The Goddess Effect Act III, part one

Why I’m releasing the never before seen third act of The Goddess Effect

I had a thought while driving down Silver Lake Boulevard yesterday. What if I published the part of The Goddess Effect that got lopped off?

I started writing The Goddess Effect in 2015; by the time I completed it, three years later, it was almost 70,000 words long and unbalanced in more ways than one. The main issue: the big reveal at the Ojai Valley Ranch sets the stage for another, bigger reveal at a location that you’ll soon discover, should you care to keep reading. While I thought that this was perfectly fine, the agent with whom I worked after The Goddess Effect got roundly rejected by a dozen some odd publishers (maybe more, I’ve blocked that episode from my brain) suggested that I do away with Act III and flesh out all that precedes it.

It was not bad advice. The leaner version of The Goddess Effect was what the agent who finally sold it read, and I stand by the book that was published in 2022. It has strength like The Rock. The third act, which sprawls out over more than 60 pages, might’ve made it flabby.

But here, on Substack, we get to be flabby. We allow our flesh to hang over the waistband of our proverbial sweatpants. No sucking in! So like Charles mo-fo-ing Dickens, I’m going to release the third act of The Goddess Effect in installments, much like my friend Jo Piazza is doing with her #tradwife novel on her Substack. If the Internet is our playground, we might as well have some fun.

In not so shocking news, apart from some delicately sliced off previews, the meat of this act will be for paid subscribers only. Dickens charged by the word! Consider yourselves lucky.

It may go without saying, but I would also recommending reading The Goddess Effect in full before embarking on this journey. Get it wherever books are sold or loaned, or here.

The Goddess Effect, Act III

Some preamble: Adil, the founder of the Gig, the new age commune in which Anita and Max live, was originally Adam, a Persian-American entrepreneur who made millions in an earlier dot com boom. And Adam … kind of has the hots for Anita. Hints were dropped in the preceding chapters; that storyline comes into full bloom here. 

Paul is Stacy’s husband. His name was changed to Colt in a later draft. Paul, in this version, is a flailing movie producer with a penchant for infidelity and a vague resemblance to a movie magnate who got (duly) #MeToo-ed. 

Adam, at this point, has most of his eggs in a basket called Evolve, a conference that he and Paul are putting together in the vein of Summit. This was written in 2018, the golden age of global innovation-adjacent conferences, when founders of various stripes earned their stripes jetting from one keynote to another. Nice work if you could get it!

In the last chapter, Anita confronts Venus about her supplement malfeasance at the Ojai Valley Ranch, eeking out a confession while live-streaming. The offending ingredient in the supplement, called Super Sand, isn’t collagen, it’s 1,3-dimethylamylamine, an amphetamine derivative. Basically, Super Sand = speed.

Please forgive any typos or inconsistencies you might encounter. As both author and editor, I am bound to miss things. Feel free to post questions in the comments section and I will answer as I’m able.

Okay! Act III, take two.

18

Adam rolled his carry on through San Francisco International Airport, fumbling with his phone to pull up his boarding pass. The great irony of mobile boarding passes was that they generally made travel more inconvenient (a bar code on a screen never scanned as easily as the paper kind) and heightened the chance of disaster. If, in the process of trying to load your boarding pass, you dropped your device on the linoleum floor of the terminal and cracked its incredibly expensive glass facade, good luck appearing even remotely professional at wherever it was that you were going. Capable people didn’t crack their phones. 

He smiled as the app refreshed and revealed that he’d been upgraded to first. Thank God. He’d be able to relax in the lounge with a drink instead of arguing with the gate agents. When he was at Berkeley, heady from the success of his early domain name flips, he fantasized that by the time he was 40, he’d have a private jet, a G6 with seats of sumptuous tan leather and a crew of flight attendants with the type of waist to hip ratio that made men weak in the knees. He wasn’t quite there yet, but now that Paul had bought into Evolve, maybe he was one step closer to never again having to endure the injustice inflicted on him by the Transportation Security Administration, like the agent he faced now, who furrowed her brow at his driver’s license, trying to figure out if Aadam Madani was one of them or if he was just trying to catch hold of the American dream, like the rest of the immigrants. For years after 9/11, they swabbed his hands, claiming to have picked up something on the scanner that looked like bomb residue. He stopped moisturizing because of it. 

The agent handed his I.D. back with a curt, “next.” He coasted through the metal detectors without incident and, on the other side, after applying some cream from the tiny tube of L'Occitane he kept in his carry on, strode confidently into the first class lounge, where he pulled out a seat at the bar and ordered a pinot noir. He scanned the low tables and gray couches for something to admire while he bided his time, but it was all businessmen in suits, or the San Francisco version of a suit — half zip pullover, dark jeans, logo-less sneakers. Everyone stared at screens, scrolling for some insight on the future. It was a study in middle aged, upper middle class boredom, the opposite of the environment he hoped to cultivate at Evolve.

He had had this thought the last time he attended Summit Series, after a yoga session led by a former prison inmate trying to get more men of color into holistic health practices, after a lecture from a new age Dr. Ruth who talked about relationship accountability and grading potential partners on a scale that ranged from white to red (red: most promising, white: elicits a level of passion akin to one’s feelings for a random gas station attendant), and after a purple-lit dance party in which a three piece band did Ukulele covers of ‘90s rap classics while he smoked way too much weed. The next morning, mind foggy, mouth dry, he roused himself from his cedar-scented suite and made it down to the ski lodge’s vaulted grand hall just as the conference organizers ceremoniously lifted a black sheet draped over a folding table, revealing dozens of bottles of nootropics, which the attendees jumped on as if a piñata had just been cracked open.