May | 2021 | J. Paul Cooper, Writer

Caslem, Earth’s first deep-space colony is attacked by a pair of assassins. A small DNA sample proves they belong to a species known as Therloxians, nicknamed Teddy Bears by humans. To provide them with an alibi, Karzon, the planet that hired the assassins, has them registered as prisoners at a mining complex on the Karzonian home planet.
Fearing that Earth computers have been hacked, the Earth Security Divison has to find and train someone who is off the grid. Coulter Hazlow, a student at the Western Canadian Space Academy in Calgary accepts the assignment. All Coulter has to do is travel into deep-space, get thrown in prison by a brutal totalitarian regime, find and kill two professional assassins, and escape from a prison no one has ever escaped from before. He’ll need some help.

I’ve just self-published this eBook using Draft2Digital. The ISBN is 9798201994990

If you’ve ever listened to motivation gurus, one of their favourite techniques is to begin by talking about regrets. They ask you to imagine what it would be like to grow old, your memories filled with nothing but remorse for all the things you didn’t do when you were younger. Unfortunately, whether they intend it or not, the message they’re sending is that unless you do amazing things all your life, you’re insignificant. It’s a lie.

It has been five years since one of my best friends died at age fifty-one. He came to Canada from Laos in his early teens, after spending two years in a refugee camp in Thailand with his family. He struggled learning English, which may have been due to a hearing impairment that was discovered later in life. He had a hard life, and never achieved the kind of success that most people would describe as “making history.” But, he did make history, just as we all do.

You can think of time as a river, and each of us is a stone in that river. As each person is born, he or she is added to the river. When someone dies, he or she is removed from the river. My friend was in the that river, influencing how it flowed for fiftfy-one years. One of my aunts, if she survives just two more weeks, will have influenced the flow for one hundred years.

If you look at a river, the larger stones may be more visible, but where the river flows is ultimately determined by the influence of all the stones in the river combined. When we think of great battles, we often focus on the leaders, but aircraft don’t fly unless someone fills their tanks with fuel, soldiers don’t have the energy to fight unless they have been fed, and ships don’t head to sea, unless someone keeps the egines running.

Let’s not forget that just like every stone in a river has an impact on the flow of water, every one of us has an influence on the flow of history. You don’t have to be on the cover of an entertainment magazine, have a bestselling novel or an Oscar winning screenplay to be significant. If you’re reading this essay, then you’re still in the river, influencing the flow of time. Keep writing, make some history.

J. Paul Cooper, Writer

Month: May 2021

Hunting Teddy Bears

Making History