first sequel

Rewriting the first draft of Saardu would have to wait. Patty had somehow persuaded Carma to make it a trilogy. The second manuscript was titled The Motherlands Journey. The absence of an apostrophe was intentional and grammatically correct. It was about four ships dubbed Motherland 1, 2, 3 and 4, and it was about the journey from our solar system to a higher place of being. It could be called a high road. 

The four ships were gifts from Zenyans who came to rescue the last remnants of humans on Earth and scattered across the solar system. They would depart in four different directions, fulfilling Zenyan tasks for a thousand years, gathering intel on the 4D universe, and then they would make a new home at Zenya. The highest dimension was originally spelled Zenia. She would later change it to Zenya, as a tribute to Kenya and to remind readers that we are one human family born of Africa. 

She would write "at" Zenya rather than "on" to signify that Zenya is a place of being rather than a surface upon which our physical bodies are held by gravity. Patty loved the way Carma's mind worked. How did she have such thoughts? 

Carma would credit many influences, however, it was mostly innate. It was the way she was wired. From her earliest recollections, her mind was noticeably different. Her family would call her the smart one. She spoke earlier than her siblings. At the age of two, her mother told her, she knew the names of all the crayons in her 64 Crayola box. Magenta was her favorite shade of red. Magenta as a crayon was more of a ruby red, barely on the purple spectrum, unlike the magenta ink and digital color. Sea foam green was Carma's favorite shade of green. It was gentle and reminded her of the ocean. Her mother Ruth loved a day at the beach more than anything. Carma has a strong visual memory of the roller coaster at Long Beach. They lived in Huntington Park for her first five years. 

She also loved forest green, especially the color of a blue spruce tree. She would grow to love being in the forest more than anything. For Carma, the whole point of writing science fiction was to ask a rhetorical question: Why do we dream of what's out there when we do not experience all the wonders of this most beautiful planet? 

It is no coincidence that Saardu is half desert and half forest. Carma grew up in the mountainous region of northern Utah and the desert region of southern Utah. The Uintah mountain range is covered with pine trees and aspen groves, among other flora. The southern part of the state is renowned for its colorful sandstone cliffs. Zion and Bryce Canyon are favorites of international travelers. Carma also lived for three happy years in St. George, Utah, only an hour drive to Zion Canyon, a national park, and visited both canyons many times. 

The Motherland II ship would never go near Saardu. Someday, she will dust off the original 231-page manuscript, scan it with an OCR app, clean up the text and publish it...one of many goals for retirement, when she no longer spends 40+ hours every week earning as much income as she can while she is able, so that she and her children will always have a roof over their heads. Her main goal for retirement is to have uninterrupted hours to write a new novel, and she has had the idea for it in mind for many years. Only her husband knows her secret. She will only reveal for now that it is romantic historical fiction that she has begun researching. 

The Motherlands Journey was registered by the U.S. Copyright Office on September 23, 1985, number TXu000216348. It was described as the sequel to The Ills of Saardu, and volume two of The Oll Trilogy. Today, Carma has no recollection of how or why the name "Oll" was chosen or what that signified at the time. Obviously, a lot changed between 1985 and 2009, when the first Saardu novel made its public debut. 

Writing novels while working full-time as a secretary was very frustrating. She mailed query letters to hundreds of publishers and literary agents over the years. She hired a professional writing coach in 1986 to help her rewrite the first novel. Eventually, Carma and a new friend envisioned starting a publishing company that they would name Universal Concepts, UC. You see. An artist friend developed some logo ideas in 1988. 

The new friend was Tim Flannery. They met in 1987 when Carma sought to take the est training for a second time (the first was in Boston, 1980). She discovered it had changed and was renamed The Forum. She enrolled in it and was amused by how diluted it was compared to est, which was one of the most transformative encounters in her journey. More about that later. 

Like Patty, Tim fell in love with the way Carma's mind worked. He was the second person to read Saardu and fall in love with it and the writer. He would not let her doubt her greatness. From 1987 to the present day, Tim is a great friend and encourages Carma to keep being her word. They completed a six-day graduate course together in 1988 (photo below). 

Two diversions would lengthen the inventor's journey: a hunger to be a mommy again, and a lack of faith in herself as a writer. 



tim and carma at the six-day course


outline of the motherland journeys



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