Outraged by the day-to-day fears endured by more than half of his fellow humans

I just came across this description of a male telepath who discovers sexual harassment. Yes, he is a fiction, but he has something worthwhile to say.

Olumiji had spent his adult life carefully cultivating his outer calm. Thanks to receptive abilities that he had struggled with since adolescence, his days were often spent filtering out the wild, uncontrolled emotions of those around him…

His … specialty involved search and rescue. Telepathy was more of an ability to sense emotions than it was a skill at reading minds, and as such, it was a fairly poor tool for locating confused and distracted humans at a distance. However, those trapped by natural disasters tended to be close at hand and to broadcast mental pleas for help quite forcefully. This made them relatively easy for a good telepath to find.

Rescue workers the world over had come to know Olumiji as the tall, thin Nigerian man who showed up after earthquakes, mudslides and tsunamis to offer assistance, and who had an uncanny ability to find barely alive souls in the wreckage. He stayed out of their way and asked for nothing in return, so most wrote him off as a harmless oddball. Some speculated that he may have lost a loved one himself long ago in a natural disaster. In a way they were right. Olumiji had never lost anyone, thankfully, but he heard the cries of the desperate so often and so well in his own head that deep in his heart he felt connected to every human who had ever died yearning to be found.

He had one chink in his armor of outer calm, and he knew that it was born of guilt. As a male in his home country, he had grown up accepting the many casual ways that young women were forced to have sex. From arranged marriages to gang rapes, from bizarre bridal customs to forced prostitution, the horror of lacking ownership of one’s own body escaped him completely—until his own budding empathy let him discover it, and then left him outraged by the day-to-day fears endured by more than half of his fellow humans.

Don’t dress that way. Don’t go out at night. Don’t talk to him. Don’t meet his eyes. Any of it can earn you pain and humiliation and even more fear, and everyone will tell you it was your own fault. Olumiji had been simply astounded.

And for all the people he had calmly rescued and helped since, every time a case came his way where a young woman was put at greater risk, merely because she possessed a vagina, or worse yet, a hymen, he felt a deep burning anger at a world that treated such as “unavoidable.”

“No,” he wanted to scream. “This is not unavoidable. We are better than that. We have to be.”

 

Antidote to current events: Truckers Against Trafficking

Who couldn’t use a story to balance out the anger and violence that has filled so much of the news lately? I’m normally a news junkie and for the past week even I can’t get myself to turn the channel to a news station.

Enter this blurb about Kevin Kimmel, a father, grandfather, and truck driver who saw a gaunt young woman being jerked away from the window of a recreational vehicle parked at truck stop, and made a phone call that resulted in the rescue of a twenty-year-old who was being tortured into having sex with strangers.

heroesEven more impressive is that Mr. Kimmel is associated with a group called TAT (Truckers Against Trafficking) that is working to educate those affiliated with the trucking industry to notice and report signs of sex slavery. Using the slogan “Everyday heroes needed” this group is fighting domestic human trafficking and so far has identified 425 likely trafficking cases involving 744 victims and 249 minors.

This tears at my heartstrings in a particularly strong way. My research for c3, a science fiction book about sex trafficking, sent me researching dark corners of the internet into which I would never have ventured otherwise. I was appalled, and I would described myself as someone who does not shock easily.

We still have a long way to go. According to the Daily Kos, there are an estimated 1.5 million victims of human trafficking in North America, and here on our continent it is a $150 billion dollar industry. As TED talk speaker Tony Talbott said while speaking on the subject “It’s all about the money. Human trafficking is insanely profitable. If you really think about it; You can sell a kilo of heroin once; You can sell a 13-year-old girl 20 times a night, 365 days a year.”

Watch his amazing TED talk, and join me in cheering for the Kevin Kimmel’s of the world.

 

 

handling the difficult delicately

Think Real 2c3 is a book about an important topic  It describes a typical sixteen year old American girl who is confronted by the sale of girls and women when she studies abroad for a semester in India. To all appearances, Teddie and her friends are helpless. They have no way to aid each other, much less any resources with which to stop the larger horrors that they see.

I had a few unusual challenges in writing this book. The first was the age of my main characters and the difficult subject matter. I intended this story to be aimed at adult fantasy lovers of all ages. I didn’t want to gloss over truths, and yet I wanted this book to be appropriate for those as young as sixteen. As a result, the book contains oblique references to sex, both consenting and not, but no direct descriptions. I’ve cleaned up the language from my previous books, although I have included an occasional crude word to convey a sense of reality. Others helped me work this problem to the point where I would be okay with my own sixteen year old daughter reading this book.

The subject matter presented another challenge. Stories need bad guys, but this stuff can get really ugly quickly. I had to be careful not to make this tale so distressing that those of any age would not want to keep reading it. It was important to interject a little humor and some good times and hope early on, both for the girls in direct danger and for Teddie as she begins to discover her powers to help them.

One of my favorite parts of this novel is not in the story at all. It is a mere two sentences in the front matter where I explain the title.

“This book is not just about sex crimes. It is also about the people who find ways to light a solitary candle in the darkness, and it is about how the resulting light they produce makes its way outward in every direction.”

I ended up with a story about how even the most vulnerable can be courageous and can hold the power to cause great change. I’m very proud of my theme and of the way it is handled. This is a book born of love.

 

 

c3 is published!

Dalai 5This is the fourth time I’ve done it, and each time has been more fun than the last. Something about hitting that button to put your heart, soul and creative effort out where the world can see it  is more exciting than I ever would have expected.

C3 is my longest novel so far, and it was the most difficult to write. Some of the plot concerns the sex industry, and human trafficking. I learned more than I wanted to know about those topics while researching this book, but the seriousness of my subject matter seemed to warrant my going the extra mile to get my facts right. Other parts of the story, like climbing the world’s highest peaks, have always fascinated me. As to all the tidbits about animal sex in the book — what can I say?  It was kind of fun to research.

Now I start the necessary but far less fun task of marketing the book. It’s not my strength, but I believe in this story so firmly that I will do it anyway. Thanks to the Dalai Lama’s FB page for reminding me that there is magic and power in each new beginning.