Dec 21
13
My purpose in life
“Before there was anything, I AM that, I AM”
-Doug Ferguson/“Brad Cullen”
I’m a published writer …but it’s not my identity. I write commercially and do business under the name my birth parents tagged me with, Doug Ferguson; I write things of a spiritual nature under the pseudonym “Brad Cullen.”
I wrote my first novel, Leapfrog, anonymously, just as I had all books and articles of a spiritual genre up until 2003.
After seven rejections, my agent in Los Angeles called me with the good news – a major publisher in New York had accepted Leapfrog on the condition that it be published with an author’s name rather than anonymously.
Why that particular publishing event never took place was that on the day I was enclosing the contracts for the book along with the movie rights, with my signature into a DHL envelope addressed to the agent – was laying on my desk, unsealed was when I was kidnapped.
I’d already insisted that Leapfrog not be published under Doug Ferguson, because of a swirling and complicated legal/political situation that was threatening and swirling about me like a violent storm.
That storm culminated in my being kidnapped and falsely accused of several crimes, which is a long and separate story related elsewhere.
A young lady, one of my agent’s staff readers, who had been responsible for the agent accepting the novel in the first place, was suggesting that it be published under “Brad Cullen” one of the main characters in Leapfrog. Brad Cullen was officially “born” as my pseudonym.
The history behind my writing Leapfrog is really quite simple; I was operating from a base in Kampala, Uganda as a business consultant to and a writer for the Lake Victoria Free Trade Zone in liaison with the LVFTZ Governor’s staff.
A member of that staff, a lawyer, happened to be a fan of my anonymously written (pre-Brad Cullen) books and articles carried on a website I’d put together with the domain, www.ministryofspirit.com (no longer online).
The lawyer was also mutual friends with a doctor and her husband, a prominent businessman, in Kampala who had encouraged me to write a novel based on the true stories with which they were familiar, “Because,” he had said, “with a novel based on a true story, you can get across the spiritual principles you’ve taught us, far more effectively with more people than by writing about them directly.”
The couple had read the first Leapfrog draft and had made several suggestions.
The couple and the lawyer were strong supporters of the spiritual work I did in the east/central African “bush” founding house fellowships throughout Kenya, Uganda and Rwanda.
Leapfrog and a later book, Integration of the Mind became the basis of my own simple religion, which I explain in a 2015 article that is accompanied by a video-cast, an interview about the article, My Simple Religion, link below.