About Leonard Crane
Leonard Crane
Hi, I'm Leonard Crane.

You will find plenty of information about my book Ninth Day of Creation on my home page, so I am going to use this page to tell you a little about me.

I no longer spend any time writing fiction.

It is possible that this situation might change one day, but it has now been over 20 years since I picked up a pen for the express purpose of cobbling together an imaginary world.

Even so, I do still spend a significant amount of time writing.

Most of this scribbling activity can either be categorized as copywriting, which has been aptly described as "salesmanship in print", or else it is the result of research into aspects of health for the express purpose of helping educate others about how to avoid the miseries that come from being ignorant about what has proven to be generally good for us and what appears to be quite bad.

When I developed an interest in writing fiction it was back in the nineties.

I was studying physics at the University of Queensland, Australia. Purely by accident I picked up a slim volume of short stories by the Australian-born writer Peter Carey.

That tiny book, The Fat Man In History, proved to be hugely influential. Before long I wanted to be able to do what Carey could do, which was to transfix a reader - to hold them spellbound with nothing more than the careful selection and arrangement of words on a page.

This newly-developed notion represented a huge departure from what I was applying myself towards during most of my waking hours.

By day I was translating the mathematics of quantum mechanics into computer code that could be run for days on end to deliver up predictions about the natural world which otherwise could not be arrived at through less computationally strenuous approaches. Such as with pencil, paper, and mere human intellect.

I was at least a highly competent doctoral student, and rushing into work in the mornings to see if our numerically computed predictions matched up with the output of simplified mathematical models wasn't entirely without its reward.

After receiving my PhD and being awarded a postdoctoral fellowship to carry out research at the California Institute of Technology I came to the United States. My intention was to continue working in the field of theoretical physics, but I discovered I was ill-suited to my new environment, and before the fellowship was up I was actively engaged in rendering my first novel.

By which I mean the first one I would complete.

A few years prior to formulating a plan to write a science thriller, which is the correct categorization for Ninth Day of Creation, I had attempted a much more psychologically dramatic work of fiction that I told a close friend would be the one thing I would be remembered for one hundred years from now. But beyond the planning for that book, and a few halting initial chapters, nothing came of it.

On new soil, in a land where the natives displayed none of the finer attention to inner dialog that I had been counting on to secure my century of fame I had to come up with another approach to writing a solid work of fiction. And more importantly this one needed to be able to pay my future bills because the date of that last fellowship payment was rapidly approaching.

So I chose what seemed at the time the logical thing to do, which was to attempt to write a blockbuster novel with the kind of power that would keep my readers "spellbound".

Then two things happened that sealed my fate as a writer of fiction.

The first was that I finished my book. I was utterly convinced at the time that I had succeeded in bringing my vision to life. Yes, the book had some flaws. The plot strained credulity, and as a first work it was overly ambitious. But it was without a doubt the best thing I had ever created. It still strikes me as one damn good novel.

The second thing that happened - the thing that decisively nipped my writing aspirations in the bud for good - was my failure to secure the interest of any New York publisher.

Perhaps if money was not an issue I might have continued to write. But putting together a book like Ninth Day of Creation is a hugely expensive undertaking.

You might attempt it once, as I did, thinking you will eventually be rewarded for your investment in time and mental energy. But you will not have an ounce of will remaining at the end of the process to contemplate doing it again. I was like the first-time marathon runner who completes the race on adrenaline alone but throws up the next morning when faced with the prospect of ever having to do it again.

A fiction writer without an audience is nothing more than a diarist, a writer of unread tales. I was quite aware the world was not going to continue feeding me if I did not recognize that basic reality. The result of this reckoning was that I quickly turned to software development, and then later copywriting, to make ends meet.

I did self-publish Ninth Day of Creation. It was the least I could do before closing the door on that part of my life. But the book never found an audience and within a few years it was out of print and essentially disappeared from the world.

However...

In 2021 I came across the article-publishing platform Medium.com and decided to use it to resurrect my book.

Enough time has passed that I feel game enough to give it a try.

We will see what happens. Medium is not known as a place for the publication of works of fiction. In fact I would say you have to be just a little crazy to even try such a thing.

Leonard Crane, Ph.D.
LeonardCrane.com