LOVE [burns]

"Our togetherness will be a beacon of light for others; an example to emulate in their lives," she said. Her name is Promise, and she has asked Soupy to find her…because love is dying. Before she left, she gave him some advice: "You're going to fail at finding me over and over again. This task I've given you, it's a numbers game, a game of volume. Only by accumulated experience will you eventually figure out who I am and where to find me. It's also a game of wisdom, because you must learn at least one thing from every person you meet." And she is right. When he thought about his neighborhood, his parents, his family, friends, practically every one had divorced or dealt with troubling relationships--no one had taught us about love. "We are meant to teach them," she said, and then she disappeared. Soupy has been given the first assignment of his life's homework, and it's a grammar test: to better understand himself. There's no cheat sheet or notes for this homework, no map to the destination, no footprints to follow down a path...no path, actually, and no mentors to lean on. He has to make his own way, and it's going to suck. But the reward is Promise. When he finds her he will have found success, and that success is nothing more and nothing less than True Love—two words for the greatest connection the world has ever known, and now needs more than ever.

"Our togetherness will be a beacon of light for others; an example to emulate in their lives," she said. Her name is Promise, and she has asked Soupy to find her…because love is dying. Before she left, she gave him some advice: "You're going to fail at finding me over and over again. This task I've given you, it's a numbers game, a game of volume. Only by accumulated experience will you eventually figure out who I am and where to find me. It's also a game of wisdom, because you must learn at least one thing from every person you meet." And she is right. When he thought about his neighborhood, his parents, his family, friends, practically every one had divorced or dealt with troubling relationships--no one had taught us about love. "We are meant to teach them," she said, and then she disappeared. Soupy has been given the first assignment of his life's homework, and it's a grammar test: to better understand himself. There's no cheat sheet or notes for this homework, no map to the destination, no footprints to follow down a path...no path, actually, and no mentors to lean on. He has to make his own way, and it's going to suck. But the reward is Promise. When he finds her he will have found success, and that success is nothing more and nothing less than True Love—two words for the greatest connection the world has ever known, and now needs more than ever. Along the way, Soupy Heller learns a lot about himself. In fact, he learns that his last name comes from an ancient ability for his ancestors to heal. As Grandma Heller once told him, "Our ability to heal doesn't come from a magical elixir or a pill of any color. Hellers carry only what can be found on or within their person: our ears, eyes, and experience." He learns that anything good in the world must be earned; that's why we haven't seen true love in hundreds of years. Anything truly great must truly be earned, but the concept of earning has been lost. As children, we can get a movie, song, or a toy instantly. No longer must we save up the money or sit poised with one finger on "Play" and one finger on "Record" waiting impatiently for our favorite song on the radio. If we're hungry, we have a multitude of options that can be retrieved or delivered at a whim. When we want attention or conversation, we can find it online, twenty-four hours a day. We make "friends" in minutes through any number of social networks. But these are just a collection of nouns. Without focusing on the connections between them, the verbs, we have little to show for our pile of persons, places, and things. And it's in those connections that the Universe bares itself, and the fundamental elements of understanding one's self and one's "opportunity" in the world are revealed. Soupy fails a lot before Promise returns--fights and flights, guns and games, candles and catastrophes, diamonds and disasters, sex and sacrifice--but return she does, and that's when things really spin out of control.

Robert Zamees often calls an airplane "home," finding rest in beds, on couches, at rented flats, and even, at times, in his own bed in Kansas City, Missouri. As a child, he wanted to be an architect, until he learned in college that The Brady Bunch wasn't reality. It prompted him to drop out of university four weeks before graduation to whimsically take up the then nascent trade of internet marketing. With a pocketful of experiences as an online marketer--like his bosses debating his worth in his presence and future professional sports franchise owners screaming at him about 404 pages--he took the busted internet bubble as a sign to do something completely different, like learn about chocolate and chewing gum, vacuum-sealed coffee, why horses don't have square eyes, and that the next world war will surely be between those who love and hate the PT Cruiser. With those exceptional nuggets of wisdom to wield, he oddly fell into being the "social voice" of one of the largest brands in the world, slinging HDTVs, diamond rings, patio furniture and Twizzlers in bulk; truly a complete and total waste of his superpowers (but a paycheck!). And once he realized his soul was dying, he burned his cape and brandished a pen. One year later, he finished the first draft of his first novel, was nearly broke, staved off foreclosure with a Kickstarter campaign, and started sharing his tome. The truth was, he didn't know the story he wanted to tell until he tried to tell it, and it was this pursuit of truth that kept him writing and rewriting about his love of love, ultimately to complete that first novel... like, a decade later. Robert has been in love many times, and is forever married to his stacks of poems, ideas, travels, and scribbles of wisdom learned (at the completion of this novel, he has learned 435 things about the world, often asking others to pick a number so he can tell their fortune). For you, #1 is free: Even beautiful people have problems, and there's beauty in all of us. #morelove