Stay Up All Night: A Preview
11/1/2024
by Noel Joshua Hadley
HAS it really been two months since my last Article Update? I checked. My last article update was for The Hidden Wilderness and the Moon Map, which landed on 8/26/24. And then, have you seen today’s date? Oops. The most recent NEW paper that I turned in for your consideration was The Lady and the Unicorn on 8/19/24. I loved that one, by the way. Usually, I’m knocking papers out of the park left and right, researching and writing, updating, and presenting, what happened? Will it please you to note that typewriter ink flows through my blood and the clap, clap, clap of the sentences haven’t ceased, even if I haven’t gotten around to publishing anything?
Just recently, I launched Shelves of Shalom Publishing in partnership with Jennifer Hartz. It’s an imprint and the fictional wing of TUC Publishing. We are seeking out writers of fiction who share in SOS’s vision, which you can read about at the Submissions page. Getting that project off the ground inspired me to take up the pad and pen and try my hand at writing my own novel. But then, there is something else that you should know. This isn’t simply a novel. It’s my life’s work.
The book that has been materializing over the last two months was first started in November of 2000. That’s not a misprint. I make those from time to time, but this is not one of them. Twenty-zero-zero. It was one year before 9/11. I had just returned from working a chicken farm in Beit Jala, Israel, and was living in Yosemite National Park, working as a cabin cleaner at the Ahwahnee Hotel. My reason for going there was to be a writer and to live in solitude, which is why I spent nearly every evening plotting out a story with the working title, ‘Thomas Miller’s Wife.’
The story has gone through several massive revisions over the last quarter century, but here is the gist of it. Thomas Miller is a struggling writer living in the redwoods just north of San Francisco during the summer of love, 1967. After his wife is killed in a tragic accident with the man that she was having an affair with, Thomas sets out to discover the seedy world that she was secretly inhabiting. Repulsed at what he discovers, Thomas is quickly swept up in the counterculture revolution, surrounded by mysterious events and Controllers, the catch being that his wife never existed. The hidden life was his own. In killing off his wife’s character, the writer was attempting to recoil from his own subconscious and seek penitence. The irony is that he dies in a car accident, just as his wife had, and on the same stretch of road. The End.
It was while fleshing out the details of that book in Yosemite that I made regular day trips to San Francisco for research purposes, targeting Haight-Ashbury and the panhandle in particular. This was back in the wild west years of the Internet, and already, thirty years had been removed. The district had changed into an upscale neighborhood though the residue remained. Finding information on where Janis Joplin or the Grateful Dead or even Jim Jones lived (Charlie Manson was there too), or where Jefferson Airplane played, or where the Medical Free Clinic stood and the Human Be-In went down, not forgetting where Patty Hearst was held captive, wasn’t always easy but the quest of discovery became so much more invigorating as a result of my determination.
The book of course never got published. It wasn’t even written for that matter. It was simply researched and envisioned, and decades later, during my quest for Truth, blossomed into The Hidden Hand of Camelot and it’s follow-up, It’s Only Murder If They’re Dead. In short, the 1960’s was an Intel PSYOP. The murder of Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family was a hoax. Haight-Ashbury and the Medical Free Clinic was a CIA side-project. Many of the movers and shakers of that decade were spooks. And stunningly, the Thomas Miller character I was attempting to describe was MK-Ultra.
Nearly a decade later, in 2008 specifically, I began developing the novel again, and the character, this time under a new name, Joshua Chamberlain. He wasn’t a writer, and he wasn’t MK-Ultra, though his wife still left him for another. It was also developed as an ambitious series of poems on par with Beowulf or Dante. But then in 2012, after amassing a thousand poetic narratives intended to be patched together into a single song cycle, I made the decision to revert back to prose. The theme remained the same. Seeking spiritual Truth among the hidden world of moral depravity. And so, I began writing. Writing and writing. Hundreds, thousands of pages. The project grew into a several part series, all of which was scripted out, only to be abandoned in 2014 with the birth of my twin sons. It was picked up again in 2016, abandoned briefly, and then lifted again while living in France in 2019. Those never came to fruition.
A quarter of a century later and I am older, far more knowledgeable, and dare I say, wiser. I am taking everything that I have learned in my pursuit of Truth and stockpiling it into every line. This isn’t simply the story of spiritual Truth in the face of moral depravity, nor is MK-Ultra the big reveal. Those are a given. It is the story of preexistence and Soul Flames, of doppelgangers and duality. Of multiple dimensions, predestination, Mandela Effect tampering and time travel. It involves pop culture, spooks and Media hoaxes, as well as the Manson family, but also the reality of spiritual agents, both righteous and evil, pressing their fingerprints into the Newspaper print from behind the scenes. The Divine will be found here, including the feminine Divine, as well as the Marriage of Spirit vs that of fornication, which I have spoken on as of late. And lastly, the entire narrative is modeled upon the Creation week.
YAH willing, it will be done. This is where I find myself today. Pouring through old notes. Comparing ignorance with what I’ve learned, and what I got right from the beginning. Reworking old concepts. Picking up my life’s work. Massaging. Molding. Writing. Re-writing and then again re-writing.
It will be the first of a series, and I call it, ‘Stay Up All Night.’
Stay tuned.