This epilogue will just provide the history to this novel, which includes the reason for its tragic end.

November 2018 was a pivotal month in the history of Tiered Democratic Governance. A year previous, I had rewritten the TDG book, enhanced the website, and put together an ebook. My inspiration was the ascendency of Donald J Trump as the 45th president of the United States. "Surely," I thought, "the world would be ready for my new ideas on democracy."

After a year of Google and Facebook Ads and many hours on political forums, there was no interest. I thought it was time to put this project back on the shelf, for the fourth time in 21 years.

But a commentator from a G+ political forum, Richard Gillespie, suggested that I write a novel about the TDG. With an easier-to-read novel, I would be teaching about the TDG in a different way. But I had not written fiction before, and I had no desire to write fiction. It seemed like a strange idea at the time.

But after a few months, a setting, characters, and a plot came to me. And I thought, "I can write this story." In May 2019, I started moving the story from my mind to paper. The first draft of Diary of a Future Politician almost wrote itself. It was a very mystical experience, with the story's output being limited by the speed of my keyboarding.

After the first draft was done, I asked Mark Hunter, a not-so-well known novelist, to teach me a few things about better fiction writing. Between him and my long-time editor, Cherie Tyers, we got this story ready in about six drafts.

In the third draft, two new stories were coming to me. These stories were building on the setting, characters, and plot from Diary. These two stories became Confessions of a Future Politician and Circles of a Future Politician. And did they ever consume me! I could not stop thinking about them.

But I knew I had to get the first book done first. Trying to revise a current work was difficult when future work was crowding my mind. It was a strange life situation—especially for a first-time fiction writer.

When the two new stories were bouncing between my ears and I was trying to suppress them, a voice said to me: "Dave, you have to kill Thelma off in a dramatic way and in the service of the TDG.Here's how Confessions will lead into Circles." The tragic ending you just finished reading was set in stone months before I put the first sentence of Confessions into my computer.

Diary was finished in April 2020. Then I started writing Confessions, and I again experienced the mystical phenomenon of a story almost writing itself. And this time, I needed fewer drafts to get this novel to my satisfaction, probably because most of this story was developed during my revision of Diary.

The next novel, Circles of a Future Politician was written concurrently with Confessions. It was a great sense of relief to get the first draft of Circles into my computer. The two stories were now somewhere other than between my ears. Circles builds on the setting, characters, and plot of Diary and Confessions. Circles should be ready by December 2021.


In my TDG book, I outline four stages of TDG development. Diary represents the first stage. Confessions and Circles represent the second stage. I have a fourth book percolating-and it will represent the third stage. Thankfully, this fourth book is not as consuming as the second and third book.


I'm not going to claim that Confessions is going to win any great literary awards. I recognize my limitations as a fiction writer.

But my writing is good enough to tell an important story. Confessions is a story of average people building a new kind of democracy. A wiser democracy. A kinder democracy. No other writer in the world is telling this kind of story.

The purpose of Diary, Confessions, and Circles is to show future TDG builders how to build that democracy.  I hope readers can see themselves in Thelma's and other characters' positions. Just ordinary people just attending a few meetings a month.

This early TDG really is not that hard to build. It requires a time commitment of about 10 hours a month. It requires deliberate learning of a few new "democratic" tools. And it requires associating with people outside one's normal social circles. But if these outsiders have adopted the TDG basics principles, they will be fun people to work with.

So what's going to be your role? Remember you have just read a book about how to build a new democracy. You are one of the first people in the world to read anything like this! Maybe—just maybe—you have just been given a great responsibility to really change the world.

For just a few hours a month! What do you really have to lose?


Dave Volek
Inventor
Tiered Democratic Governance
July 2021