Fiction. Paperback, 235 pages, apx 56,000 words, $17.95 via Barnes and Noble, and Bookshop.org. $20 for personalized Author Signed Copy via ND Media Bookstore.
NEW E-book edition now available, $2.99 via Bookshop.org
Deluxe DIY Edition E-book, 232 pages, includes the full novel plus 30+ pages of the true story behind the fiction that is unavailable elsewhere, $5.00 via ND Media Bookstore
E-book release date: June 9, 2024 — Paperback: October 10, 2024
Eighteen-year-old Estelle Perdue has driven herself over the edge. Racing against the limits of insomnia and an unforgiving time clock, she succumbs to sleep while driving home from a music festival. She is saved from the ditch by the most fortunate circumstances — or is she? Unable to tell where one dream world ends and another begins, Estelle’s dark night culminates as an unlikely band of fellow travelers she had met on the road collaborate with her lifelong antagonist and guide her to an ultimate catharsis.
Set in the alt-rock heyday of the early 1990s, UNLESS is a coming-of-age drama with a distinct Gen-X flavor, a cynical front against a soundtrack of hope. It is a love letter to the twin powers of music and writing, and an homage to their ability to lift us above our assigned narratives into the space where we become the storytellers of our lives, not just the main characters.
The Deluxe DIY Edition, in e-book only, includes a supplemental section of “behind the scenes” bonus material called “The Untold Story of ‘Angry Youth: the Untold Story’ (and how it helps reveal the many narrative layers of UNLESS).” You can learn more about the fascinating true story behind the adventures of Estelle! This edition is exclusive to the ND Media Bookstore.
Signup for the ND Media mailing list for updates on the publication process for UNLESS
RELATED ARTICLES AND LINKS
The Strange Blessing of Maladaptive Traits — 6.18.24
But what if all of these behaviors, including and maybe especially the uncomfortable ones, are an essential part of self-actualization, spiritually or otherwise?
Against All Authority, Especially My Own — 6.18.24
The asymmetrical war [within each individual] is the cause of Estelle’s dissociative symptoms. The “tiny but loud autocrat,” one should quickly surmise, is her ego, which is not the bastion of individuality we assume it to be. This assumption, we learn, is a deliberate Orwellian twist that perpetuates social control over the individual by placing an authoritarian voice of its own creation at the helm of the natural person seeking liberation. The duplicity of the egoic turncoat — acting at times like the liberator but only further ensnaring the self in its grasp — fuels the distrust that keeps them at odds, preventing the one thing that can actually lead to a liberated individual: the rejection of all authority, including one’s own.
The Cantankerous Inward Anarchism of Sludge O’Toole — 6.29.24
Though the character is no match for Hennecy’s real-life activist credentials and socialist bonafides…the heart that drives them and the philosophy that guides them are the same. I can speak with confidence on the matter because Sludge is, more or less, me — that is, he, shortcomings and all, represents my present-day influence on my own book about events from the long-ago past. He is the mentor that I’ve had to be for myself while my wordsmith nature daydreams the story into existence. He is the secular patron saint of every independent author who has been compelled to write while working, in the world but not quite of it, to support a family and promote their own work as a one-person DIY writer-publisher in late stage capitalist America.
Zeke: the Silent Voice of Angry Youth — 7.14.24
It was the Travelers’ appearance in the lineup of the Hullabaloo Festival in the summer of 1992 that created the intersection of their story with the travels of young aspiring writer Estelle Perdue and dovetailed into the narrative about the events of UNLESS. But the untold backstory of Angry Youth, the ultrasecretive band that almost made it big, is where the true connection between them is illustrated, and there is no part of that tale more mysterious than the mononym bassist with an unknown past.
When I Woke Up: Excerpts From the Notes of Estelle Perdue After the Vince Lombardi Service Area
This will be an ongoing series of blog posts from Noesta Aqui written in the voice of Estelle, and focusing on the ideas explored in UNLESS as she would have developed them after the final scene. At this point, there are no plans to order them or compile them into a new volume, just some further reading if the main themes of the book interest you.
The Maculate Gems of Indra’s Net — 7.4.24
We are not mere passive apertures by which an active universe perceives itself — we are fractals of that prime activity, by which the universe stages dramas that are woven seamlessly into the fabric of the Great Story we call reality. To miss or disavow these subjective aspects of the Story is to admire a forest while giving no thought to root structure or photosynthesis, and to abdicate our co-creatorship only assures that our contribution will be dull and derivative.
Then There Is — 7.28.24
Pantheism says nothing is God in isolation, to the exclusion of non-God. Everything is a timeless unity as God is said to be a timeless unity, and that’s a very different assertion than “nothing is a timeless unity/God.”
Just Call Me Lunch Lady — 7.28.24
I think most of us who aren’t rabid fundamentalists are small-c cafeteria “catholics” in the original sense of the word –”universal”– and I mean that in a very good way. We are all pursuing the same Truth, diffused through our diverse human cultures in a wide variety of ways, and we sample from the whole selection available to us and choose what resonates the most.
Killing Spinoza / Part One: Why I Disavow Pantheism™️ / Part Two: and Am No Less Pantheist For It — 8.3.24
There are two main reasons that I, an avowed pantheist according to Alasdair MacIntyre, have come to disavow Pantheism™️ as it is commonly misunderstood today: 1) the feeble manner in which it tries to deal with universal Mind, 2) its severe allergy to teleology, and concurrently, a lack of intellectual footing to consider divine will or any of its temporal manifestations
Turn and Become Like Little Children — 1.29.25
You can be confident that the “I” who thinks your thoughts and looks through your eyes and feels the world as the delicate nexus of your nervous system right now — that “I” will be like a little child again, scrubbed of all cognitive notion of being “you,” but with an intuition that will be giving you hints along the way.
WHERE TO PURCHASE (other than Amazon!)
Barnes and Noble (paperback or Nook)
Book Locker (paperback or PDF e-book)
Bookshop.org (paperback)
Kobo (e-book)
ND Media Bookstore (Deluxe DIY edition e-book or paperback — buy direct from the publisher to support independent media!)
Not One, Not Two 