Engaging, funny, poignant, thoughtful, and by turns mystical and down-to-earth, this story starts out reading like fan-fiction written by a Carlos Castaneda devotee. But it soon takes a sharp right turn into something far more interesting. Painted in broad, vivid strokes with a Southwestern palette, the story follows the author on a strange Quest. At every turn, he is brought up short by his own human nature, and here unfolds the piece's core wisdom and compassion. The plot often looks like classic action-adventure, but as soon as the reader is lulled into a false sense of bored security, the focus turns inward, and the drama derives from that most mysterious and frightening of puzzles: the author's confrontations with himself. This is the story's greatest strength.

Hauntingly, I find imagest from the story coming to mind at odd times, like when I'm waking up in the morning, or walking home from work. The central romance has the appeal of any glandularly-driven story, but to my taste serves best as a setting for the real-life anecdotes: the transcendent experience seeing Jimmy Hendrix live in concert, or the little bits of musical minutia, such as the concept of "flam" (where the members of a band don't quite manage to hit a beat all together).

I have three complaints: first, this thing cries out for a copy editor. I haven't noticed many typoes, but there are a lot of syntactical tangles and a few abandoned revisions that distract painfully from the otherwise enrapturing story. Second, some sort of clever formatting was attempted between paragraphs. Fortunately, my version of Netscape simply ignores the special characters, but the gaping white-space which results is additionally irritating. The prose is strong enough to stand on its own; don't gild the lily, for heaven's sake!

The third is actually a back-handed compliment: this is a work in progress, This is both the virtue and the curse of the Web, where one can watch a work unfold as it is being created, but one has to bloody wait for the next chapter to be finished. (Ah hates serials...) I'm starting to get edgy because I'm fast reaching the end of the 7 completed chapters, out of the 13 planned. The good news is that the chapters are fat and rich (rare, on the Web) and sufficiently compelling that each one is a good solid lunch-hour's worth of reading. But I can tell already that the wait for the next one is going to be excruciating.

Late flash: just finished chapter seven. Innevitably, this turns out to be a plug for a hardcopy book due out, apparently, around the holidays. (Which argues that what's on the web site is a draft, so I suppose I can forgive the shakey copy editing.) But for once I don't mind the capitalist ploy. The story as presented actually reaches a satisfactory conclusion. This is web publishing at its best: a hearty sample that serves as a rich, full meal in and of itself, but leaves the diner hungry for more. This is what I call good-faith advertizing: make your sales based on demonstrated quality and value delivered. I fully intend to buy the book when it comes out. Oh, the name of the author? Go read it and see. He eventually identifies himself explicitly in the story, but it's fun trying to figure it out. If you're just too curious, go up-directory and look. (I deliberately set the link to a sub-directory that doesn't say.) I think you'll be surprised. Or if you really can't stand it, email me. (You'll have to go back to the bottom of my home page and unpack the Spammex at the bottom. Sorry about the hassle, but junk mail really annoys me.)

--26 August 1997