Here’s a marketing ploy I haven’t seen before – by buying (or pre-ordering to be precise) a copy of this new book on their website (http://www.thesacredquest.co.uk ) before the 30th September 2007, you become an Ether Founder Member. And then "once Ether Publishing and Ether Music Productions reach a certain size in terms of post tax profit, 10% of the company’s post tax profits will be made available to and distributed equally amongst the Founder Members. This will be gifted on an ongoing and annual basis in recognition of the support of the Founder Members’ participation in the instigation of the companies."

Whether this is likely to result in any actual money coming your way I leave to your judgement. I suspect that many of the contributors to this site know how hard the publishing business can be and that they can fairly accurately assess the chances of being part of a big breakthrough bestseller.

All that marketing hype aside, however, the book itself looks like an interesting proposition. In what sounds like a postmodern Celestine Prophecy, "[a]s [the author] begins to write the book in full and follows implicitly her intuition, so the book quite literally manifests into reality around her as remarkable twists occur."

This theme ties in with the recent speculation of alternative quantum physicists such as Goswami that consciousness creates the universe around itself – a theme which has been echoed by the likes of Daniel Pinchbeck (whom I quote in relation to this elsewhere on this site) and Michael Glickman ("Thoughts seem to be effecting reality more than before.") Of course, this has long been the speculation of psychic questers (for example see the comments by Andrew Collins and Richard Ward concerning the brass box and the swords in the pQ Interview) so there’s no surprises for us there. However, it is interesting to see the view become more mainstream and perhaps, like the Da Vinci code before it, this book will hit public consciousness at just the right moment.

I picked this up recently from Whitley Strieber’s website. I haven’t had a chance to listen to it yet myself but it sounds interesting:

"In the year 2000, Andrew Collins published Gateway to Atlantis, proposing that the impact of a comet over the North America resulted in the end of the ice age 10,900 years ago, and destroyed Atlantis, an island empire in the Atlantic, in a single night.

Now, incredibly, corroboration has come from a group of scientists who have published in established scientific journals and written a book saying that the very disaster Andrew identified 7 years ago did indeed happen!"

For those of you who want to cut straight to the podcast the link is here: http://strieber.streamguys.net/081807.mp3 but they only stay up for a few weeks so you’ll need to download it relatively quickly.

I’ve changed the Web Link for Cara Louise’s website to her new site http://wwwcaralouisebooks.blogspot.com/.

Cara is republishing six works of children’s short fiction which coincidentally (or not!) feature artwork from Yuri Leitch and the new site is definitely well worth a look.