Dark Places by Bloomsbury

Author:Bloomsbury
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2012-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Transcendence

A Note from C. J. Omololu

The seeds for Transcendence were planted during one of the most difficult funerals I’ve ever attended. A friend’s son had died suddenly, and seeing his classmates and his soccer team in their jerseys filing into the overcrowded church made me unbearably sad and overwhelmingly angry. How could this smart, handsome, kind, athletic, loving fourteen-year-old boy suddenly be gone? I had no answers, but started thinking about possibilities—what if this wasn’t the end? What if reincarnation were real?

I started outlining some ideas for a group of people who remembered all of their past lives, and began to wonder how that would affect the lives they were living right now. What would they do differently? Would they have any special skills? I read many thick books on reincarnation, including Donald E. Carr’s The Eternal Return and Edward Cayce’s The Story of Karma, as well as several articles on Buddhist and Hindu theory. As I came up with my own philosophies for the book, I pulled in the things that made sense to me and ignored the things that didn’t, finally settling on a unique take on the idea of reincarnation. While I was fiddling with the idea, I watched a show on a boy who could play the piano beautifully at the age of three, and out of nowhere came the thought that perhaps prodigies were really souls who had been reborn, but retained some of the memories of the skills they had in their past lives, and that’s when the book truly took off for me. Suddenly, it all made so much sense.

As I was drawn into the world of the Akhet (I found some perfect names for things in the books among the ancient Egyptian language—Akhet means “the place where the sun rises and sets”), I began to explore the meanings behind their existence. While being able to play the piano perfectly from birth is an amazing skill, there had to be more—and that sent me to the idea that Akhet come back again and again to use their knowledge and experiences to help the world and to undo the negative things they may have done in the past. But what if there was an Akhet who didn’t have good intentions? I decided that was also possible, and such a person could be very dangerous, especially if they felt my main character had wronged them in some way in a past life.

As I got to know the characters, I had a very clear vision of Cole as a cello prodigy and what she was like, although Griffon changed a bit over time, getting a little more serious and worldly as we went. While I was writing, I borrowed the name of my friend’s son as a placeholder, thinking I would change it later, but when I was about fifty pages into the first draft, I realized that I thought of him as Griffon and wasn’t sure I was going to be able to alter that.

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