ETERNITY was the strangest story I ever wrote. Actually, I didn't write it. I think it wrote itself. I was just the channel. The idea came to me fully formed. I didn't plot or outline. I didn't think about it. I just sat down and began. The words flowed through me, searing me on the way. It was like channeling wildfire.
As the opening scenes unfolded, something happened to me. I felt a rush in my chest, and suddenly my heart was racing. Not like, boy-am-I- excited type racing. This was more like, Oh-shit-I- think-I'm-going-to-die type racing. I had to go to the ER. My heartrate was over 220 beats per minute. We tried some things in the ER. Ice packs on my face and neck. Bearing down. Carotid massage. And my heart slowed down to normal again within a few minutes of my arrival. The entire episode was probably an hour in duration.
But it came back. It came back for the next month or so, and it only happened when I was working on this particular story.
Later, the heart thing was diagnosed as an electrical issue, primary supra-ventricular tachycardia. The nerve endings in my heart would sometimes misfire for no apparent reason, triggering the racing heart result. Over the coming years it would return at random. I've been flat-lined 5 times in order to get my heart rate out of this state of tachycardia. And I later found several things that could trigger it. Too little water, alcohol, even in small amounts, happy excitement, stretching in a certain way, sleeping on my left side, driving when traffic is slow and I'm late. One time it happened when I saw news coverage of a hurricane battering North Carolina while my firstborn was living there, and it hit me so hard and fast I was sure it was an actual heart attack. Sometimes there's no apparent reason at all.
It hardly ever happens anymore. I've applied Law of Attraction to eliminate the problem from my life almost entirely, and I have a little pill I can take if it manages to slip through again.
However, none of that explains the onset. The way it came to me for the first time during the creation of this book, when creative fire was rushing through me in a way it had never done before or since. This book is the only book that ever triggered such a reaction.
ETERNITY was not made up. It was channeled. There's something real, some collective consciousness memory that it stirs, and not just in me, but in its readers. Many readers told me they had to skip those opening few scenes, because they were too real.
I'm going to blog more about the mysterious happenings associated with this book. There are several other inexplicable events related to the story. But for now, I'll leave you with this link where you can read an excerpt and download the entire book at Amazon. And just so you know, ETERNITY is free right now in all ebook formats in all countries. (You can find the links to Eternity for Nook, iBooks, and Kobo right below the excerpt link.)