I've been working on a novel about special ops and the CIA. I had planned to apply for a job at the CIA and had trained independently. Some of the book is based on real events, but the story is fiction. It's a different kind of book, and the events that inspired the plot will become part of an alternate-reality game.
The novel is about a program for developing supersoldiers, part of which involves training spiritually as well as mentally and physically. There's a theory that states that the mind subconsciously blocks out and avoids memories that may be traumatizing. Training one's brain to handle different types of trauma, from the physical to facing your fears, can unblock memories that may be traumatizing as well as memories that may be preferentially avoided or given less attention in recall. This can lead to increased awareness and better recall and decision-making. The training is a modification of techniques commonly used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder.
The novel builds on this theory by hypothesizing that one may be able to use this principle to open oneself up to information from the spiritual world as well, increasing the probability of spiritual and paranormal phenomena. This can be achieved through meditation or dream interpretation. In the story, the information is suppressed as part of a plan to keep spiritual and political power within a certain group.
The alternate-reality component invites the reader to become fully immersed in the experience of the book by doing what no novel that I'd seen before had done: creating good luck.
For example, a common symbol, the number 1, signifies first place. As a lot of people use the same symbol over and over again, they "charge" or "bank" that object with more power, and the magic in the symbol grows stronger. This is regardless of whether the symbol had any magical significance to begin with. Other things can be used as symbols, such as people, ideas and events, and it can be done in a secular or spiritual context. I spent years banking magic in symbols that would benefit the reader, like the luck to physically give all that one can give and live to fight another day, created by passing a grueling physical endurance task that serves as the protagonist's boot camp final exam. The novel also teaches readers to create their own symbols and offers a reference map of interconnecting symbols that are more powerful when used together. The game plans to offer an intense first-person shooter where one plays a supersoldier subverting a conspiracy as well as a separate online gaming community and bank for the exchange and creation of magic.
It's my personal opinion that magic may or may not exist, but it's worth dedicating a reasonable time and effort to on the off-chance that it may be real. Because symbols become more powerful the closer they are to the object they represent, creating good luck for the reader meant acting out the events of the story in as real a way as possible. This meant doing a lot of survival training, meditating, facing my fears for hours at a time, and asking people if they were government agents (although I wondered if a secret agent would admit to it even if she were an agent), all the while coming across as imbalanced when people didn't know what I was doing.
At first I was extremely paranoid of telling people about the novel. Many of the ridiculous techniques used to train the soldiers in the novel could be used to train terrorists in a way that would be almost undetectable to someone who didn't know what to look for. I acted and trained independently, and anyone wanting to copy my method for personal reasons might unknowingly inspire terrorism simply by talking or reading about the novel in a public space. I was also afraid that I'd be misunderstood to the point of being put on a terrorist watchlist. I tried to research whether anything similar had been done before, but any relevant tips I found made me look bad out-of-context, especially since they were gathered in an obsessive writer-researcher kind of way, and I had already been warned that by buying a copy of Catcher in the Rye, I looked suspicious.
However, I've reflected on this, and I decided that I didn't want to suppress the information from anyone who might find it useful.
I'm sincerely sorry for the confusion and hurt I caused along the way. I understand if you once considered me your friend but no longer do. I hope that one day things may be different.
Thank you to everyone who supported me along the way even though they didn't understand. I'll always be grateful.
