New Legacy Project Part 14: Next Steps

Dear Friends and Fans,

I was scheduled to write this update two days ago, on Sunday, April 20, but didn’t. That was Easter Sunday, and although I am not a Christian, it felt disrespectful to be working on Easter even though I have no compunctions about working on a Saturday-Shabbat. Also, Sunday was the last day of Passover, which I could not bring myself to “celebrate” while Netanyahu’s government is carrying out the genocide in Gaza.

So what better day to be writing this blog than today, EARTH DAY? Earth Day is for EVERYONE. It is the one modern, secular, global festival—founded by an American peace activist in 1970—celebrated by one billion people in 193 countries. Its aim: demonstrate support for environmental protection. All of us humans are living on this one beautiful, unique planet of ours, called Gaia by the Ancient Greeks. Gaia is also the name of the Earth seen as a living planetary system in which we are all descendants of very ancient living organisms called bacteria. To quote Dorion Sagan, who is speaking at an Earth Day celebration in Lisbon, Portugal today, “… from a broad, cosmic, evolutionary perspective, we are the epiphenomena of multi-billion-year-old and perhaps cosmically distributed, highly durable, and intensely social microorganisms.” That statement certainly puts us in our proper place, doesn’t it? Earth, Gaia, is our human life support system, and we humans need to stop trashing it.

Combined image: Earth from outer space overlying my protocell painting, “Promise” (see my blog https://www.cybermuse.com/blog/2022/11/2/promise).

But I digress. You opened this e-blog to find out what’s happening with a book that is overflowing with pictures of and writings about life on Earth. Since my March post, I printed out a hard copy proposal for my book, For the Love of Form: Confessions of a Morphophiliac, and submitted it, unsolicited, at Chronicle Books publishing house in San Francisco in hope that they will want to publish it. Since returning home, I have re-done the title page/cover. I would really love to get your feedback on this change. And while you’re at it, tell me what you think of the title itself. Some people wince at the word “morphophilia;” others relish it because it’s provocative. I made it up from the Ancient Greek words, morphos and philia, and it means “love of form/shape.” The book proposal is ready to take its next step: go publishers and agents.

Here’s the old title page/cover with Ode to the Eukaryote as its solo image.

Here’s the new title page/cover made by cutting up prints of some of my paintings and improvising this collage.

So now, dear friends and fans, which title page/cover of the book do you like better? And why? Do you know any agents who would be suitable representing me to publishers? Do you know any publishers you would recommend? I appreciate each and every suggestion, as well as each new subscriber. So please share this blog with a friend. From now on, I will be wearing my marketing hat. Wish me good luck. I will also be getting back to doing my artwork, at last!