It is difficult to know where to begin, mostly because it hasn’t finished yet.
I am probably in Grade 12 or 13, in Toronto over forty years ago, involved in the school literary magazine, full of potential and serious intent, unable to get the words out fast enough, and trying to exist in the social emotional vortex that is high school.
I am writing like a madman, writing short stories furiously, experimenting with form, playing with ideas.
One of my pieces, a one-page tale called Snowflakes, begins with a child:
“Djika danced...”
Don’t remember the rest of it. Dancing, a storm coming, coming out after to see the devastation, changing. The idea was, if I recall, to try to present a metaphor for growing up—maturing—without all that usual sex and violence nonsense. Djika matures from an innocent child dancing in a forest to someone aware of the destruction around them after the storm. A lot for a single page story, sure, but I don’t have time to worry about the details, I am too busy having fun writing out all the ideas in my head.
Snowflakes wins 2nd or 3rd place in some contest, and I think I win $50 for it, something like that. Maybe get a dinner out of it? This is, remember, over forty years ago.
Anyway, life happens.
Work and marriage, and a son: By this point, mid-20’s, writing is something I do when I have time and I don’t have time, too much work, too much life, but even so:
My son’s middle name is Djika.
I haven’t even started writing yet, and I know this is coming.
And work, not sure if you younger folks know this, is a capitalist horror show of wage slavery and wasting time on boss problems. One does their best, but one’s best alone is rarely enough. It helps to have connections, to be lucky, to fit in. At least, I assume so.
Time passes, and sometimes we don’t even know the potential inside is fading, and sometimes we know, and don’t stop thinking about it, because we see the loss, we see it, and are desperately trying to fix it so that we don’t grieve.
So the idea morphs and evolves, and Djika becomes that potential, the good future I desperately want to see happen, because the world is going to hell and I can’t stop it. I can’t stop undead greed monsters taking and destroying anything good: the only options seem to be to fit into a predator system to thrive, or give in to the predator system and escape to a better place culturally.
But, see, I don’t want to escape. I live here, and people I love live here. And the world isn’t the problem, the predatory system is the problem. If the only way I can thrive is by making up a false morality and calling predatory good, I’m not going to thrive because lying to support a lie does not make ungood into good. And cultural escape is, our predatory system claims, a subset of the system: so you get Fight to Protect the Status Quo and Back to Work Citizen stories, and the real world isn’t getting any better by culturally fitting in. So I don’t want to escape, and can’t even if I wanted to.
Djika isn’t about learning how to fit into the world, and Djika isn’t about running from the problem.
Djika is about creating your own reality.
Djika is potential, which puts her in the future, trying to come to terms with our present, trying to morally stand on a very shaky past.
And all those jobs I take to survive are not interested in Djika. They all have their own obsessions. They have nothing to do with the maturity of the human race and our collective potential and whatnot--it’s all about them, see, and all this time later, after all that crap pay and all the layoffs and all the lies told to me by Powers That Be, all the way along this sweet little voice, so quiet and gentle, still keeps whispering in my ear: Where’s my story?
And the question becomes an answer and forty plus years later is still pulling me along.
I finish the first draft of The Djika Equation about ten years ago, and it has taken this long to get it out into the cultureverse, and that by itself feels like an achievement worth celebrating. But ten years is a long time, a decade in some circles, and that sweet little voice that has been my imaginary companion all these years, has in fact come closer and sounds louder.
What happens next? she asks.
The first draft of The Djika Connection, Book 2 in what is now a series, is currently in Eukalypto’s hands, waiting to be read.
Book 3 is emerging, even as we speak.
In fact, it is time for me to get back to work.
I must answer.
She is still calling.
Like any other reader, I started “The Djika Equation” with the impression that it was a Sci-Fi novel. A few pages later, I realized it was indeed an extremely original and well-thought one. And a few more pages later, that it was much more than that. That it was also, on a certain level, a wise and philosophical description of our modern world and life, disguised as a Sci-Fi novel where genres alternate, smoothly and naturally. Yet sometimes with the violence of a wake-up call.
The author initially labelled his book “An Anarchist Fairy Tale”. That spontaneous label structure already fitted the Eukalypto spirit. And the label itself, as I discovered throughout the pages, is utterly accurate: The socio-political message could even be an anarchist manifesto, while the global architecture of the book reminds one of a fairy tale’s, yet amongst the darkest ones.
Indeed, “The Djika Equation” get darker and darker as the chapters unveil. But every time I wondered if that wasn’t too dark to be shared with a wide audience, another element would remind me that our world is, actually, dark. And that the reality portrayed is one of the most accurate I’ve ever come cross.
Still, despite its intrinsic darkness, “The Djika Equation” ends, after several astonishing plot twists, on a rather positive note. Opening a door to the second volume of the trilogy–that will also be published by Eukalypto. And keeping a light of hope at the end of a tunnel we are all stuck in.
ABOUT THE COVER:
The Djika Equation’s cover is the first of our covers to have been totally created from A to Z by the author themself.
When we asked him what he would like to say about that cover, this is what he replied:
My original idea for the cover was more like this:
The emphasis was on the garden, the bubble, gates, different perspectives of the same plant. I liked the idea of seeing Djika, but was not confident enough in my artistic abilities to create an image of Djika without words.
In books, I figured, you don't necessarily need a photographic image of your characters; I know these days, we all love the photographic image, we love the hype surrounding the picture, we love framing the picture -- but books have always been able to take a minimalist approach to story covers, and that is the route I chose to go, mostly because I'm more of a words than a picture guy, and ultimately it's all about the symbolism anyway. Isn't it?
Cover, Take 2:
Lot of words. Too many words. Could work better as a poster, maybe.
And then -- still unsatisfied with it, still playing, I broke it down into theoretically easier to swallow bits:
And finally:
And here we are, abstract minimalism all around, wot. You've got your black space, your strips of purple, your moon. Or is it a bubble? We don't know. Might have to find out.
Why purple?
Sax and violets, that's why.
All the way down.