Welcome to all my new followers. This is the first blog about how I dreamed a book, which will be published in May. And yes it is politically relevant.

This Word Press blog is called 115 Journals. In fact, there are 149. The series of hardcover sketch books covered in black ink musings ends abruptly in the middle of February 2021. I had spent the previous shut-in year reading books about the climate change and its threat to civilization, books like Roy Stanton’s Learning to Die in the Anthropocene and The Ministry of the Future by KIm Stanley Robertson.

The morning the journal ended, I had had a late dream. In the next entry, I began to record that dream as if it were the beginning of a novel. A few pages further on, I find that I also recorded the end of the book, although I’m sure I didn’t dream the whole story, which has tuned out to be 153,439 words long.

“It’s a beast,” cried my previous cover artist, S. “I worked on a cover like that once. It was a nightmare. The writer kept coming back with changes and edits after the book was formatted, which added all kinds of fees. I charged $1,000 because books like that are beasts.” “Oh, the myth of the 200-page novel,” commented another. She had the curious idea that a book should be as long as it wanted to be. And she would do the cover.

Then there was the title, I Trust You to Kill Me. No, it’s not a sado/masochistic book. This is what Al-Hallaj, a Sufi Master, found guilty of heresy, said to his executioner on the banks of the Tigris in 922. You may have come across it, reading the poems of Rumi, which have become popular in their translations by Coleman Barks.

It is the precept that the protagonist, Alena Rivera, an intelligence agent in the year 2119 has lived by in the event she’s seriously wounded while on a mission. Dying might be necessary to save the other agents and the mission.

It was also a useful motto for the ordinary citizen caught up in unbearable famine, flood, drought, violent raids, continual epidemics or threat of torture.

The subtitle of this first book is ‘Salvador’, the second book ‘Lucas’ has reached 30,500 words, and the third book, ‘Beni’ keeps whispering, “Patagonia’ but is otherwise blank. The story is set mostly in Colombia 2019 to 2175.

How does one live when the Pacific has eaten its way up to the feet of the western range of the Andes, when Carthegena and New York City and Boston and Mumbai are isolated tiny islands, when Miami and most of Florida have vanished, much of London, when Los Angeles and the great ports and colonial capitals are gone? How does one live when children keep insisting on being born?When ‘thousand year storms are yearly occurrences? When temperatures are above what flesh and blood can stand? What consolation or hope can one fall back on?