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Where realism and idealism meet Tony Brasunas, author of Double Happiness

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  • Audiobook Released!

    Just after the Trump-Kamala debate, just in time to help you decipher the endless streams of disinformation coming from the candidates, just as the parties’ surrogates and the Red News and Blue News analysts tell you what to think, I am proud to present the completion of this labor of love.

    Written and read by yours truly, in the hopes of spreading truth, clarity, compassion, and knowledge, this is an audiobook that unpacks corporate media lies and points out a path to a deeper understanding of our world.

    Let me read to you, at your own preferred pace and time:

    » Red White & Blind (the audiobook at Audible) «

    » Red White & Blind (the audiobook at Awesound) «

    Awesound.com is an alternative audiobook distributor that enables you to purchase the book outright and listen to it on any platform you like. I’m running a promo there currently.

    From Bernie to Biden, from Covid to Epstein, from wars to elections, I’ve investigated dozens of recent and historical events in order to illustrate the ways we are deceived. It’s an insidious minefield out there, but I never leave you wallowing in despair over the mountains of disinformation that confront us. The book offers insights and tips from myself and others on how to develop the savvy to discern the truth behind each story—what I call media consciousness. We are in the early phases of a great unveiling, an internet-birthed era that I believe is a New Enlightenment in which we are all gradually awakening to the actual truth about many, many things.

    (more…)
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  • 18 Days: The Countdown is on for Double Happiness!

    Wow!! We’re almost halfway to China! Thank you so much for reading, supporting, and backing Double Happiness! I’m grateful and inspired. We are making a beautiful book together, one that you will soon have in your hands. Thank you!

    We still need to dig deeper to get there. We’re at 41%, not quite halfway, which of course isn’t all the way. So if you’re able to, I need your help to create this book. Please jump in right now, become a Backer, choose your favorite reward, and create Double Happiness with me:

          >> www.DoubleHappy.be/kickstart << If you're not sure what I'm asking, or what this is all about, watch the fun video:       >> www.DoubleHappy.be/kickstart << I'd love your support today so that I know how close - or how far - we really are from the goal. A pledge of any amount helps, even one dollar! This is how it works, if you don't know:

    If your pledges total $8888 or more by June 30, the funds are released, I publish Double Happiness into a beautiful volume, and we share it with the world.

    If I don’t get all the way to $8888 by June 30, I get nothing, zip, zilch, nada, no matter how much anyone pledges, and it’s back to the drawing board with Double Happiness.

    I want to ensure that the first scenario happens. So jump in, help me publish Double Happiness and share this story of teaching, travel, and transformation with the world. My hope all along, from the very first time I put pen to paper with Double Happiness, has been that this story can inspire both those who can leave everything behind and seek their fortune in a faraway land, and those who for whatever reason cannot but are able to access the story through reading.

    Help me share this story:

    www.DoubleHappy.be/kickstart

    Thank you from the bottom of my heart.

    Towards Double Happiness,
    Tony

    ps: If you’re already a Backer, Thank You! Now forward this e-mail to friends who might be interested in books, teaching abroad, adventure travel, China, or coming of age in a foreign land. Thank you, you’re amazing!

  • It’s launched! Kickstarter is here.

    It is with humility and deep gratitude that I arrive at this moment. The top of the mountain that I have been climbing for years is just ahead; the peak is in view. I need you to help me reach it.

    I’m thrilled to announce that the Kickstarter for my book, Double Happiness, just went live.

    If you know what that means, without further ado, here it is:

          >> www.DoubleHappy.be/kickstart << If you're still reading this and don't know what Kickstarter is, read on. Kickstarter is a website that allows people all over the world to contribute financially to creative projects in order to help make them happen. The range of projects funded through Kickstarter is incredibly vast, from unusual metal spice racks to major motion pictures. If you contribute to Double Happiness, you’ll get some great rewards, you’ll take part in publishing a book, and you’ll make me and other potential readers of the book very grateful.

    There are two important rules. Read these twice:

    1. I have until June 30, four weeks, to reach the goal, $8888.

    2. If we don’t get to $8888 by June 30, I get nothing!

    Yes, that’s right. I need to get to $8888, my stated goal, during this month of June. If we do get to $8888, the dream of Double Happiness will become a reality. You’ll take part in creating a wonderful book and share a transformative story with the world and with posterity.

    It’s going to be an exciting 28 days!

    Much more information is on the Kickstarter page. So please visit the page, read it, pick your favorite reward, and contribute early! And please share the page with your friends via facebook, twitter, email, and good old fashioned human conversation.

    THANK YOU!

    I can summit this peak with your help. Join me in the journey and we’ll get there!

    Here’s the page:

              >> www.DoubleHappy.be/kickstart << All my blessings and gratitude to you.

  • Manuscript Excerpt: The Prologue

    PROLOGUE

     

    “Do you want to tickle the dragon?” 

    My father was calling up to me. I was curled near the ceiling in a carpeted cubby he had built as a loft space. Lying on my belly like a snake, I sorted golden rivets into piles: long, yellow brass ones; shorter, reddish copper ones; dull, gray steel ones. It was fun and important work, but I could never resist tickling the dragon.

    I climbed down the ladder and stepped onto the sooty concrete floor. The smell of coal hung in the air around my father’s brick forge. I grabbed hold of the wooden peg on the giant black wheel and pulled it down. The wheel began to turn. Because I wasn’t tall enough, I let the wheel spin the peg back up, and I caught it again as it came down, pulling again so the wheel began to turn faster. Heat radiated in intensifying waves from the hole in the center of the forge, and embers of hot orange and gold flew from the hole. The dragon was breathing!

    “That’s it,” said my father. “Good. He’s awake.” In iron tongs he clutched a long piece of black steel that maybe, finally, he would make into a sword instead of a horseshoe, triangle, or fancy gate.

    But I had to watch from above. He sent me back up to the loft, and I let my head hang over the edge so that I could watch as my father held the steel in the dragon’s breath. The fierce heat now exhaled constantly and turned the steel purple, red, orange, and finally a bright golden white. The flames held my gaze. Is there really a dragon down there, under the concrete floor? I wondered. Does it actually eat the coal we give it every morning?

    He pinched the white-hot steel with the tongs, set it on the anvil, and with a heavy iron hammer, he struck the glowing metal, once, twice, three times, and sparks flew: Long, hairy fragments of orange shot everywhere in an inverted waterfall of light.

     

    This was the end of the 1970s, on a commune in West Virginia. Twelve years earlier, before becoming a blacksmith, my father had been one of the first long-haired hippies at MIT in Boston. He swore he would never wear a tie, and he leapt into the civil rights and peace movements that were sweeping through the country like wildfire.

    Soon he changed course and elected a more personal path to fixing the world. With the woman who would become my mother, he traveled to England and lived for a year in a spiritual community west of Oxford. They learned meditation techniques from the community’s leader, John G. Bennett, a wise and well-traveled man. Bennett determined that the time had come to start a community in the United States, and an estate called Claymont, in West Virginia, with four hundred acres of hilly forests and fertile farmland, was chosen for the purpose. At Claymont, my father turned an old concrete storehouse into a forge while my mother worked in the bookstore and the vegetable gardens. I helped in the forge and attended the three-room school, studying math, French, and art in the mornings alongside the two dozen other children; in the afternoons, our teachers would take us into the loam-smelling woods or down to the gurgling waters of the fish farm.

    After a mere nine years, the commune faltered, rudderless. Bennett’s unexpected death had robbed the experiment of its visionary, and efforts to replace his leadership had largely proven fruitless. My parents had ushered my sister and brother into the world, and they consulted an astrologer for a new path. “Telecommunications” was divined in my father’s future, and he concocted a short resume, tied a tie to his neck, and landed a phone company job in a nearby town.

    I went a different way, breaking with my strange hippie parents and attending a faraway college, exploring a freshness I found in political and cultural conservatism. But the dragon-breath that I fanned as a young boy I had also lit deep inside me, and an interest in travel, a love of languages, and a curiosity about China that my father, through his secondary role as the school’s occasional geography teacher, smoldered in me – and these coals did not die. Math, computer science, and, finally, Chinese drew and held my attention. After my college graduation, I left the United States for the first time. I flew alone to the other side of the planet, and at twenty-two arrived in China with but a few bags and a handful of wild expectations.

    The year was 1997, just before international travel became dominated by the omniscience of smart phones, ATMs, and email – before Google, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and the technologies that would replace them, before the ubiquity of blogs on every imaginable subject. In China, it was an exhilarating and confusing time. The nation’s political isolation was thawing rapidly but unevenly: Many towns and regions were open, but others remained verboten to foreigners, and the motives of Americans in particular were suspect. The excitement was palpable: Hong Kong was reverting to Chinese rule after 157 years of British colonialism, the economy was heating up like a blacksmith’s forge, a building boom featuring modern glass and steel was transforming cities small and large, and formidable international honor from things like the Olympics had become more than a gleam in the eye of well-placed officials. It was before 9-11, before the “War on Terror,” before American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan; in many ways it was a simpler time for Americans to travel. In every other respect it was just like today.

     

    The steel glowed in the flames as if coated with honey-hued neon. My father pulled it out and flipped it over on the anvil.

    High-pitched notes rang off the walls as his hammer pounded, metal-on-metal. Sparks leapt through the air, danced across the floor, vanished. Slowly the steel cooled under the transformative blows.

    Could it be? I watched the steel flatten, lengthen, darken.

    He dipped the steel into a barrel of water beside the anvil, sending clouds of steam hissing into the air. He motioned that I could climb down.

    “Are you making a sword?” I asked.

    “What else are you going to be carrying – if you find a dragon that isn’t friendly?”

    I stepped towards the blade.

    “Let it cool,” he said, a hand on my shoulder. “It will be yours soon.”

  • Why the Amount $8888?

    Why $8888?

    This amount is the minimum I need to produce Double Happiness. Fortuitously, 8888, or 88-88, also happens to be a number the Chinese consider extraordinarily lucky. In fact the pairs of eights are considered to resemble and evoke the principle of shuang xi – “double happiness” – one meaning of which is the happiness that comes from the union of two things. So for Double Happiness, $8888 is both essential and lucky.

  • Four Reasons I’m Publishing My Book With Kickstarter

    After revising my manuscript for ten years, working with a professional literary agent for two years, and exploring every high and low of the various publishing industries in the United States, here in 2013 I’ve discovered that the perfect way to publish Double Happiness is independently with a Kickstarter.com campaign.

    Why? For me, there are four main reasons: Adventure, Timing, Creative Control, and Community.

    1. Adventure – At its heart, my book, Double Happiness is a tale of adventure, and Kickstarter brings adventure to the whole process of publishing a book. It’s a risk to put my dreams out there on some web page and hope for the best. It might not work! I don’t know who I’m going to find — or be found by — out there. I know only that I have a vision and a path, and that I have the means to walk that path. It was taking exactly this kind of risk that led to the journeys and discoveries Double Happiness is written to share.

    2. Timing – With the big publishing houses, I’ve learned that books generally do not come out for at least a year after the author signs and closes the big deal. Often it takes even longer, depending on where your book is on the house’s priority list, and how it fits in with their marketing plans and goals. Exceptions are made for exceptionally time-sensitive books (your book on the Super Bowl, for instance, in mid-January, or your biography of a political candidate in the midst of a campaign), but Double Happiness would not fit in that category. If I use Kickstarter and independently publish the book, I get to determine the ideal time for the book to come out, even if that ideal time is right away.

    3. Creative Control – Sometimes professional editors in Manhattan know exactly what you are trying to say — or what you should be trying to say. Sometimes they don’t have a clue, or should just leave well enough alone. This can cut both ways, of course, and at certain points in the writing process editors can provide very helpful insights. Double Happiness has been meticulously edited by myself and several professional editors, but because it’s an unusual and highly personal book — with maps and epigraphs, and with an epilogue and prologue set in contrasting time periods — being able to make the final decisions on what goes in and what stays out of the manuscript is very appealing to me. I get to deliver to my readers a beautiful book, a flawlessly-edited book, and above all, the book I deeply longed to write.

    4. Community – Through Kickstarter, the book begins and is brought into the world as a collective project and as part of a shared experience with the readers themselves. This promises to be a magical part of the whole journey to publication. I hope everyone who’s ever traveled or hoped to travel jumps on board!


    Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it? I sense it’s going to work for me. But it might not. And of course if you’ve just completed your manuscript, your mileage may vary considerably. Your particularly desires, ambitions, and creative predilections may indicate finding an agent and selling your manuscript to a publishing house is your best path.

    For me, Kickstarter feels perfect. I can’t wait to go live and launch it!

    When will that be? I’m working on the video and rewards for the campaign now, and they’re nearly done. I will launch my Kickstarter publication campaign this month! To get an email note when we launch, subscribe to this blog or go to facebook.com/DoubleHappy and click to “Like” the page. I do hope you’ll explore my Kickstarter campaign when it begins, and if you fancy, get on board, join the community, contribute to the campaign, and help publish Double Happiness!

  • What My Mother Asked

    When I had dinner with my mother last Friday night, she asked me a straightforward question, but it made me pause.

    She asked, “What exactly do you want us to do?”

    I looked at her.

    “With your book,” she said. “There is the blog and the Kickstarter (which hasn’t started yet) and the Facebook and the this and the that. But what do you want us to do right now?”

    There could be no confusion! I thought. But if my mother needed to ask, perhaps I should spell it out. Perhaps I don’t have this blogging thing down quite yet.

    I’m doing what I’ve longed to do for years — independently publishing my book, my labor of love and joy. There are several phases of this project.

    Right now, the current phase is: Building a base, a community, so as to best find the interested patrons who might support my endeavor as well as to find the readers for whom Double Happiness was written.

    Right now, if you have a minute, please:

    1. Visit www.facebook.com/DoubleHappy
    2. “Like” the page.
    3. Click on the gearwheel and “Share” the page.

    Voila! That’s it. That would be amazing and would help get the word out to all who will find the writing in Double Happiness useful, engaging, funny, or interesting. Little things are rarely little things. Something was said once about a butterfly flapping its wings in China.

    There will be more phases in the very near future, things almost too exciting for me to type out here. I’m about to jump out of this plane I’ve been riding in safely for about a decade. I hope you will be a small part of my parachute.

  • Facebook and Kickstarter get Double Happy

    The journey is long and sweet to that day when a beautiful copy of Double Happiness is in your hands. Two quick updates on where it is, and how you can help…

    Facebook

    I’ve upgraded the Double Happiness facebook page. Check it out. If you like the way the page looks, or if you like travel books about China, or if you like Double Happiness itself, or if you like me, or if you feel like clicking a button, click to LIKE the page.

    Share the page with anyone else you know who might like these things — anyone who is interested in travel, China, teaching or living abroad, backpacking, or a young man’s coming of age in a foreign land.

    Let’s get to 100 likes by the end of the week!

    www.facebook.com/DoubleHappy

    And if you don’t like the page, tell me why, leave a comment.

    Kickstarter

    To raise the funds to bring Double Happiness into the world, I’ll be using Kickstarter.com, which, if you haven’t heard of it, is like a superhero that enables the universe of interested souls to be the modern independent artist’s patron saint. Everyone interested in an artistic project pitches in, instead of just one publisher, label, or company. You can be a Patron of the Arts, a modern Maecenas, for as little as $1!

    For the Kickstarter page I’m going to create a video. I want to share with the world the original inspiration and current vision for Double Happiness. Do you know of any great video creators or filmmakers who could possibly help me here, even if for just an hour one afternoon or evening? I would be eternally grateful (and able to offer a small amount of money). Someone with either interview skills, videography skills, or video editing skills — or all three! — would be perfect. Let me know! Write your suggestions in a comment below, or email me directly.

    Thank you. I’m humbled by your support. Towards Double Happiness for all!

  • Book Designers: Who Are They, and Why Would I Hire One?

    I talked to two book designers this week. It’s exciting and quite the roller coaster ride going this route — independently publishing my book.

    Wait, who did I talk to? Book designers? Am I looking for someone to select the colors of my book’s cover?

    Well, yes. But that’s not the job of the book designer.

    Book Design is the art and science of laying out the interior of the book, from the title page to the index, and everything in between. A book designer will design the Table of Contents and the Glossary, and, if talented, make the first page of each chapter visually interesting and beautiful. Book designers not only know typography and font pairing, but also typesetting and making the pages look and feel like a book. When you’re in a bookstore and you open to a random page in a book, and the font is appealing and there’s a “running head” telling you the chapter you’re in, and you notice that both the left and right page have the same number of lines, you’re probably looking at a book designer’s work. These things don’t happen by accident.

    Double Happiness is going to be a beautiful book, both in print and in e-book formats. That’s been my vision since the first step of this journey. I am a web designer by day, but I’m not going to teach myself book design and risk making a bunch of novice’s mistakes.

    What are your favorite visual elements of the books you love? What would you like to see for Double Happiness?

  • The Time is Here!

    The manuscript is done, and so many other necessary preliminary steps are complete. It’s time to publish Double Happiness!

    I will now be regularly updating this space, asking and answering questions, and detailing the road that takes me from a meticulously edited manuscript to a beautiful book in your hands or attractive file on your kindle. I will be hiring a cover designer, book designer, and an illustrator en route to independently publishing.

    This labor of love, this journey so long and sweet, is now moving into its final phase. There is still much to do. Follow along with me here if you’re interested in independent publishing or in travel through Asia or in teaching abroad or in China or in simply reading a young man’s tale of fear, delight, and discovery.

    A tale of a young American’s coming of age in a faraway land, the book will be titled Double Happiness: One Man’s Tale of Love, Loss, and Wonder on the Long Roads of China.

    I would like to take this moment to thank my agent, Susan Lee Cohen of Riverside Literary Agency, for all her hard work, smart ideas, and wise counsel.

    I would also like to thank Intuition, that great universal deity that plays such a vital role in Double Happiness, and that has played already a powerful part in this journey to publication.

    Thank You!

  • First You Must Learn to Walk

    It’s ironic that this blog began by calling the process of writing and publishing my book a journey, a march of 10,000 miles.

    Certainly everything about my time in China, and about writing this book, now does seem to comprise a trek. But it’s been a strange, even cyclical one. I started the journey a decade ago, and now I’ve seemingly had another detour, or I’ve started over, or I’ve done the whole thing in reverse. I’ve literally relearned to walk.

    I’m back on my feet after my November knee surgery, and how sweet it is. To be mobile again, to be up on my hind legs once again, like a homo sapiens. It’s difficult to describe. We take our bodily health, our mobility, our evolution, for granted at our mental and emotional peril.

    Happily, I resume the journey where I left off, or perhaps even a few steps ahead. Things continue apace toward the publication of Double Happiness. I completed some revisions to the manuscript and the book proposal, and both items are now in the capable hands of my agent. She is now approaching publishers, carrying our shared dream of placing the book at a major house.

    She’s at the helm, and I’m not needed in the process as much anymore, which has brought another interesting cocktail of feelings: a delightful relief that I’m part of a team working towards the birth of this book, mixed with a puzzling sensation of absence akin to what parents must feel when their children are with a babysitter. Wait, where’s my book?

    Yes, I have less news to report to you these days, since I’m now less involved in the nitty gritty of the publication process. What would you like to know about writing and publishing a book? Or about traveling and living in China?

    One exciting bit of news I do have to report is that I participated in the I Live Here: SF project. For my contribution, I wrote about my experiences coming to San Francisco and falling in love with the city. The creative mind and literate photographer behind the project, Julie Michelle, took a bunch of pictures of me so she could choose one to include in her gallery opening, which featured the writings and photographs of some two hundred San Francisco residents from all walks of life.

    And voila, I have a collection of professional photos from which to choose the ideal author portrait! What do you think? The photos are here. How do you like the one I’ve tentatively selected for the inset? And what about the one on the author page? Are they better than the ones you voted on before in the portrait poll? I feel an almost guilty sense of vanity in asking you to look at all these pictures of me. But hey, I need an author photo for the book proposal and the cover of the book. So thank you. Click to “Leave a Comment” below. I’m not that vain. Right?

    Or perhaps vanity is a temporary phase that occurs in any journey, somewhere around the 9,000th mile, somewhere between learning to walk and learning to run.