Collecting the Shards

Over the past few weeks, I have published several new books. From the outside, that can look like some kind of creative superpower. Like I locked myself in a room, drank a heroic amount of coffee, and sprinted through a stack of fresh manuscripts until the world blurred and the covers appeared. That is not what happened.

What happened is quieter, slower, and a lot more like cleaning out an attic with a flashlight in your mouth.

The truth is I did not “suddenly become prolific.” I have always been prolific! It’s just that now I became willing to collect what I had already made; to re-examine what once was.

For years, my writing has lived in pieces. Some of it was unpublished, sitting in folders with names like “Draft,” “Later,” and “Fix This Someday.” Some of it was partly published, a chapter here, an essay there, a blog post that carried a whole book inside it but never got the chance to become one. Some of it was wholly, but incompletely published, meaning the words were technically out in the world, but they were not standing on their own. They were missing the surrounding structure that makes a piece feel finished, coherent, and alive.

They were shards. Living proof of the personal condemnation. “Not now, but soon.”

A shard is a funny thing. It is proof something existed, and proof something broke. It can be beautiful, but it is sharp. It does not always make sense in your hand. On its own, it is easy to dismiss. A fragment. A failed start. A leftover.

But collect enough shards and you stop holding broken glass. You start holding raw material. You start seeing a mosaic.

The container mattered

The real catalyst for this run of publishing was the new design of BolesBooks.com.

I have learned something about my own work over time. I do not just need ideas. I need a place for those ideas to live. A structure that can hold them without crushing them. A home that makes the work feel like it belongs to a larger body, not a loose pile of pages.

The new architecture of BolesBooks.com gave me that. It gave me the gravity I was missing. Suddenly, all those scattered fragments had somewhere to go. Not as orphans, not as “someday,” not as half-finished gestures, but as complete literary works that could stand on their own.

Once that clicked, the project stopped being abstract. It became practical.

Find the pieces.
Gather them.
Read them honestly.
Decide what they are.
Then do the real work.

Excavation, not invention

The last few weeks have been an excavation. I have been digging through decades of writing, not with nostalgia, but with a kind of stubborn care.

It starts with scavenging. Old files. Old backups. Half-abandoned series. Notes that only made sense to the version of me who wrote them. Drafts that I avoided for years because I remembered how unfinished they felt.

Then comes sorting, which sounds simple until you try it. You discover that a “random blog post” is actually the missing middle of an argument you never completed. You find three separate essays written ten years apart that are clearly talking about the same thing, just in different moods. You find an idea that was ahead of its time for you, and another that was a dead end you kept trying to resurrect out of sheer loyalty.

This is where the illusion breaks. Publishing a lot of books quickly does not always mean you produced a lot quickly. Sometimes it means you finally stopped leaving your work scattered.

The hardest part is meeting your past self

Revisiting writing from ten or twenty years ago requires a specific kind of nerve.

You have to sit across the table from the person you used to be. Not the romantic version, the fearless younger artist, but the real one. The one with blind spots. The one who tried too hard. The one who hedged and apologized. The one who sometimes confused intensity with insight. The one who occasionally hit the nail dead-on and did not even realize it.

I found drafts where the central idea was strong, but the execution was clumsy. I found pieces where the prose had energy, but the argument underneath it was thin. I found “misplaced intentions,” moments where I was reaching for the right truth but grabbing it by the wrong handle.

That is not fun to admit. It is also unbelievably useful.

Because once you can see what is wrong, you can save what is right.

Salvage, redaction, adaptation

This is not copy and paste. It is not dumping old work into new covers.

It is salvage.

Sometimes the salvage looks like redaction. Cutting the parts that were only there to sound smart. Removing references that dated the work without adding anything. Trimming the throat-clearing and the wandering preamble. Sanding down the rough edges of insecurity and arrogance, both of which age badly.

Sometimes it looks like adaptation. A blog post becomes a chapter once it has neighbors. A short essay becomes the spine of a larger piece once it has room to breathe. A half-finished series finally gets an ending, not because the ending suddenly appears, but because I am older now and I can see what the ending was always asking for.

And sometimes it looks like rewriting from the ground up while keeping the original spark. That is the part people do not see. A “new book” can contain old bones, but the muscle is built now. The connective tissue is built now. The voice is steadier now.

This is the work of bringing shards into relationship with each other until they stop being fragments and start becoming structure.

Time is passing. Publication is now.

For a long time, I treated publication like a finish line you cross only when everything is perfect.

But perfection is a mirage that gets more expensive every year. Files decay. Links break. Formats change. Memory gets slippery. The context you were writing inside of fades. The work does not sit still while you wait. It quietly disappears.

So I have shifted my thinking.

Publication is not a victory lap. It is preservation. It is how you stop the slow rot. It is how you give your work the chance to outlive your hesitation.

With BolesBooks.com rebuilt, I finally have a place where these ideas and passions can be gathered under one umbrella and released as books that do not need apologies or footnotes to explain why they exist. They can stand on their own now. Not as pieces of something that might have been, but as a new whole thing that actually is.

What looks sudden is usually a long return

If it seems like I published a lot in a short time, that is because I did.

But the real timeline stretches back decades.

This is what it looks like when you stop abandoning your own work. When you stop leaving your best ideas trapped in bad drafts. When you take the fragments seriously enough to assemble them into something that holds.

There will be more books to come. The excavation is not finished. There are still shards out there, waiting in old folders and forgotten posts and half-written arguments that deserve to be completed.

And now, finally, they have somewhere to go.

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The Kinship of Strangers: When DNA Reveals What Identity Cannot Accept

Some truths arrive uninvited. They come in the mail, in the form of a cardboard box containing a plastic tube, a prepaid envelope, and instructions for depositing saliva. Six weeks later, they return as a percentage breakdown, a haplogroup designation, a list of genetic relatives you never knew existed. The Kinship of Strangers, the third novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when those percentages contradict everything you were raised to believe about who you are and who belongs to your people.

The premise emerged from a scientific fact that should be unsurprising but somehow remains explosive: populations that have lived as neighbors for millennia share genetic ancestry that transcends the boundaries they have drawn between themselves. The Cohen Modal Haplotype, a Y-chromosome signature associated with Jewish priestly lineage, appears in Palestinian populations at rates that complicate every simple narrative about who belongs where. Bronze Age bones excavated from Levantine soil carry DNA that belongs to everyone and no one, ancestors claimed by peoples who cannot acknowledge their kinship without destabilizing the stories that hold their communities together.

Population genetics does not care about politics. It does not respect the borders drawn by empires or the categories enforced by tradition. It simply reports what the molecules reveal: that human beings have been mixing, migrating, and making families across every boundary we have ever erected. The question is not whether the science is accurate. The question is what we do when accuracy threatens identity.

Ten characters confront this question across ten interconnected stories. A rabbi in Philadelphia receives test results that connect his Y-chromosome more closely to Palestinians than to most of his congregation. A Palestinian archaeologist excavates remains at Megiddo that complicate every modern claim to the land she is digging. A cognitive scientist lectures on identity-protective cognition while failing to apply her own research to her own avoidances. A genetic counselor who helps others interpret their ancestry results throws away her own kit unopened. An Israeli geneticist and a Palestinian researcher collaborate across borders their families cannot cross, their shared data too dangerous to publish in either of their home countries.

The stories move from Philadelphia synagogues to Jerusalem checkpoints, from Chicago conference rooms to Amman hotel lobbies. Characters glimpsed in one story reappear in another. Connections emerge that none of them fully understand. The architecture borrows from two public domain sources: James Joyce’s Dubliners, with its linked stories building toward earned epiphany, and the nested narratives of One Thousand and One Nights, where Scheherazade survives by leaving stories unfinished. Like Scheherazade, these characters have learned that the story that does not end is the story that keeps you alive. Resolution is not available. Continuation is the only victory.

This is Fractional Fiction: the methodology that drives this series. Each novel takes a public domain literary source, identifies its structural architecture and thematic engine, and synthesizes it with contemporary scientific research to produce something that belongs fully to neither tradition but could not exist without both. The Dying Grove married Joyce’s Dubliners structure to mycorrhizal network research. The Inheritance fused Ibsen’s Ghosts with transgenerational epigenetics. The Kinship of Strangers brings Joyce and Scheherazade together with population genetics and cognitive science, asking how we process evidence that contradicts our sense of self.

The research domain matters because the science is real. Identity-protective cognition is a documented phenomenon: the tendency of intelligent people to recruit their cognitive resources in defense of beliefs that anchor their social identity, even when evidence contradicts those beliefs. The smarter you are, the better you are at defending what you already believe. The Cohen Modal Haplotype is real. The genetic overlap between populations who define themselves as fundamentally distinct is real. The characters are invented, but the science that disrupts their certainties is not.

What makes this novel different from the previous Fractional Fiction books is its refusal of resolution at every level. The Dying Grove offered transformation through dissolution. The Inheritance delivered revelation through excavation. The Kinship of Strangers offers neither. Its characters do not arrive at peace. They arrive at recognition: the acknowledgment that they share more than they can accept, that the stories they tell about themselves are simultaneously necessary and false, that kinship does not require acknowledgment to exist.

The final story brings multiple characters together at a genetics conference in Amman, Jordan. They have been circling the same questions throughout the book without knowing it. When they finally meet, what they discover is not resolution but company: other people who have been carrying the same impossible knowledge, other strangers who are kin whether they can say so or not.

The Kinship of Strangers is available now through Amazon in Kindle edition and paperback. A free PDF is available for download at BolesBooks.com. If you have ever wondered what your DNA might reveal that your family never told you, if you have ever suspected that the boundaries between peoples are more porous than the stories suggest, if you have ever felt kinship with strangers you were taught to see as other, this book was written for you.

The test results are in. The question is whether you are ready to read them.

#bolesBooks #bookSeries #community #culture #davidBoles #dna #fractionalFiction #history #kinship #literaryFiction #method #research #strangers

The Inheritance: When the Body Remembers What the Mind Cannot

Some secrets do not stay buried. They write themselves into blood and bone. They pass from grandmother to mother to daughter through mechanisms we are only beginning to understand. The Inheritance, the second novel in the Fractional Fiction series, asks what happens when a scientist trained to study transgenerational trauma in laboratory mice discovers that the patterns she has been mapping exist in her own DNA.

The premise is rooted in contemporary research. In her Cambridge laboratory, epigeneticist Anna Osborne studies how trauma alters gene expression and passes to subsequent generations. The science is controversial, the implications unsettling, and Anna has spent her career maintaining professional distance from the questions that haunt her own family. Then her mother dies, leaving behind a crumbling farmhouse in Nebraska, a confession recorded in the final hours of morphine clarity, and evidence that the secrets Anna has been running from are written into her own cells.

What follows is a literary mystery in the truest sense. Not a puzzle to be solved with clues and deductions, but an excavation of three generations of silence, transgression, and the price families pay for choosing protection over truth. The Vance Farm holds answers that Claire spent sixty years burying. A murder disguised as an accident. A pregnancy that arrived at precisely the wrong moment. A family system built on silence so complete that even the women who lived through it could not speak of what they knew. Now Anna must piece together the truth from land records and DNA profiles, from her grandmother’s calculated denials and her great-uncle’s deathbed words, from the methylation patterns in her own cells that carry memories she never made.

The Fractional Fiction Method

Fractional Fiction takes classic literature and reimagines it through the lens of modern knowledge. Each novel begins with public domain source texts whose themes, character dynamics, and dramatic architecture have proven their capacity to illuminate human experience. These elements fuse with contemporary scientific, historical, or philosophical research to create something entirely new. Not adaptation. Not pastiche. Transformation with purpose.

The Dying Grove, the first Fractional Fiction novel, drew on James Joyce’s “Dubliners” and contemporary mycorrhizal network research to explore consciousness, connection, and what we owe to the systems that sustain us. “The Inheritance” operates on a different axis, drawing on three towering works of dramatic literature to examine the inheritance of sin, the biology of memory, and the question of whether we can escape what our ancestors made us.

The Source Constellation

Three plays provide the dramatic DNA for “The Inheritance,” each contributing essential elements to the synthesis.

William Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” (c. 1600) supplies the investigative architecture. Anna, like the Prince of Denmark, is summoned home by a parent’s death and confronted with demands for action she did not seek. Her scientific training makes her, like Hamlet, someone who needs proof before acting, who investigates obsessively, who is haunted by a demand to address injustice she did not commit. The ghost that haunts the Vance Farm is not supernatural but epigenetic, speaking through altered gene expression rather than spectral visitation. Yet the central question remains: what does the present owe to the dead?

Henrik Ibsen’s “Ghosts” (1881) provides the thematic engine. Ibsen’s drama of inherited sin, generational silence, and the terrible cost of respectability maps directly onto the Vance family’s situation. Mrs. Alving’s discovery that her son has inherited his father’s disease becomes Anna’s discovery that trauma leaves molecular traces. The Norwegian parlor becomes a Nebraska farmhouse, but the question remains the same: what price do children pay for the secrets their parents chose to keep? What happens when the protection offered by silence becomes the poison that destroys?

Eugene O’Neill’s “Desire Under the Elms” (1924) contributes the American vernacular and the contested territory. O’Neill’s play concerns a son who believes his father’s farm should be his inheritance, a young stepmother who becomes his lover, and the catastrophic consequences of these entanglements. The Oedipal dynamics connect directly to “Hamlet.” The inheritance theme connects to both Ibsen and Shakespeare. The American rural setting provides a distinct register from the Danish court and the Norwegian parlor. In “The Inheritance,” the Vance Farm functions as O’Neill’s farm does: as contested ground where property, identity, and transgression become inextricable.

The Research Domain

The three source texts agree on one point: the past determines the present, and escape is impossible. The Ghost demands vengeance. Mrs. Alving cannot outrun her husband’s syphilis. Eben and Abbie destroy themselves because they cannot stop wanting what they should not have. Classical tragedy does not believe in freedom.

Contemporary epigenetics complicates that certainty. Research now suggests that trauma can alter gene expression without changing the underlying DNA sequence, that these alterations can pass to subsequent generations, and that they may be reversible through sustained intervention. The inheritance is real, it is measurable, it shapes who we are before we are born, and yet it may not be destiny. The mouse studies Anna conducts in her laboratory show both the reality of transgenerational trauma transmission and the possibility that environmental enrichment, sustained care, and breaking the cycle of stress can attenuate its effects.

This scientific uncertainty creates the novel’s dramatic tension. The source texts all answer “no” to the question of escape. The science answers “maybe.” Anna must navigate between these possibilities, discovering what her family buried while deciding what she will do with the knowledge. The question is not merely whether she can learn the truth. The question is whether knowing the truth changes anything.

The Novel’s Architecture

“The Inheritance” braids three timelines across four generations. The 1950s and 1960s reveal the original catastrophe: Margaret’s suicide in the barn, Edmund’s cold erasure of first one wife and then another, the affair between Helen and her stepson Thomas, and Edmund’s death under circumstances that remain permanently ambiguous. The 1990s and 2000s show Claire inheriting secrets she does not fully understand, raising her daughter Anna with an intensity that borders on desperation, and finally succumbing to the dementia that will force everything into the open. The present follows Anna’s investigation, her confrontation with the family history, and her decision about what to do with what she learns.

The structure honors all three source texts while creating something none of them contains: the possibility that knowledge might enable change, that understanding the mechanism might provide leverage against it. Anna is pregnant by the novel’s end. The question of what she will tell her child, and whether the telling itself might begin to break the chain, remains open. The tragic sources would close that door. The science leaves it ajar. The novel holds both possibilities without resolving the tension between them.

About the Author and Publisher

David Boles is an author, dramatist, editor, publisher, and teacher with an MFA from Columbia University. He founded David Boles Books Writing and Publishing in 1975. The Fractional Fiction series emerges from a conviction that classic literature deserves more than reverence. It deserves transformation. The plays that have survived centuries did so because they asked questions that remain unanswered. Shakespeare wanted to know what we owe the dead. Ibsen wanted to know whether silence protects or poisons. O’Neill wanted to know whether we can escape the land and blood that made us. These questions did not expire with their authors. They persist because human beings persist in facing the same dilemmas across generations.

Fractional Fiction exists to bring those questions forward, not by updating settings or modernizing dialogue, but by fusing dramatic architecture with contemporary knowledge. The method is deliberate: source analysis, research integration, structural synthesis. The goal is fiction that carries the weight of literary tradition while speaking to present concerns. Each novel documents its origins so readers can trace the connections themselves, can see how classic literature continues to speak through new forms when given the chance.

Getting “The Inheritance”

“The Inheritance” is available now as a Kindle edition for $9.99 at Amazon and as a paperback version for $19.99. A free PDF is also available at David Boles Books for those who prefer that format. An audiobook is in production for those who prefer to listen.

This is a novel about what we owe to the dead, what the body remembers that the mind forgets, and the price of breaking silences that were meant to last forever. It is also, like all Fractional Fiction, an experiment in literary synthesis: asking whether classic dramatic structures can find new life when fused with contemporary knowledge, whether the questions that haunted Shakespeare and Ibsen and O’Neill still haunt us, and whether the answers might be different now that we understand more about how inheritance actually works.

The wound remains faithful, but perhaps the chain can break. That uncertainty is not a weakness. It is the point.

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The Dying Grove: A Novel Born from the Collision of Joyce and Mycorrhiza

Some books are written. Others are grown. “The Dying Grove” belongs to the second category, and that distinction is not metaphor but method. This novel, the first in a new series called Fractional Fiction, emerged from an experiment in literary hybridization: what happens when you take the formal architecture of modernist masters and seed it with contemporary scientific research? The result is something that belongs fully to neither tradition but could not exist without both.

The premise is deceptively simple. Eli Chen, a researcher carrying unprocessed grief over his mother’s death, arrives at a remote research station in the Pacific Northwest to study mycorrhizal networks. These are the underground fungal systems that connect trees into vast communication webs, the so-called “wood wide web” that has captured scientific imagination over the past decade. What Eli discovers challenges everything he understands about consciousness, memory, and what it means to be an individual organism in a world of radical interconnection.

Mycorrhizal networks are not fiction. They are documented science. Trees share nutrients through fungal threads. Mother trees preferentially support their offspring. Chemical signals transmit warnings of pest attacks faster than any single tree could manage on its own. The forest, seen from below rather than above, looks less like a collection of individual plants competing for sunlight and more like a distributed organism thinking in chemical code across centuries.

This is the scientific foundation beneath “The Dying Grove.” But science alone does not make literature. For that, you need form.

James Joyce’s “Dubliners” provided the formal skeleton. Those fifteen stories anatomize paralysis: characters trapped by institutional constraints, by poverty, by the weight of dead tradition, by their own inability to act. The famous ending of “The Dead,” where Gabriel Conroy confronts the snow falling on the living and the dead alike, represents one of literature’s great moments of consciousness expanding beyond individual limitation to encompass something larger. That expansion, that movement from the personal to the cosmic, became the emotional trajectory of “The Dying Grove.”

Chekhov contributed the ensemble structure. “The Cherry Orchard” and “Uncle Vanya” taught us that drama need not center on a single protagonist wrestling toward climax and resolution. Instead, multiple characters can circle one another in accumulating tension, each pursuing private concerns while something larger builds beneath their awareness. The research station in “The Dying Grove” functions like Chekhov’s country estates: an isolated space where people cannot escape one another, where small conflicts reveal vast distances in understanding, where what cannot be preserved must be transformed.

This combination, Joyce’s epiphanic realism married to Chekhovian ensemble drama and grounded in mycorrhizal science, produces something I am calling Fractional Fiction. The name comes from mathematics: fractions are parts that combine to form unexpected wholes. Each Fractional Fiction novel takes a public domain literary work, a contemporary research domain, and a structural framework, then allows the collision between them to generate original narrative.

The methodology is deliberate. We live in an age that has largely abandoned literary form in favor of genre convention. Contemporary novels tend toward either the experimental and deliberately difficult or the commercial and deliberately accessible. Fractional Fiction occupies different territory. These books are meant to be read by people who care about story, who want characters they can follow and conflicts they can understand. But they are also meant to carry the intellectual weight that serious literature once bore as a matter of course. Science is not decoration in these novels. It is load-bearing structure. The ideas matter as much as the people who encounter them.

“The Dying Grove” asks questions that I suspect readers bring to fiction even when they cannot articulate them. What do we owe to the systems that sustain us? Can consciousness exist at scales that dwarf individual human life? What transformations must we accept if we hope to preserve what matters most? Eli Chen’s encounter with the dying forest network is not simply a scientific discovery. It is a confrontation with forms of memory, intention, and awareness that operate across millennia while he measures his own existence in decades.

The forest in the novel is four thousand years old. It has survived ice ages, volcanic eruptions, and the logging operations that reduced it to a fragment of its former reach. It remembers everything. And it is dying. That dying, which accelerates throughout the novel as development encroaches and climate change alters the conditions the network evolved to exploit, provides the urgency that drives the narrative forward. Eli is not simply studying something interesting. He is witnessing something irreplaceable in the process of being lost, and he must decide what he is willing to become in order to preserve any part of it.

I began writing in 1975, the same year I founded David Boles Books. Across fifty years of publishing, I have learned that the best books come from genuine necessity. They are written because the writer cannot not write them. “The Dying Grove” emerged from a collision of necessities: the need to understand consciousness beyond human scale, the need to honor literary traditions that contemporary publishing has largely abandoned, and the need to write fiction that takes science seriously without becoming textbook exposition.

Fractional Fiction as a series will continue with additional novels, each built from the same methodology: classic literature plus contemporary research plus structural framework equals original narrative. The series is ordered, meaning each book has a publication sequence, though the novels stand entirely alone. A reader can begin with “The Dying Grove” or with whatever book appears next without needing any prior context. The series identifier signals methodology rather than serial narrative.

“The Dying Grove” is available now through Amazon in Kindle edition and paperback. Audiobook and free PDF editions will follow. If you have ever wondered what forests know, if you have ever suspected that consciousness might not be limited to brains, if you have ever felt that contemporary fiction has forgotten how to carry ideas while still telling stories, this book was written for you.

The network is waiting. It has been waiting for four thousand years. It can wait a little longer while you decide whether to listen.

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