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I got an email earlier today which ended with the question they suggested I answer here in the blog. “How do you start a novel?” It generally starts with an idea. I will use my novel The Last Holey Man as an example. I was noticing that we were slowly replacing parts of our bodies with non-organic items. The book I mentioned that I so loved as a child, Treasure Island, had a pirate with the peg leg and that was first published in 1883, so the idea of replacing body parts is not very modern. On the other hand, the replacement of body parts was accelerating as I began to think of the novel. I am not among the first to wonder if it would be possible to replace the entire body. I didn’t like the idea of just moving our mind and/or our memories into something like a computer. I decided in my novel the people would retain their basic physical appearance, but they could even choose the age they appear to be within limits. As with virtually every technological advance, there had to be a downside. The power source in these new nonorganic bodies would need to be replaced. The basic “memory unit” would lose its contents with the loss of power during replacement of the power source. Before replacing the power source, the “memory unit” would be backed up and temporarily stored. The process presented two problems. The first was there was a small loss of data during each transfer; i.e., memories were lost. There appeared to be no solution to this problem. The second potential problem was the memories could be manipulated before being returned to their owner. These were parts of the “fatal flaw” driving the story. To add to the conflict, the government did not want to deal with anyone who was still human for many reasons. They invented the term “holey” and applied it to anyone who was still human since they still had functioning “body orifices” and used it as a stigmatizing term.

That was the germ, the basic idea, of the novel. The novel took shape from there. I obviously added people and ideas to increase the level of conflict, but the novel started with the simple idea of replacing body parts and then leaping ahead to the total replacement of our bodies and what that might mean. If you have questions about my writing or writing in general, please ask them. I want this to blog to be a two-way exchange of information.