David*Macinnis*Gill.com

Author James Maxey gave me the story seeds that even­tu­ally led to the cre­ation of Soul Enchi­lada. I would like to return the favor by pass­ing on this post from his blog:

Fol­low­ers of my blogs, and the read­ers who read the acknowl­edge­ment pages of my books, will know that I lost my part­ner Laura Her­rmann to breast can­cer in May 2005. I’ve been inter­ested in can­cer research since then and have pri­vately made con­tri­bu­tions to can­cer related char­i­ties, but I’ve never put out any sort of appeal on my blogs to solicit for this cause, until now.

Last week, I received sev­eral cases of my lat­est book Drag­on­seed. One of the ongo­ing themes of Drag­on­seed is the idea of heal­ing, both from phys­i­cal and spir­i­tual wounds. Within the book there’s a mirac­u­lous object called a drag­on­seed: Eat the seed, and all your injuries will be healed. Even your old­est scars will vanish.

I have some sci­ence fic­tion hoodoo under­ly­ing the drag­on­seed. The tech­nol­ogy to cre­ate a pill that will both diag­nose and cure any ill­ness is pretty far out in our future, if it exists at all. But, the part of this that isn’t sci­ence fic­tion or hoodoo is that I believe that tech­nol­ogy has the power to work mir­a­cles. We have MRI and PET scans that can look into a human body and see it work­ing in minute detail. We have devel­oped sur­gi­cal tools and tech­niques that can remove dis­eased tis­sues from a human body with­out doing undo dam­age to healthy tis­sues. My father had a heart attack recently, and the doc­tors had to place stents in his arter­ies. The inci­sion to per­form the oper­a­tion was small enough to cover with a band-aid. And, right now, there are researchers who are tak­ing apart can­cer cells mol­e­cule by mol­e­cule to under­stand the genetic engines that drive them to a degree unimag­in­able only a few decades ago.

We live in an age of mir­a­cles because we live in an age of knowl­edge. Mod­ern com­put­ers are finally pow­er­ful enough to process all the com­plex data con­tained within a human cell. The only bar­ri­ers remain­ing between our present under­stand­ing a cure for any dis­ease you can name are time and money.

These are not insignif­i­cant bar­ri­ers. New tech­nolo­gies are always expen­sive. And, to be blunt, the world has a lim­ited sup­ply of really smart peo­ple, and a nearly unlim­ited sup­ply of prob­lems for them to solve. For bet­ter or worse, money is one of the most impor­tant dri­ving forces of where the smart peo­ple focus their ener­gies. In the six­ties, it was decided we would put a man on the moon. We threw money at the prob­lem, and pro­duced a glut of rocket sci­en­tists. In the eight­ies and nineties, com­puter tech­nol­ogy was fed enor­mous sums of money by the stock mar­ket, and smart peo­ple focused their ener­gies on design­ing hard­ware and soft­ware, and with the result that today my cell phone has more mem­ory than I do. There is a lot of money today flow­ing into health care, but only a frac­tion of this money goes to research of any given dis­ease. I’d like to invite you to increase the frac­tion going to breast can­cer research, both due to my per­sonal con­nec­tion to the cause, and because I think that this is the right moment in his­tory to truly make a dif­fer­ence. I firmly believe this is a dis­ease than can be cured within our life­time. I don’t know if one day we will sim­ply swal­low a magic pill and be healed, but I do know that the day will come when we will be able to pro­file any can­cer cell and match it with the appro­pri­ate drug to wipe it out.

To help bring this day closer, if only by a minute or two, I’d like to announce my “Books for Breasts” pro­mo­tion. Any­one who con­tributes to the Susan G. Komen Breast Can­cer Foun­da­tion through the “Team Dragon” fundrais­ing page will get a free signed copy of Dragonseed.

You can con­tribute to the Susan G. Komen Breast Can­cer foun­da­tion by click­ing here. This will take you to my per­sonal fundrais­ing page; just click the but­ton that says “sup­port James.” Then, to get your signed copy of Drag­on­seed, just email me your mail­ing address to nobo­dynov­el­writer [at] yahoo [dot] com. I’ve set aside 50 copies for this cause; if I give them all away by the end of July, I’m pretty sure I can get my hands on another 50.

I’ve set up a mod­est goal of rais­ing $300 through this pro­mo­tion. This means I need to aver­age con­tri­bu­tions of $6, which is less than you’d pay for the book on Ama­zon. How­ever, I’ll send you a book for a con­tri­bu­tion in any amount, even if it’s just a buck. Spend a buck, get a book, save some breasts. Who’s with me?