Autumn Sage is here!
And by here, I mean: Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo | Google Play | Scribd
(Yep, it’s on Scribd, as is Summer Chaparral. If you’d like to try my books risk free, Scribd is a great way to do it.)
If you’ve read Summer Chaparral, you’re already familiar with Isabel, the heroine of this book. But you haven’t really met Sebastian yet. He is very much the wounded hero when the story begins, although he’s very good at hiding it. At hiding everything, really.
About a year and half ago, I wrote a blog post about Sebastian, which I think is still the best description of him I’ve ever written. (Besides, you know, the 500 page novel I wrote about him.) And here it is again:
Auto-Synapse, or Seeking a Heroine
The common conception of cells is that they are blebby sorts of things, amoeba-like, floating in a nutrient soup with everything they need to survive safely contained within their membrane. Maybe an illustration from a biology textbook is coming to mind even now.
Neurons aren’t like that at all. Yes, they have a round, blebby center, but shooting out from that center are long torturous processes—one direction to receive information (dendrites) and one to send out information (the axon). These processes can be as long as several feet—as long as the distance from the end of your big toe to the base of your spine.
A neuron’s sole reason for being is to receive information, integrate it, then pass it along. To do this, it must join with other neurons in a network. A lone neuron sends out those processes—searching, grasping fingers looking for a mate. Most of the time the neuron will only find rejection. You see, it cannot pair with just any other neuron. It must find the right one.
So those fingers continue on, listening for the call that says, “I’m here. I’m the one that was meant to listen to you.” And when a neuron hears the call of the one it was meant to hear, its dendrites clasp to the axon of the other, forming a joint we call a synapse. The two neurons send chemical messengers across the gap of that synapse, rather like lobbing notes to your crush across a crowded classroom.
(Pedantic scientific aside: Yes, synaptic transmission is much, much more complicated than that and the composition of synaptic scaffolding still holds unknowns, etc, etc. It’s still a nice metaphor.)
But what happens to a neuron in isolation?
Take a single neuron, newly born, and place it in a dish, covered with nutrient broth. All alone. What will it do?
A neuron that isn’t sending information, that isn’t communicating, dies. So what happens to our lone neuron in the dish?
It has no one to form a synapse with, no other neuron calling out across the distance “I’m here, I’m waiting.” This neuron sits in silence, sending its messages nowhere.
But a neuron has to fire, has to send those signals somewhere, to survive. So our lone neuron, without any other neuron to clasp at, forms a synapse with itself—an auto-synapse. (More commonly referred to as an autapse.)
Without anyone else to send its signals to, it turns in on itself. It has to, or it will die.
In Autumn Sage, the hero is terrified of his emotions. He thinks they are wrong, wrong, wrong, and shares them with no one. He wants to tear them out by the roots, to reduce his emotional life to a desert.
But you can’t extirpate an entire emotional life. You would die.
So he keeps them to himself, sending them to the deepest part of him, and convinces himself that they have disappeared. In sum, he is a neuron that has synapsed on itself, thinking that he is alone, stranded in emptiness.
But there is someone, waiting there to hear him. He’s not alone—she’s holding out her hand, saying “I’m here. I’m the one that was meant to listen to you.”
He only has to reach out and grasp it.
If you want to know more about Sebastian, you can find his full story in Autumn Sage: Amazon | iBooks | Nook | Kobo | Google Play | Scribd
I’ll also be posting more teasers here at the blog and on Facebook and Twitter. And on Tuesday, I’ll put up a list of all the Easter eggs I put in the book. See if you can find them all!