I started writing Shards Of Divinities in 2006. This was after almost a decade of wanting to write this book. Initially, I envisioned writing a nonfiction book that examines the deepest questions about the nature of Reality and offers a fresh new perspective to these questions. By 2002 I knew I would write a novel. But it would be a novel with a unique format. The novel would "know" that it is a novel. It would tell the story of how it is being written. It would be a self- aware novel. If consciousness is self-awareness then the novel would be conscious!
The novel I envisioned writing would ask and offer thought-provoking answers to the deepest questions that have perplexed and enticed humanity for thousands of years:
- What is Reality?
- What is consciousness?
- Why does the universe exist?
- Is there a God?
- Will the animosity between science and religion ever be resolved?
During the years leading up to when I first started writing my novel, I came to the conclusion that the answers to the questions I posed above would usher in an age of enlightenment like humanity has never yet experienced. I didn't conclude this only intellectually, I also felt it in a place deep within me that transcends my ego. I called this age of enlightenment The Third Age (for reasons explained in my novel).
In the Spring of 2006, I typed the first sentence of my novel. And once I typed it I never changed it. Writing a novel requires multiple drafts and iterations. You gradually refine your story, your grammar, and the ideas you breathe into your creation. But That first sentence... I never changed.
"Ever since I was a child I always felt like a citizen of a different realm."
That first sentence is the foundational notion of my novel, and I interpret this notion from different perspectives throughout the novel.
Over the next ten years, I wrote on and off. Some years I wrote nothing. During other years I would take months-long breaks from my work as a software developer and I would write full time. During those months of furious writing, most days I wrote at most a page. But on some days I could not find inspiration, and I stared with futility at the computer keyboard, and all I could see was its monolithic lifelessness and inertness. On other rare days, I became a geyser erupting with inspiration, and I could no longer see an inert keyboard in front of me, but instead I could only see it as infinite forms superimposed one on the other and forming its body. And then I played it as a masterful musician plays his instrument.
In the Spring of 2016 I completed my novel.
Shards Of divinities is a work of many flavors. It is a philosophical work. It is a work of poetic prose. It is a work that seriously examines and parses the deepest concepts in modern physics and logic. It is a sprawling saga that explores family dynamics and tensions. But above all, it is a tale of humanity's longing to commune win the Source of Creation.