Cat has everything—a condo on the ocean in San Francisco, a booming career, a great backhand—but she is losing her sanity and her soul. The one thing she has wanted all her life is slipping away, an intimate connection with Spirit, the Divine Mind from which the universe is shaped.
A man from her past, maverick quantum physicist Josh Siegel, promises her that and more if she will join him and three other carefully selected women in a scheme to harness Spirit’s power for a free, clean, unlimited fuel source. Doing so and teaching others to do so, he says, will trigger an evolutionary leap in consciousness that saves humans from extinction.
Cat jumps at the chance. But at Shamballa, Josh’s retreat in Sonoma’s Valley of the Moon, she realizes that he has dangerous hidden motives and even more dangerous enemies. As Cat’s uncanny gifts with Spirit emerge, so do deadly, long-concealed fears and anger, unleashing a fiery battle between good and evil in herself, with Josh, and with the malicious Consortium that runs the world and wants to stop them.
Some change, some die, and Spirit reveals to Cat its deepest, most surprising secret.
Praise for Change or Die
“A spiritual thriller with heart, soul, and humor. Fresh writing, irresistible characters, and a riveting story. A terrific read.”
—Adair Lara, author of Naked, Drunk, and Writing
“Masterful writing and strong, quirky characters create a compelling reality that kept me turning pages. Narrator Cat is both inspiring and reckless—a combination that ignites high drama as she goes where few of us dare to go. I lived Cat’s adventure with her, and was the better for it.”
—Ruth Coe Chambers, author of The Chinaberry Album, Heat Lightning, and other novels
WRITING CHANGE OR DIE
The Change or Die story had been running around in my mind for decades. When I started to write, I told a friend,
“It’s about a California Consciousness Circuit veteran who gets mixed up with a charming but questionable guru up in the Valley of the Moon near Sonoma. He gathers four women and trains them to use psychic power to tap into Divine energy and create a fuel that is free, clean, and inexhaustible. But then the trouble starts.”
She looked quizzical, and asked, “What’s the back story?” I told her that Cat had been an abused kid with a terrible mother who ran away at age ten, got “adopted” by a woman who ran a bakery cum brothel, and later fled to Montana to battle alcohol and her own demons in a desperate search for the Divine.
“I think that’s the book you should be writing!” she said. The back story book turned out to be my first novel, Chasing Grace. When that was finished, I could finally write Change or Die.
This second novel felt a little like a second child. I was over the nervousness of writing my first fiction and just wanted to tell a good story. I constantly asked myself what would I want to happen next if I were the reader. It was a more playful writing experience than Chasing Grace, and was finished in less than half the time.
This book also took me to two of my favorite places: the Valley of the Moon near Sonoma, and Glacier National Park in Montana. I worked at Glacier after my sophomore year in college, and fell in love with it. The Valley of the Moon, an hour north of San Francisco, has always been my place to look and to heal.
Writing Change or Die completed something for me, released a compulsion to tell that particular story, and freed me up to go on to what was next.