I started out trying to put a spoken message together, trying to verbalize just what I believe. As I honed and refined my speech I began to realize it wasn't so much a message as a manifesto.

Well, hey, if the other side can have a manifesto, why shouldn't we? At least this one's better organized, the thoughts actually connect and they don't leave you high and dry somewhere.

I've arranged two separate formats, one for reading, one for printing. Feel free to print and distribute as many as you'd like. You have permission under my copywrite as long as my name stays on it and you don't try to make me say something I didn't. For booklet format, print on both sides, Flip on short edge.

I want to do more than entertain, I want to teach, convince, and promote change in the lives of those who read my books. Ideas are dangerous, they have the power to overthrow the established order. A fearsome monster exists in our world, a thought-numbing, close-ranked mindset that permeates all of society. How do we destroy it? How do we even properly identify it?

Ultimately it comes down to two kingdoms, the earth and all of history being the battlefield. It encompasses all the wars, the struggles, the triumphs, and the pain of the human condition. It's far bigger than Republican vs. Democrat, Capitalist vs. Socialist, Christian vs. Islam, Liberal vs. Conservative, or any other dividing line we try to rally behind.

Gary's first novel began life as a concept in 1977, written out first in longhand and then pounded out on a vintage "Underwood Model 5" typewriter with glass-faced keys and Victorian stenciling. The concept was set aside until almost 30 years later, when Gary realized it was still a story that needed to be told. So here it is, the little boy, adrift in a big universe, who's beginning to realize that everything he'd poured his life into was wrong... More about Gary Hughes, here.