail across the Rocky Mountains on horseback because they love horses and one another and because they need to warn the wagon train that they are on the menu of the cannibals of Utah. The first complete wagon train barbeque. Of 9/11/1857, anyway.

Like the foresome foursome, the first two couple pirate band to kidnap a conquistador admiral annnnnnnd his command ship. Well, the first in 1511, anyway.

And the Moon over Big Sur to be attacked for having a dog. Well, the first full Moon, anyway. Of 2012, anyway!

And so on!

Nine Elevens Author Page

Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/NineElevens