Breakthrough Novel "Stories from the Age of Distraction" tackles the toll of Digital Technology on Creative Expression and Human Interaction

May 22, 2015 - Imagine a global E-book, a communication renaissance, a world where we once again re-engage with language and with each other! "Stories from the Age of Distraction" by Patricia M. Mahon (www.pmmahon.com) is a call to arms to take back the written word and reignite the art of storytelling.

The book's main protagonists, Morgan Byrnes and her best friend Percy Chadwick have been writing stories back and forth across social media platforms for years, but when others start adding to the dialogue, the idea for a global storytelling app is born. Morgan, a speech writer, and Percy, a school teacher, detect a "distraction crisis" and dream about re-engaging the "dropped head" generation to save the vernacular of the 21st century before our collective voices are lost to the ages.

"The art of the story is now in the fight of its life. It is tilting at windmills as cyber technology and shared platforms overtake plot, structure, and meaning. Such is the glaring limitation of our newly networked life."

After turning down funding from high-powered, censor-hawking Silicon Valley investors, Morgan and Percy decide to go it alone and develop their app with the help of freelance techno-geek, Rowley Gaines. The trio journeys across continents and time zones moving in and out of the lives of tragic and heroic characters as the world's story is finally told. For his part in the creative odyssey, Rowley is profoundly and utterly changed.

"His life had been an easy hack. His desires were locked in safe mode with old passwords, fixed defaults, and self-populating caches. He had been defragged to the bone, and he could no Google™ or Bing™ his way back into the human race."

We meet gamblers, surfers, dress-makers and dreamers; and when the lines between virtual reality and actuality get blurred, our three heroes find themselves on a remote island in the South Atlantic … the ideal ecosystem to stop, embrace nature, confirm reality, and come face to face with those things that make stories so timeless and the desire to tell them so universal.

"The journey was neither a small step nor a giant leap … it was an epic vault of consciousness for all those that had lost touch with their soul."

As the titans of world literature whisper across its pages, the book is a story-within-a story that re-connects us to art, self-expression, and modern romanticism … so we can claim the dynamic conversation of our time.

"Stories from the Age of Distraction: The Island" is the first in a series of stories about the impact of technology on relationships, creative expression, and the timeless tradition of storytelling.

Volume One is available on Smashwords at http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/544593 and more information is also available at: www.theageofdistraction.com.