Two more for the shelves!

SS6, The Shoot is one for the movie buffs. By whom I mean all the people I know and have yet to meet who love making movies and working on movie sets.
This story is a conglomeration of pretty much every movie set I've ever worked on, which is quite a few, since I spent practically all of my late 20's and 30's on one film set or another, before I switched to post production full-time.
And yes, I did go on a shoot to Puerto Vallarta and yes, we did stay in one of those mega-hotels that was 90% closed down for the winter. A very pleasurable and somewhat creepy experience.
Additional creepiness was blended in from my years working out of the Middle East, when we'd get assigned to places like Mykonos and Athens to shoot commercials, but return to Corfu during the off-season just to chill out. The atmosphere from those days was most fantastic and otherworldly, making this story have more of an autobiographical slant that the previous ones.
Yes, I've bent a few pre-historical facts to suit the plotlines better, but hey, this is fiction, and I did that mainly to preserve the dramatic throughline so that readers of today can relate better. Apologies to those whose scholastic noses might be tweaked just a little out of true by my doing that, please take it all with good humor and in the spirit in which it was intended.


SS7, The Third I, was, is, and always shall be, a bit of an enigma. Mainly to me, I think, since this story, of lovers connecting through lifetimes and consciousness and religions and myths, striving against the steepest of odds and using everything they can to make that connection, is still a dream to me. My father started it all with a series of talks with me before I went to school, that I have summarized and paraphrased into something of a poem, which is the one in front of the book. Then, the story itself came to me, almost fully formed, as a lucid dream.
For those of you who don't know what that is, a lucid dream is to be had in that special state of semi-consciousness in between being aware that one is awake, and being asleep. In short, it's the state of being aware that one is dreaming. After quite a long period of cultivating and working on this awareness, it's then possible to control, to a greater or lesser degree, certain elements of that dream. A common one for me, for instance, is the realization that I'm swimming underwater, and, after a cautious moment of experimentation (because either I'm dreaming, or I'm drowning) I find that I'm able to breathe after all. Underwater. Which means that I'm dreaming. So, since this is cool and the panic's over, I can then proceed to explore around me, and can swim wherever I choose.
In the Third I, I chose to explore the dream and turn it into a movie.