From the desk of Leonard Crane, Ph.D.

Reader, if you answered yes, then I may have something for you.

Ninth Day of Creation was conceived and penned during in the years immediately following the movie release of Steven Spielberg's interpretation of Michael Crichton's novel Jurassic Park.

I was barely thirty years old, almost half a lifetime ago now, when I got it into my head that I wanted to try my hand at creating the kind of world that might keep readers spellbound for hours.

At the time I was inexperienced enough to believe the only thing that could stop me from pulling off this Herculean feat was willpower. If I could just summon it, I was sure I could achieve my goal.

Well it did not quite turn out that way.

Over a period of years the book got written and off it went to the publishing houses. Ninth Day of Creation was my proof to the world, or so I imagined, that I deserved a crack at the life of the full-time writer of fictional tales.

Shortly thereafter I pitched my book to at least two dozen literary agencies, most of them with New York zip codes. The only agency to have the transcript properly evaluated then inexplicably forwarded me a copy of their reader's report.

With no small amount of delight I learned my writing compared favorably to that of Crichton, Tom Clancy, and some fellow named C.S. Forester who I inferred wrote dramatic stories involving warring sailors thrust into battle on the high seas.

The Forester comparison came as a surprise.

Not so the references to Crichton and Clancy, because I had dutifully studied several of their books line by line. I had done it to unearth the magic that allowed them to write blockbuster tales worthy of millions of readers.

The literary agency must have sent me that reader's report, which they characterized as "glowing", simply to buy themselves time to take a closer look at the book. Unfortunately, not only did they unnecessarily inflate my hopes, but when they passed on Ninth Day of Creation they confirmed an uneasy suspicion of mine that had gradually taken root.

Remarks from less attentive agents - that they were "Not too hot on science right now", or that I should consider splitting my book and publishing it as two volumes - had convinced me that whatever Crichton and Clancy had going for them, agents were not exactly climbing over each other to try to reproduce it with a new writer.

So when that reader's report, which expressed more than a little enthusiasm for my book and its author, failed to inspire the agent who had commissioned it in the first place I stopped believing anyone might be willing to represent me and help me find a suitable national publisher.

But I did not completely give up. I went ahead and published the book myself as a print on demand title. But my prospective career as a writer of fictional tales had come to an end.

Several years later, after I got distracted with other things, my publisher account was deactivated then deleted, and the book fell out of print. Then in 2020 I discovered Medium.com, the article publishing platform that paid writers according to how often their stories were read.

An idea began to hatch in my head for how to use Medium to restore Ninth Day of Creation and place it in front of an audience that was already known to read. Although, I was much less certain they were a novel-reading audience. I

For reasons that become apparent once you beginning reading the book, Ninth Day of Creation is not well-suited to publication on platforms like Kindle and other small-screen format devices. So Medium looked promising and I sent ahead and created an online version of the book.

The first third of the book (Part I) amounts to about 7 hours of reading. It is freely available to anyone with a browsing device:

The other two thirds of the book, which make up Part II and represent almost 13 hours of reading time, are located "behind" the Medium paywall. That means you need to be a paid Medium subscriber to be able to access the remaining part of the book. The appeal of a Medium subscription is that it costs just $5 per month and you can cancel at any time.

What is interesting about Medium in the context of using it as a publishing platform for a novel, or a book in general, is that the site is not set up to handle this and the platform itself does not seem interested in trying to make its publishing tool friendly to authors of book-length works.

However, with some perserverance I was able to figure out how to do it in a way that should keep most readers of online books happy.

I wrote the kind of book I thought I would might keep me glued to the page if I was a first-time reader. That means if any of the following statements seem like they apply to you then there is a very good chance you will thoroughly enjoy the book.

• You especially like the scientific plot lines of Michael Crichton novels.
• You like stories for which the plot lines are intricate, interwoven, and completely unpredictable.
• You enjoy stories with strong female characters.
• You have read one or more of Tom Clancy's books in which two or more nations find themselves on the brink of military engagement with each other.
• You particularly like military stories involving submarine / anti-submarine warfare.
• You like reading stories for which the science and technology seems so realistic that you have a hard time finding the dividing line between fiction and fact.

If you discover, once you begin reading Ninth Day of Creation, that you find it is hard to put the book down, then you are exactly the reader I was writing for all those years ago and I am happy to have found you.

- Leonard Crane