The question of how we should deal with minorities has bothered modern societies at least since the middle of the last century. The term "minority group" has taken on new meanings, to include not only ethnic groups but also less fortunate individuals, such as crippled people, retarded people, those who are sick and, generally, any group that is defined by a trait that is not present in all the population. To become a "minority" the defining trait doesn’t have to be a negative one, although in most cases it almost automatically assumes a negative connotation. For instance, one never refers to Nobel Prize Laureates as a "minority group", although they certainly are a small group within the general population.

Rather than dealing with the roots of the problem, however, society always prefers to find roundabout ways to mitigate it. Those, more often than not, are mere palliatives dictated by hypocrisy, which leave the problem seething and exacerbating under the surface.

Courting Stress

Political correctness is the device by which people attempt to create an amorphous society – one in which we seek to homogenize everyone and everybody into an uninteresting mass of humanity lacking a diversified identity. So we worry ourselves sick if we are not sure what the latest politically correct way to define somebody is. We also don’t know which term will be considered politically correct by our interlocutor, since some new terms have been considered to be offensive by the same people they were supposed to shield from offense. All these factors may turn a simple conversation into a stressful episode.

I don't post much self-promotion on my blog, but this is a special case. A few months ago I was musing on how life is always a mixture of sorrow and joy and how the two are often intertwined. I wondered how that applies to someone like me, who writes both dark and humorous fiction, so I decided to take a count of the short stories that I had written during the last decade. I was amazed to see that they were split almost equally between those two extremes (which either makes me a well-balanced person, or…)

The distance from that realization and the release of two collections, “His Darker Side” and “His Lighter Side”, with two great covers by Laura Givens, was a short one. They include short stories previously published in various magazines and anthologies, as well as three previously unpublished ones. “For better results”, the two collections should be read together, alternating a dark story with a light one.

I can promise some fun to zombie lovers, but here you'll find also extraterrestials (both funny and evil ones), ghosts and other good guys. In short, there is a little bit for everyone there and I hope you'll enjoy these books. I have enrolled the Kindle editions in KDP Select, so if you are an Amazon Prime member you can borrow them there.

My favorite line from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, is when Arthur Dent tackles “a Nutri-Matic machine which had provided him with a plastic cup filled with a liquid that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.”

I was reminded of this line lately, when I was mystified to learn that someone reading my novel, The Evelyn Project, thought that it “reads a lot like The Da Vinci Code.” I mean, was the reader paying attention to the plot at all, when reading either book, or both? One must assume that he wasn’t, because, as Douglas Adams would probably aptly put it, “The Evelyn Project is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike The Da Vinci Code.” True, they both mention the Vatican, but in an altogether different context. As the Cabin Goddess very neatly puts it, “[t]his is not like da Vinci’s code,” and you don't need to be a rocket scientist to see that.

I can reveal a secret here: not every book that mentions the Vatican is “like the Da Vinci code”; there is more to the Vatican than that.

I wouldn’t like anybody to think that any resemblance (however remote) between the outer crusts of the books might have been intentional. Except for some superficial similarities the two books are worlds apart – The Evelyn Project deals with the relationship between people who lived in two different centuries, and with a father’s personal quest to save his dying daughter. The Da Vinci Code, on the other hand, is (in the words of the Wikipedia) an “exploration of alternative religious history, whose central plot point is that the Merovingian kings of France were descendants from the bloodline of Jesus Christ and Mary Magdalene.” One can’t be more unlike the other.