10/21/25
I find myself caught up for the moment...I'm on-hold for the artist and the cover designer for my book, and then I need to publish it through Amazon and IngramSpark. That may be at least a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I've done all the preliminary work I can do. Yesterday, I put together a video introduction that's under a minute, which I'll probably put at the front of my next video blog entry. I'm even thinking of using it to introduce talks, if I'm in a position to give them. But I want to have that printed book in-hand when I shoot the video blog.

So being caught up on a lovely Maine fall day, after months of intense activity, is something of a bittersweet feeling. And in such a moment, the thought rolls around my head which I have had before...not just, "does anybody believe me," but can anybody believe me?

The reason this comes up, is not the mocking responses, which I have had relatively few of. Nor is it the "thunderous silence," which I have had a great deal of! It's the polite ones...the sympathetic ones...the friends and acquaintances, and the polite literary agents. A metaphor will say this far more clearly than I can explain it. Let me think for a moment...

I walk up to you, and I tell you that I have found a diamond the size of a golf ball. I have it in my car, and if only you will walk about half a block with me, I will show it to you.

Not only don't you believe me, but no matter how hard you tried, you would be literally unable to believe me. It is beyond your power. You will not be walking that half a block with me, because everybody knows I don't have a diamond the size of a golf ball in my car. If I really did have one, it wouldn't matter. You could not make your legs walk half a block.

Now, if you prided yourself on your open-mindedness, or your refined manners, or your social tolerance, you might say, "That's nice, but I can't spare the time right now." I get a lot of variations on "that's nice." And I know that anyone who says "that's nice" doesn't believe me, even if their lips should form the words, "I believe you." How do I know? Because if anyone believed, for half-a-half-a-second, that I had found a diamond the size of a golfball, and I had it a block away in my car, he or she would be running to see it!

Logically, the "wow response," or lack thereof, is an unfallible acid test. Every single human being who has failed to give that response, hasn't believed me. Not deep down. No exceptions.

But the question today is, are they even capable of it?

I say, no. And I also say that if anyone tried, he or she would be faking it. Nobody gets this. And it would be a source of nearly unbearable frustration for me, if I didn't step back from it. Never mind the gentle depression I feel right now. I would be screaming.

But, no. I go on doing what I do because I was born to do this. What's going to happen if I complete everything I was born to do, and not a single person has believed me? I'll have to leave this world and let the whole thing turn to dust, because at that point, my focus will be elsewhere. I will have done my best, which is all anyone can ever hope to do.

In this intensive examination of Charles Dickens' handwritten manuscript (his second draft) of "A Christmas Carol," I found at least 10 smoking guns. I was just counting them a little while ago. A few of them merely prove that he was copying, by rote, from an earlier manuscript, portions of which he was unfamiliar with. But some of them prove that he was doing a very incompetent job of dumbing down a sacred masterpiece. What we have, today, is the clownish result of that desecration. When "A Christmas Carol" has been made into a movie, or a play, perhaps 70% of the damage he did has been aside. Directors simply don't use those revisions. So the movie, or the play, is somewhat more authentic to Mathew and Abby Whittier's original conception. Except that it wasn't a ghost story, and it wasn't secular.

There is one other reason why someone might not give the "wow response," and that's if they simply don't care. But I don't care right back at them. Their opinion is not what I'm after. I'm after the people who are inspired by "A Christmas Carol," who love it, but who mistakenly associate it with Dickens.

They have a surprise in store. They would only need to read this book, "The Sacred Carol." I dare any such person to read it, cover-to-cover. Encounter those ten smoking guns. Understand that the logic is undeniable. And, change. Because a whole new world is there for you--a whole new appreciation of what the "Carol" really is.

I just don't know how to get it across to people. I feel like I'm shouting into an abyss...

Sincerely,

Stephen Sakellarios, M.S.