u/Powerful-Ad-9378

If you’re drawn to visionary fiction, mythic cosmology, spiritual awakening arcs, or stories that feel like they’re whispering something just beyond language, this book might resonate with you. It’s not mainstream sci‑fi — it’s a soul‑story, a canyon‑story, a consciousness‑story — and it’s meant for readers who feel the world humming beneath the surface.

As Above, So Within is a mythic‑cosmic novel set on the Mogollon Rim in Arizona, where the land itself seems to breathe, remember, and wait. The story begins when a tremor splits the canyon and reveals a sealed Mogollon kiva untouched for centuries — its walls painted with a serpent made of galaxies. That moment pulls Alexa Beth, a woman whose life has been quietly unraveling, into a hidden cosmology she never knew she was part of. What she finds in the kiva isn’t an artifact. It’s an awakening.

The book blends spiritual sci‑fi, Indigenous‑adjacent mythic resonance (handled respectfully and fictionally), and lyrical, poetic prose. It’s not a fast‑paced thriller; it’s a deep, canyon‑breathing story about consciousness, memory, and the ancient intelligence woven through land and light. The tone is quiet, mystical, and immersive — more The Alchemist than Dune, more visionary than genre‑bound. Readers who love cosmic symbolism, serpent archetypes, and stories where the world itself is a character tend to connect with it immediately.

Alexa’s journey is guided by Nantan, an elder who hears the canyon’s song the way others hear wind, and by Awanyu, the serpent of light whose presence blurs the line between myth and reality. As Alexa begins to awaken — not in a magical‑powers sense, but in a consciousness‑recognizing‑itself sense — she discovers that something else is stirring beneath the Rim: a hive‑mind rising in the dark, feeding on disconnection and fear. The tension in the book isn’t good vs. evil; it’s awakening vs. forgetting, resonance vs. collapse, the Fifth World opening vs. the hive’s attempt to smother it.

At its core, the novel asks a single question: What happens when “I AM” becomes more than a phrase — when it becomes a remembering?
The story unfolds like a spiritual initiation wrapped in a cosmic mystery, with canyon silence, serpent light, and ancient songs guiding the reader through each step.
I’m looking for beta readers!

If you’re drawn to visionary fiction, mythic cosmology, spiritual awakening arcs, or stories that feel like they’re whispering something just beyond language, this book might resonate with you. It’s not mainstream sci‑fi — it’s a soul‑story, a canyon‑story, a consciousness‑story — and it’s meant for readers who feel the world humming beneath the surface.

As Above, So Within is a mythic‑cosmic novel set on the Mogollon Rim in Arizona, where the land itself seems to breathe, remember, and wait. The story begins when a tremor splits the canyon and reveals a sealed Mogollon kiva untouched for centuries — its walls painted with a serpent made of galaxies. That moment pulls Alexa Beth, a woman whose life has been quietly unraveling, into a hidden cosmology she never knew she was part of. What she finds in the kiva isn’t an artifact. It’s an awakening.

The book blends spiritual sci‑fi, Indigenous‑adjacent mythic resonance (handled respectfully and fictionally), and lyrical, poetic prose. It’s not a fast‑paced thriller; it’s a deep, canyon‑breathing story about consciousness, memory, and the ancient intelligence woven through land and light. The tone is quiet, mystical, and immersive — more The Alchemist than Dune, more visionary than genre‑bound. Readers who love cosmic symbolism, serpent archetypes, and stories where the world itself is a character tend to connect with it immediately.

Alexa’s journey is guided by Nantan, an elder who hears the canyon’s song the way others hear wind, and by Awanyu, the serpent of light whose presence blurs the line between myth and reality. As Alexa begins to awaken — not in a magical‑powers sense, but in a consciousness‑recognizing‑itself sense — she discovers that something else is stirring beneath the Rim: a hive‑mind rising in the dark, feeding on disconnection and fear. The tension in the book isn’t good vs. evil; it’s awakening vs. forgetting, resonance vs. collapse, the Fifth World opening vs. the hive’s attempt to smother it.

At its core, the novel asks a single question: What happens when “I AM” becomes more than a phrase — when it becomes a remembering?
The story unfolds like a spiritual initiation wrapped in a cosmic mystery, with canyon silence, serpent light, and ancient songs guiding the reader through each step.

The last hurricane that passed through here had the power and the cell towers down for over a week. Now the season is upon us again and due to my work from home position I need continued internet. I only stream Roku on one tv and don’t play video games. My Spectrum bill has crept up to $130 per month for speed I don’t need. and I see where I can get Starlink at my house for $85 per month for approximately 200 mbps. This would reduce my bill and also handle cell towers outages. What are the downsides to this switch? Considering the rate of global warming, hurricanes are only going to get more intense and cause more power outages. I have a small generator so power is not an issue.

I’m 71, living in a newer, well insulated double wide in Polk county Florida. I’m concerned about the extended power outages from hurricanes. I have 3 power banks to recharge my small things like my phone and some lamps and one that is rated to recharge my laptop. I don’t have a car, so no car battery. I have 2 usb rechargeable 9 inch fans. My yard is very sunny. I have about $500 total to spend on a solar system. What do you recommend to help with the heat?

Aren’t we missing the point here? Seems to me the reader’s opinion should be the only thing that matters.

Did the reader enjoy the experience the writing generated in his mind? Were the emotional feelings and thoughts the author engendered in his mind fulfilling and appreciated? Is it the author’s responsibility to teach the reader? Is that what the reader wanted? Did the written product fulfill the purpose or goal of the reader? Is the reader’s goal to envision the story to the point of not even noticing the words and sentence structure? Is the reader’s goal to see how hard the author struggled to tell the story?

I'm working on a novel about a genetics researcher whose discovery ends her academic career right as it gets her the most prestigious invitation of her life — except the institute recruiting her isn't what it seems, and the man who steps forward to help her is not entirely human. She was raised by an Apache Medicine Singer, and as her world falls apart, the land she grew up on starts showing her things her two PhDs never prepared her for.

It's part hard-science sci-fi (CRISPR-adjacent genetics, a real research setting), part slow-burn conspiracy (something bigger than her is watching, and wants something from her work), and part myth — Apache and Hopi cosmology isn't background flavor here, it's the actual engine of the story. Tonally it's more literary than genre-typical: interior, image-driven, and I'd rather hear "the prose didn't work for me" than "needed more explosions."

What I'm sharing: the opening — a cosmic preamble, a short prelude, and Chapters 1 through 7 (protagonist's breaking point, her exit from academia, and her return to the reservation where things start to shift).

Let me know if this interests you.

Before you ask, this is written with AI assistance.

Here is portion of the Preamble:

The universe did not watch the way a person watches, and it did not care the way a person cares, but it kept its accounts anyway, in frequencies too slow for human ears and patterns too old to be called anything but law. Beneath all of it ran a single current, unbroken since before the first star lit — call it consciousness, call it unity, call it the quiet insistence of I AM running under everything that existed. It did not choose sides. It only wanted, the way water wants the sea, for everything within it to wake up.

Most lives passed beneath that arc of stars without ever being counted. Alexa Beth Merrill's did not.
She had not always carried the name Alexa Beth Merrill alone. Her parents — brilliant, both of them, doctors who followed the world's worst emergencies with Doctors Without Borders and were rarely home to raise the daughter they loved — had entrusted her at six to her godfather, an Apache Medicine Singer three generations deep in the old ways, and the tribal lands along the Mogollon Rim had done what an empty house never could — taught her to listen before she spoke, to sit still long enough that the land would tell her something true. The people who raised her called her something else, in a language older than English and closer to the truth of her: She Who Listens To Beauty. By twenty-two she carried two doctorates and the kind of mind that made grown scientists doubt their own instruments before they doubted her, but under the credentials ran the same gift the name had always pointed to — a way of seeing pattern in silence that no laboratory had taught her, because no laboratory had made her.
She read the quiet between things the way other scientists read instruments, and where her colleagues saw noise, she saw a structure holding its shape underneath — an order that had been there long before anyone thought to look for it.

Awanyu had worn that serpent shape since before the first story was told about him, feathered and horned and old as the rock he moved through, carrying the same patient hunger the universe carried: not to rule what he touched, but to wake it. He turned his attention toward Alexa the way a current turns toward a break in the shore, and toward another, farther off, at almost the same moment.

That other one had been watching her for longer, and from somewhere far colder.

They had come shaped by a survival harder than anything Earth had ever demanded of its own, and their minds did not work as one mind works — they worked as many, folded into one will, a hive that had long ago traded the noise of individual wanting for the clean efficiency of a single purpose. What they wanted from humanity wasn't its warmth or its reason — those were of no use to them. It was the other half: the cunning that surfaces when there's nothing left to lose, the rage that outlives every argument against it, the will to dominate that humans spent their whole history pretending they didn't carry. That was the raw material of a hybrid conqueror, and for a hundred thousand years they'd had no way to take hold of it cleanly, no way to draw it out of humanity without also inheriting its weakness.

Alexa had solved that problem for them without knowing she'd been asked the question. Her method didn't cut a gene out and hope the rest of the code held together the way CRISPR did — it read the pattern first, understood what held a trait in place and what let it go, and rewrote the code the way a hand rewrites a sentence, precisely, without disturbing what surrounded it. To her, it was a cure. To them, watching from the cold, it was a blade fine enough to cut vengeance free from everything human that usually kept it in check, and graft it onto something that would never hesitate to use it.

They sent one of their own to close the distance, built in a shape that could sit across a table from her and be believed. He carried their purpose the way a blade carries an edge, and he did not question it, because questioning was not a function his makers had built into him. But Awanyu had touched him too, once, in passing, the way a current touches everything it moves through — and left behind something the hive had never intended and would not have permitted if they'd known: the smallest capacity to want something for its own sake, rather than for the purpose he'd been made to serve. It was not much. It was enough to be the beginning of a crack.

Alexa didn't know any of this the morning she stepped up to the podium at the Banbury Center. She only knew the lights were brighter than she'd expected, and that her hands, for once, weren't shaking.

The design had been running long before she ever walked into that room — patient, exact, built out of probability rather than prophecy. But so was the current beneath it, older than the design and larger than either side of it, moving toward the same target for a different reason: not conquest, not cure, but the slow work of waking every mind it touched, human and hive alike, toward whatever came after this world ended and the next one began. The universe hadn't chosen Alexa. It had simply noticed her, the way water notices the lowest point in a landscape, and begun, very quietly, to flow — toward her, toward him, toward the world both of their choices would decide.

Here is Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE — THE BREAKING POINT

The email had been sitting open on the laptop for almost an hour. Nothing about it had changed, and neither had Alexa — same chair, same posture, same hour bleeding into the next.

Accepted for publication.

Four years came down to those three words. The years didn't care how long she stared at the screen — they were spent now, folded already into the past, and no amount of rereading the sentence was going to hand any of them back. Alexa had meant to read it twice, to see if the second pass felt any different than the first, but she never got there. The cursor just kept blinking in a reply field she hadn't typed a word into, and somewhere in the last hour that blinking had become the only thing she was doing.

The data was loose in the world now, moving through the field the way a rumor moves. By next week there wouldn't be a lab left standing on a CRISPR platform that didn't know its whole approach had an expiration date on it — and a name attached. The fallout had started in pieces too small to call an attack but too consistent to call nothing: a mentor's call gone three days unanswered, a coauthor quietly asking to be listed lower on the paper, an email from her old thesis committee that used the word concerning twice and never once said congratulations.

Four years, and she'd built something that made careers obsolete — her own included, on certain mornings. She'd known this part was coming. Knowing hadn't made tonight any easier.

On the folding table, under the edge of the laptop, sat the other letter — printed on heavy cream stock, because the Banbury Center didn't bother with email for something like this, asking Alexa to stand in front of the six people in the world whose opinion still meant anything and tell them what she'd found. Six weeks out. Read four times since it arrived, and told to no one, not because she was hiding it but because rubbing that success in the faces of people who'd just spent a week finding new ways not to call her wasn't who Alexa wanted to be about this. Fear and admiration could live in the same department — sometimes the same person — and neither one canceled the other out. The quiet in the apartment didn't get any less quiet for knowing that. It just had two sources instead of one.

The champagne in the refrigerator was hers alone, six dollars and cold, bought weeks ago back when there was still a version of Alexa sure enough of this night to plan for it. The other order — two cases of Schramsberg, the good kind, the kind her department chair once called appropriately celebratory without being gauche, at someone else's tenure party — had gone back to the vendor unopened, canceled two days before delivery, somewhere between the third terse email from the department coordinator and the moment she'd noticed Dr. Reinholt scheduling meetings without her name on the invite. That bottle had been for the version of tonight where people came. This one was just for her, and it was cheap on purpose, because there was no one left to impress with it.

She'd pictured the whole thing — the give of the cork, the first cold swallow, some fierce private joy she'd earned and finally let herself have. The whole night had been built around a feeling, and the feeling hadn't shown up to it.

It hadn't come. She waited another minute to see if it would. It still didn't.

Something had gone quiet in her instead, and she felt it first in her hands — steady, when they should have been shaking, calm in a way that had nothing to do with peace.

Going to the kitchenette wasn't a decision so much as the only thing left that didn't require thinking, and thinking was more than Alexa had in her tonight. The walk from the bed to the refrigerator felt longer than it had any right to be. She stood in front of the open door a second too long, letting the cold roll over her before she remembered what she'd come for.

She pulled the bottle out by the neck, the glass stinging her palm — oddly, the first thing all night that had actually reached her.

"I did it," Alexa said, out loud, just to hear how it sounded in an empty room.

The words landed nowhere, the way a stone lands in water too deep to hear it hit bottom. She tried again, quieter, and the second try came back even flatter than the first, so she let it go.

The cork fought her more than it should have, her hands not quite doing what she told them, but it came free eventually with a pop too bright for the room. She poured the glass, lifted it toward the black window, and found her own reflection looking back — thinner in the face than she remembered, tired in a way that had stopped being about sleep a long time ago.

She tried to smile at it. The smile didn't take.

The glass went down before she'd decided to set it down. Her hand found the counter's edge instead, taking more of her weight than a countertop should have to. Standing upright had turned into something with a price on it, something her body billed her for instead of doing for free. Out past the window, a knot of students crossed the quad, laughing about nothing that mattered, and the sound reached her the way sound reaches you underwater — there, but distant, with no real certainty left that she wanted it closer.

"I can't do this anymore."

Quiet, but true, the first true thing said in that apartment all night, and once it was out Alexa understood it hadn't started tonight. It had been happening for years, a skipped meal here, a missed call there, some new piece of herself set aside every time the work asked for one more push, and she'd just never been still long enough before now to feel the size of what was gone.

The champagne went down the sink slow, watched rather than looked away from. The glass got rinsed and set in the rack to dry — her hands running through motions they already knew, because muscle memory was the only part of her still willing to clock in tonight.

Then Alexa sat on the edge of the bed, elbows on her knees, face in her hands, and stopped — the way your arms stop when you've carried something heavy past the point your body agreed to. She didn't cry. There wasn't fuel left over for that either.

When she lifted her head, the room looked different, or she did. The shelves sat bare where she used to keep the things she actually reached for, not the things that came with the apartment. The folding table and the one chair looked like they belonged to whoever had lived here before her — someone she was fairly sure she used to be, before the work took the rest of her.

Leaving wasn't a next-month decision for Alexa, something to arrange into shape and explain later. It was a tonight decision, made on whatever was left in the tank, because there was no telling if enough of her would be left by next month to make the trip at all.

Getting up took one full breath, and then a second. The closet gave up the suitcase, its weight in her hand almost more than she'd braced for. It landed open on the bed, and she stood over it a moment without packing a thing, just breathing, saving whatever she had left for the next task, and the one after that.

The story centers around Alexa. Adopted by an Apache medicine singer when she was six years old, she was raised in the old ways. However, her brilliance earns her two doctorate degrees by the time she turns 22 years old. Now 28, she just completed 4 years of research at Stanford University that proved CRISPR genetics manipulation methods were outdated and no longer valid. Devastation of academic departments, grant structures and careers have been leveled on her, eclipsing the astonishing methodology she has created.

I'm working on a novel about a genetics researcher whose discovery ends her academic career right as it gets her the most prestigious invitation of her life — except the institute recruiting her isn't what it seems, and the man who steps forward to help her is not entirely human. She was raised by an Apache Medicine Singer, and as her world falls apart, the land she grew up on starts showing her things her two PhDs never prepared her for.
It's part hard-science sci-fi (CRISPR-adjacent genetics, a real research setting), part slow-burn conspiracy (something bigger than her is watching, and wants something from her work), and part myth — Apache and Hopi cosmology isn't background flavor here, it's the actual engine of the story. Tonally it's more literary than genre-typical: interior, image-driven, and I'd rather hear "the prose didn't work for me" than "needed more explosions."
What I'm sharing: the opening — a cosmic preamble, a short prelude, and Chapters 1 through 7 (protagonist's breaking point, her exit from academia, and her return to the reservation where things start to shift).
What I'm looking for: honest reaction over praise. Specifically —
Did the voice pull you in or push you out?
Did the mythic/paranormal elements feel earned, or did they come out of nowhere?
Any place your attention drifted?
Any lines or images that landed hard, good or bad?
Not looking for line edits at this stage — more interested in whether the whole thing holds together as an experience.

Regarding fiction, there are some top level goals that are being ignored:
The content is for the enjoyment of the reader
A goal of a good story should be that the story comes alive in the reader’s mind. The actual words should fall away and not get in the way of the story as it is envisioned by the reader.
A good story is understandable and relatable.

I see posters on Reddit talking about using ai as a writing tool in a variety of ways and about violating the ethics of writing. What are the ethics of writing? Is this written down somewhere - like an AP Stylebook? Are ethics being created on the fly? Who decides what is ethical and what isn’t?
When I look up ethics of writing I see the following categories
- plagiarism
- improper or missing references
- avoidance of hate mongering
- avoidance of antisemitism and other religious concerns.

There is no Wiki of writing ethics.

I can’t find all the other hundreds of ethics rules discussed with AI. I believe they are more personal, subjective moral self enforced judgements.

I am having a positive experience using my paid Copilot account to assist with my novel. I also use OneNote and Novelcrafter.

A paid Copilot remembers what you have discussed in the past. I can refer back to a session and build and evolve a concept.

I don’t know how I would have done this without Copilot to assist me. For instance, one of my characters is an Apache medicine singer. I wanted to create Apache songs for him to sing. Copilot stops me and says no, can’t use actual Apache songs but you can create some for your story. I ask what the rhythm and what some lyrics might be. I wrote some with that guidance and I think they turned out ok. Then I asked Copilot to translate song words into Apache. Here is an example of what I ended up with

Nantan’s Song (Fictional, Culturally Respectful)
 
“Shíł góne’ dah shaa ná’ííł’į́į́’…”
The dawn light walks toward me…
 
“Diyí’ nłt’áá’ biké’ dah naashá…”
The holy wind moves around my steps…
 
“Ndee biké’ dah shaa shíł bééshgo’ ílíí’…”
The land of my people shines like metal in the sun…
 
“Shash bii’ dah yá’át’ééhgo shaa yá’át’ééh…”
The bear’s strength rests kindly on my shoulders…
 
“Késhjéé’ bikáá’ dah naashá, t’áá’ íiyisí…”
I walk the old path, just as they did…
 
“Diyin dine’é shaa yá’át’ééhgo shaa dah naashá…”
The holy ones walk with me in goodness…
 
“Shí éí naashá, shí éí nitsáhákees…”
I walk. I remember.
 
Amazing. Can you tell me similar examples of Copilot use similar to this?

Has anyone ever created a video trailer of your book? I am still in the writing process but my mind strays, as one does, to how I plan to market my book. I know it's a big sea and hard to catch readers attention. It works for movies and tv shows and it seems I have seen one somewhere done for a book. What is your opinion?

I was floundering for a while as I tried to create a virtual toolbox of apps to use to assist me writing a book. I have tried several AI based writing tools but none gave me the support and framework I needed. Finally, I have found a combo that works! (for me, of course) Perhaps you can try this out for yourself.

First I use Microsoft OneNote. I use this repository for every thing - from websites, images, search results, freehand written notes, everything.

Second, I rely heavily on a Microsoft Copilot paid account. The more you work with CoPilot, the more it works with you. It understands plot lines, characters, underlying theories you might have, etc. I use it as if it is a mentor and collaborator. I put all questions and answers from Copilot into OneNote with copy and paste.

Lastly, I use NovelCrafter with the Artisan package to organize into an actual book. While some AI tools can be integrated int NovelCrafter, Copilot cannot. However it is smart enough to set itself up to make it easier to port information in the correct area of NovelCrafter and can guide you on how to use Novelcrafter at the same time.

I know everyone is different. This is what works for me.

The Banbury Center (Cold Spring Harbor, NY)

Alexa Beth Merrill’s heels struck a confident rhythm across the Banbury Center’s old heart‑of‑pine floors, each step a crisp clack that echoed through the quiet morning halls. The wood had been polished by decades of brilliant minds pacing, arguing, discovering — and today, she intended to add her own mark to that lineage.
 
Anticipation coiled warm and keen in her chest, pulling her mouth into a smile that flirted with a smirk as she imagined the faces of the CRISPR advocates.
Two years of relentless refinement. Two years of failures, breakthroughs, sleepless nights, and the kind of stubborn faith only scientists and fools possessed in equal measure. And now — finally — her results were ready to meet the world. Stunning. Irrefutable. Beautiful, in the way only truth revealed through light could be 

She stepped into the small lecture room, sunlight spilling through tall, mullioned windows and pooling across the rows of chairs. The air held the faint scent of old books and ocean salt drifting in from the Sound. Her audience — some of the sharpest minds in DNA editing from across the globe — settled into their seats with the quiet rustle of notebooks and whispered speculation.

Alexa set her laptop on the podium, exhaled once, and tapped the first key.
The opening slide bloomed onto the screen behind her:
Beyond the Molecular Scissor: Harmonic Photonics for Precision Genome Editing.

A soft murmur rippled through the room.

She lifted her chin, letting the familiar steadiness settle into her bones. “For ten years,” she began, her voice smooth and sure, “we’ve been trying to edit the book of life using molecular scissors. But scissors are blunt. They’re messy. And they leave scars.”

She paused, letting the words breathe. “Today, I’m here to show you how we can rewrite the code not with blades, but with light.”

The slide shifted to a rotating 3D model of a DNA double helix — sleek, luminous, alive. Instead of the usual Cas9 enzyme blobs, thin violet‑blue ribbons of laser light wove through the structure, threading between nucleotides with the grace of a violin bow gliding across strings.

She watched the audience lean forward.

My 12 year old cocker spaniel was the runt of the litter and was born with defective hip sockets. I was quoted $15,000 repair surgeries years ago but I am disabled and on a fixed income. I have always done my best for him with high quality food and hip and joint supplements. Now he is blind in one eye and deaf. He can no longer negotiate the steps down into my yard and is too heavy for me to lift, except in extreme circumstances when I will have to deal with resulting severe back pain. He eats and drinks but has steadily gotten thinner over the last few months. He howls incessantly if he doesn’t know where I am in the house. He howls from pain. Most of his time is spent asleep.

I believe he has no quality of life. However, I am at a loss at what to do. I have no money for vet assisted euthanasia and even my local animal shelter charges for this. The shelter told me I could abandon him there and he would be put down in three days. I am beyond revolted by the idea of his fear and terror of being abandoned this way.
His howling is ear piercing and has kept me from being able to sleep more than a few hours at a stretch. I am exhausted and at age 71, at my wits end.
Please, if you have suggestions let me know.

Could the announcement of imminent disclosure and all the questions and opinions brought about because of this, actually be considered as soft disclosure, regardless of the actual intent?