A speech I gave at the Lion's Club in Titusville Pennsylvania, my hometown

Good evening my name is Anthony Mirarchi, Tony to those who know me.  I came to this town in 1965 to work for Universal Cyclops.  And I found one of the benefits of living in a small town immediately, cheaper auto insurance.  At least that’s what Bob Schneider told me.

My  wife taught school first at Hyde Town then later in the middle school. We had two boys and in 1979, we moved back to Pittsburgh with Cyclops.  A  short five years and we came back when they relocated the corporate headquarters here.

I worked with Ed Myer in the recreation center and helped start the soccer league and later petitioned the school to start a varsity program.  I wound up coaching the team for four years then turned it over to some one who knew a lot more about coaching than I did.

My relationship with Cytemp ended and I got a job that gave me a lot more free time. That’s when I started to write.  I joined a writing club in Erie and found out I didn’t know anything about how to write fiction, but over the next several years I wrote a science fiction time travel novel that I though it was pretty good.  Through the writing club I had an agent read it who told me it was well written, but it was not a page turner and she would not represent me.  That discouraged me for a little while, but then I got another idea and wrote a full length vampire novel.  Now this is where a writer discovers the difficulties of the publishing business.  I wrote hundreds of letters, sent out hundreds of emails, but I couldn’t get an agent to represent me or a publisher to even look at it.  I gave up on that to evaluate what I could do.  I decided that maybe my style lent itself more to younger readers.  So I got another idea and began writing this novel, Cristo’s chronicles – Book One The King’s Challenge.  I finished it and was lucky enough to get an agent and a publisher and finally here it is.  This book is written for the young adult market - ages 8 to 14, but several of my local friends who have read it said they enjoyed it.  Nevertheless I’m hoping most you have grandchildren in that age group.

            So you ask what’s it about.  It’s about time, that is the measurement of time.  It’s obviously fiction, but it offers a plausible explanation of how a sundial and a early calendar were developed.

            Today we live in a society where time controls every aspect of our lives.  We wake up a 7 am get to work by 8.  Meet someone for lunch at noon and have a doctor’s appointment at 3.  We need to know what day it, what month, what year. We need to know how old we are , when we were born and when did everything that we ever learned about happen.  Everything has a date and a time associated with it.

Now imagine yourself back about five thousand years ago, no  clocks, no calendar, no counting and no writing. You wouldn’t know how old you were because numbers and years hadn’t yet been discovered.  Your mother might have told you were born in the warm season, but you could not possibly determine an actual day.

            Your day would probably begin at dawn and you might have some concept of where you were during the day by checking the position of the sun.  You could guess at midmorning, midday, midafternoon, and dark.  That was good enough for some, but if you were a farmer , you needed a better grasp of the seasons.  A traveling merchant might like to know more about the length of the day and a craftsman might want a more accurate measure of the time it took to make his product.

            My guess would be that some people knew more about these things than others, but since there was no writing there would have been no way to know what others had learned and it seems likely that if you or someone in your family discovered something that gave you an advantage, you would be very reluctant to tell anyone.  A farmer that figured out when to plant based on some learned knowledge in his family wouldn’t reveal his secrets.  A craftsman would not be eager to tell  that he found a better, shorter way to make his product lest in his bartering with others he might get less return value for each item.

So that’s the premise of the book.  The King lays down a challenge to the wise men of his country to find an answer to these problems and freely give that knowledge to everyone.  The king’s wizard, Lord Allard, takes up the challenge and my hero, Cristo, a young boy finagles his way into helping him.  An adventure story develops with a spy, a kidnapping and an escape through dangerous mountain territory.

The real challenge in the book is to figure out how anyone could conduct an experiment that requires writing and counting without the knowledge of those two skills.  The critical things that you need to identify are the longest, the shortest and the equal days of the year also the days in between.  It would seem that counting and writing would be necessary to determine this information. 

It took me a long time to figure how to do this and I leave it to the reader to decide if they agree with my solution.  You have to read the book to find out.  Remember it is fiction.

I wrote this book to encourage young people to think about the technological advantages of our present society and how we got here.  Most of us learned in school about Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Albert Einstein. These people are revered for their contribution to science and technology, but the greatest discoveries of mankind, fire, the wheel, the calendar, counting and writing have no known authors and for the most part we cannot be sure of when and what peoples were primarily responsible for these discoveries.  Nevertheless each of them was more than the technological equivalent of radio, television and computers and did more to improve cultural development than the more recent discoveries.

I couldn’t do anything with fire and the wheel, but I tried to take on as much as I could concerning the other ancient discoveries.  This is book one of a trilogy.  Book two then carries forward what was learned by Cristo and his mentor, Lord Allard, and they go on to develop a counting system.  Book three stretches the connection to develop a writing system.  Cristo proves his worthiness in each book by contributing his own ideas to each discovery.  The adventure side is maintained by more kidnapping and dire situations that require Cristo to show courage as well as brilliance.

I think the books are interesting, educational and inspiring.  I hope most of the readers agree.  I wanted the young reader to realize that our measurement of time is an arbitrary system that could have ended differently.  The standardized use of seconds, minutes, hours, weeks and months occurred over a long time and were accepted universally either because they solved the existing problems or there were no better solutions.   But there are different solutions.  People have worked at the metrification of time that is get us off the 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour.  You could change the length of a second, minute and hour and have 100 seconds per minute and 100 minutes per hour and only 10 per am and pm. Also a thirteen month calendar has been suggested with 28 days per month with each day of the week always falling on the same numbers.  Sundays would always be the first, the 8^th, the 15^th and the 22^nd.  The only fixed times are the length of the day and the length of the year and they can be segmented many different ways.   It gives you something to think about.    

Before I take questions I want to familairize you with some of the economics of the publishing business.  About 200,000 books are published each year. 99 percent don’t sell 100 copies.  I’m happy to say I’ve sailed by that level, but to consider this book at least an economic success I need to sell about 4000 copies. Then I have a reasonable chance of getting books 2 and 3 published.  I’m also not in the most lucrative or popular market segment which is romance which is about 57 percent of the market, followed by mystery and thrillers. I don’t know what percent the young adult market is, but I’m sure that Harry Potter has most of it.  When I got my first copy of the book I sent out an email to all my friends in which I said you better hurry and buy this book. Its going to be “Hotter then Potter” then I wrote, "well maybe not.  It’s a long way from 100 to a hundred million."