COVER STORY

It's time I said something about this book, then. I thought I'd begin with the cover. That would introduce it nicely. In visual terms there were two main characters I wanted to portray, but they needed a background. I thought first of all I'd try to paint one myself, or maybe take a few photos and piece them together. But then this idea came to me to use a piece of fabric which I had in my possession. It was silk, it had the right sort of colours and was already hand painted. But to make it more my own I wanted to change it in some way, so I scrunched it up and flattened it by placing a piece of glass over it. The result was 'ripple'. My friend Skip, (Robert Palmer,) came in at this point and together we took photos of it, which he then transferred onto the computer where, side by side, we gradually pieced together my ideas for the cover.

Then I made images of my two main characters, the boy and the girl. All good stories have a boy and a girl. But in this case at least, Finn, the young male character, was a boy with a difference. For one thing he arrives on the scene after having spent a few hundred years surfing the Multiverse. He has been summonsed by Gaia, Mother Earth, just as Humanity is on the verge of a major transition, a crisis point in World history, and plummets down through the stratosphere just as Annya, our main female character is floundering in the sea, close to drowning.

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The fabric I used for a background has just the right touch of ambiguity. It suggests the sea, while at the same time it is a metaphor for 'the veil' which certain esoteric writers speak of as that which separates us, the living, flesh and blood humans, from those they speak of as being 'on the other side.' These are not terms I feel comfortable about using myself, and I didn't consciously choose a piece of silk with that term in mind. But once in place it felt right, and almost as if someone other than myself had had a hand in its choosing.

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And this is something else which deserves a mention: there was, on many an occasion during the writing of the book, a sense that 'my uptheres' as I call them, were constantly dropping in from time to time, not only with encouragement, but with vital pieces of information at the very moment when I was floundering myself, or felt as if I had come to the very edge of a precipice and didn't have the slightest clue what I was going to say next. I have acknowledged this at the front of the book, crediting figures such as Adamus Saint Germain, Tobias, and the voice of The Reconnections, via Daniel Jacob.