The Peripatetic Philosopher shares with his readers:

DEVLIN, a novel

 JAMES R. FISHER, JR., Ph.D.

© January 9, 2017

FOR YOUR INFORMATION

DEVLIN, a novel, has been completed, and will be copied at Kinko's, and BB will read and edited it at her leisure.  I've spent more time on this work than usual, and I am most pleased with the effort.  Of course, and I have typically given you, my readers, advanced notice on such things, I expected it to be on Kindle by late February or early March 2017.  

I will share with you the last paragraph of the novel here:

Devlin may be out of Africa, but now he was entering limbo, not the purgatory of the afterlife, but the real world of chaos in his fading youth and equally fading idealism, no longer employed in a collapsing marriage with harbingers of an equally collapsing economy just over the horizon with runaway inflation and unemployment, while his four children were going speedily through puberty with him as their father in nowhere land as nowhere man. George Orwell in “Nineteen Eighty-Four” and Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World” wrote about his plight as fiction, but Devlin was entering that dystopia world as his reality.  One of the blessing of life is its uncertainty and Devlin has known a lot about uncertainty and was likely to learn much more about it in the future.    

I thought of calling this novel, DEVLIN IN AFRICA as the next novel in this series -- if I live to write it -- will be DEVLIN IN LIMBO with the final novel in this trilogy DEVLIN IN LOVE.  

If I'm able to complete this gambit it will have gone from dystopia to utopia in a nervous dance of one individual against the fabric of his time.

Should the second and third books be written, they will be much shorter as this one is quite long, but I think an easy read.

If it doesn't sell, and one never knows if it will (without advertising), I may still continue to write the story but having success with the first volume would help to get assistance in the editing of these future volumes.  The stories are complete in my head.  

As poky as I am as an individual, I conceive and write rather quickly, including, of course, tons of errors, as my readers can attest.  By the accident of my birth in place and time and circumstance, I have lived several lives in one and feel it is worthy of a novelized recording.  

I shared the last chapter with a dear friend who said when I finished reading it to him over the phone, "You sound a lot like Dostoyevsky, especially as he relates to the Great Inquisitor in "The Brothers Karamazov."  If this seems absurd, it shouldn’t, as we both have been somewhat obsessed with our times.

JRF