25 February 2024

What An Amazing February! More music & updates!

What a month! The shortest month is always full of so many events I can hardly keep up. First was the Day of the Groundhog (not the horror film), in which I simultaneously began the process of moving to a new 'writing studio' (at which I shall also eat, wash, sleep, and collect mail). Next came my child's birthday, which is no longer a big deal now that she's well into adulthood. Then, be still my quickly  anticipating heart, the Kansas City Chiefs, my hometown team since I was a little boy (I watched Super Bowl I live on TV), played in and won the Super Bowl, which was their second in a row and third victory in four visits in five years, an incredible feat! That after a 50-year absence from the final contest. 

Then their celebratory parade which followed was forever marred by tragedy when two youths who should never have had handguns decided to settle their personal dispute in a crowded place. The month continued with more moving (great exercise, all this lifting of heavy boxes of heavy books) and more writing/revising/ editing on the latest works-in-progress (more below). Lastly, comes my annual visit to doctors and receptionists to prove I am still, for now, alive.

Nothing I write next can possibly beat the month I've had so far.

In my previous blog post I spoke of how music had inspired me. In fact, I have used music to inspire my writing far more than any writing has inspired my music. As a music student I looked for texts I could set to music but did not apply them to many songs. My own music tended to be purely instrumental, although I did manage a fair setting of *Coleridge's long poem "Kubla Khan", using four singers, a woodwind quintet, piano, and a gong. Another text setting of a poem eventually lost its text when I couldn't find a singer but did find a violinist willing to play it (with piano accompaniment) for my senior composition recital.

It may be no secret that I listen to music constantly while writing and revising - anytime I'm working on a novel. I choose music which fits the story, often that which fits a particular scene, and play it over and over as I see the story in my mind and try my best to describe what happens. I've never really paused to think about how that works. It's both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing to be able to see a story unfold like a movie playing in my head. It's a curse when I can't shut it off to sleep or do other things I need to do.

In my more recent novels I've included lists of the music I listened to while writing the novel, believing that readers may also enjoy it. I suppose my music listening began with my first published book, AFTER ILIUM (2012). Began, I mean, in the sense of selecting particular music to aid my writing. For After Ilium, which is the sordid tale of a young college graduate who meets an older woman on a tour of the ruins of Troy (also known as Ilium), I listened to the CD of Secret Garden's Songs from a Secret Garden (1996), which to me provided the ideal soundtrack if the story were to be made into a movie. The sweeping, often soaring melodies, and intimate, vaguely exotic harmonies fit the setting of the story perfectly.


Another example is my MFA thesis-turned-complicated novel
A BEAUTIFUL CHILL (2014). This story, what I deem an anti-romance, involves the up-and-down relationship between the new professor on campus and a self-absorbed art student. She is from Iceland, so I immediately listened to Icelandic music, or music which could be Icelandic in feeling. Yes, Bjork. Yes, Sigur Ros. But other music as well, like Miriam Stockley's album Miriam (1999), which features evocative music that put me right there in the scenes of ancient Iceland (part of the subplot). And music from other Scandinavian musicians which created the spiritual space for me to create in.

For a science fiction novel (actually a trilogy) like THE DREAM LAND, which is partly set on another world via an interdimensional portal, I struggled to find the right music. In fact, I struggled finding the best way to start the story which had boiled in me for years. It wasn't until I happened to purchase a cassette of Enya's album The Celts (1987) that I could proceed. The music was for a documentary about the Celts, but for me, well, I saw the mighty Zetin warriors on the wild moors of Tebbicousimankale in what would be the opening scene. Other music I came across which might not have seemed to fit, actually did. I found that film music works especially well: no lyrics to get into my head and all the drama I need for the scene. Video game music also works the same way. The soundtrack for Silent Running (a 1972 film about a lone gardener on a spacecraft) composed by Peter Schickele was a major influence on the writing of the first novel. I did see the movie but it was many years prior to me rediscovering the music and using it to inspire my writing. Also, the music of The Moody Blues, especially the albums Seventh Sojourn (1972) and Octave (1978), provided several cultural references (e.g., interdimensional travel, etc.) which I used to support two teen nerds becoming rulers on another planet.

You get the idea. The music is not simply a lovely background for my hobby but a key that unlocks and opens the mind. For me, it is necessary and I can rarely write new material without the right music. Yes, when I'm far enough along in a new manuscript I may write without listening to music if I have to; probably the music, having heard it previously, remains in my head. To this end, I maintain a large library of CDs and digital (MP3) tracks in every style, genre, mood, and instrumentation. I recently, in my moving, carried five boxes of CDs from one place to the next. I have as much more music thankfully on portable hard drives, flash drives, and on my computer itself. I will never run out and continually add more.

UPDATE

I finished my pandemic/family saga trilogy FLU SEASON (click for the series page) and immediately started in on a fourth book, which I dub a sequel to the trilogy. 

FLU SEASON 4: THE BOOK OF DAD is complete and undergoing revision at the moment. I expect it to be available by summer. Revision was delayed because I immediately began a fifth book in the series, following the grown daughter of the Book 4 protagonist. It is about half-way at present. I know how it will end but I set it aside to revise Book 4 and get it ready for publication. I look for Book 5 to be available in December 2024. 

Will there be more books in this series? I don't know. If a compelling plot presents itself I may pursue it. Otherwise, I try to end every book as though the reader could stop there and be satisfied. But we shall see.


*See the error on the score? Samuel Coleridge Taylor is a music composer; Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the famous poet.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2024 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

21 January 2024

The Musical Life of an Author

Greetings for 2024!

I hope you had a lovely holiday period and are rested and ready for all the new year has in store for you. As for me, I continue dabbling at yet another novel in my FLU SEASON series, revising Book 4 and starting Book 5.

However, for those of you who may only know me as a writer of dubious fiction, in my previous life I was actually deep into music and known as a tuba player and composer. A strange set of circumstances indeed! I was reminded of that recently with the Netflix film MAESTRO, concerning the life of Leonard Bernstein. This blog post is not so much a review of that film, which I enjoyed very much, but the odd connections seeing this film brought back to me of my previous life.


Not long ago I watched another orchestra conductor movie, TAR, which turned out (after googling some info) to be entirely fictitious. I still enjoyed the film and it brought similar memories back to me. So I couldn't help but compare them and my own sordid career in music. Truth be told, after high school I became a music student at the
Conservatory of Music in Kansas City. My goal was to become a Classical music composer at a time when rock'n'roll was king and top-40 pop ruled. I had written some music during high school and arranged others for our concert band, jazz band, and choir. (I also had a knack for writing stories at the time, mostly of science fiction or fantasy.)

At the Conservatory, I studied music theory and the related courses which had me composing more music. My instrument there was the tuba, which I had been playing since junior high school after starting on French horn at age 7 before switching. I was the principal tubist in the wind ensemble, the only tuba player in the orchestra. As part of my education, I learned to play several other instruments, including harp, mostly so I would know how to write music for them. Later, when I transferred to my parents' alma mater for my final two years, I also played in brass ensembles and had my music played in different situations and performed in  concert. It was a big thrill for me but I knew I was not up to the standards of the composers I admired.

At the Conservatory, I worked in the music library
where I had easy access to all the music of the world. I knew Leonard Bernstein as a famous conductor and knew he had written West Side Story, Candide, and three symphonies - I listened to all of them, following along with the scores. This was a common way for me to learn how to compose and orchestrate music. One day I found a set of recordings titled The Unanswered Question, which was a series of lectures by Bernstein linking music and language which I found utterly fascinating. I listened to the reel-to-reel tape as I followed along in the accompanying booklets; I had no access then to the video version of the lectures, which are now available on YouTube. That was the limit of my Bernstein knowledge: conductor, composer, music teacher - nothing more about his life, relationships, provocations, and so on ever entered my understanding in those days as a music student.

So I eagerly anticipated the film and was pleased when I first watched it. It was not so much a documentary of his career but more a study of his relationship with his wife and their children during his career. This presented much that I hadn't known or considered wanting to know previously. Throughout the film excerpts of Bernstein's music filled the soundtrack, as appropriate. I didn't recognize many of them. One that caught my attention was the scene where Bernstein is sitting at his piano composing a new work. We hear the music as we see a close up of his pencil drawing notes and lyrics on the score paper set on the piano, an experience I, too, had often done in my youth. The music we hear is from his composition Mass, a re-envisioning of the traditional Latin mass. That music caused me to recall that I, too, had written a mass and I rushed to the nostalgia trunks in the basement to dig it up.

Not to toot my own horn, but... I scribbled out what I called a mass on green score paper, marking off the sections of instruments and chorus, using the traditional text. I was not a religious person wanting to create a mass so much as a composer who found inspiration in other masses, particularly by Berlioz, Mozart, and a few others. I recalled I had titled my mass the "Brass Mass" because it began with a magnificent brass fanfare. I got obsessed with finding it and twice I pulled out music I thought was it only to find as I read through it that it was not the Brass Mass but something else. Eventually, I concluded that "Brass Mass" was only my nickname and not the true title written at the top. At any rate, there it was: most of a mass, ready to be copied neatly from my scribblings! Oh, but that was long ago and far from where I am today as a scribbler of novels.

From the movie, I had to look for my CDs of Bernstein music. I opened the first of several boxes which I knew contained my collection of CDs and there - right on top - was the double CD box of Bernstein's three symphonies. It seemed to be an omen. Of course, I listened to them once more. I followed the scores on YouTube. I watched performances on YouTube with Bernstein conducting. I ordered a CD of Mass and went through it several times. I became a little obsessed with my music career that had been put away for so many decades as I switched to English and became a professor of English instead of Music. I feel a little sad that I made that turn, but it seems now is too late to dive back into that pool and hope to swim again. I still have that trunk full of music manuscripts, most of them never played even in a read-through session. I include here a few excerpts as a kind of proof. 

"Only the Music Moved" was a composition class assignment: we had to set the text to music. This is my version. You are welcome to play it, perform it, and enjoy it.


As for the subject of the film Maestro
, I can see and perhaps understand the creative drive that pushed him, confounded him, and gave him pleasure. His was an uncanny life and career, so unlike those who preceded him (conductors and composers) and so forward-thinking in many respects in forming a particularly American musical genre (musical theater). Reviews have pointed to flaws and inaccuracies, but as a film focusing on the singular relationship at the center of his life, I think it was well-done and compelling as its own work of drama. It definitely is not a documentary or even a docu-drama but truly a work of film art. And I, too, had my period involved with film, once considering being a cinematographer.

But, alas, in Kansas City there were few opportunities I knew of or was willing to pursue. I expected them to open for me, to be invited in, rather than working hard and making connections, schmoozing and galavanting to get a project green-lighted. I was rather shy in those days, although I meant well and had, by my own admission, good ideas. C'est la vie! I had my chance. Nevertheless, I did succeed in my new career: switching to English, writing stories instead of music (but always using music to inspire stories), and when the publishing world evolved past sending a box of paper around to offices hoping someone might read them and make me famous, well, I happened to get something published. That began a new career for me.

Now my eighteenth novel is soon to be available (part of the FLU SEASON series) and, for what it may be worth, I am happy just to complete it to my satisfaction and make it available to readers. The rest, the remaining steps of the process, is up to readers. I could have written music to make myself happy, and shared it with those who might also enjoy it. But I learned early on how much trouble it was to copy out the parts for an orchestra work versus typing a single copy of a novel manuscript then taking it to Kinko's for additional copies to send out. I'm reminded of a 66-page single-spaced novelette I typed out during high school that I offered to a friend who passed it to another friend who passed it on around the school. Everyone loved it (a rip-off of 1984). I doubt that a piece of music would have been heard by as many fellow students as that stapled manuscript was read. Such is life. The experiences we have somehow inform other experiences and we reach a point where we see those connections and life makes sense.



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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

24 December 2023

The Holidays Post (Updated)

The following was originally posted in 2020. This is an edited update.

Following the National Novel Writing Month debacle [which I did not participate in this year], I expected to post immediately to debunk my rambling missives or, more likely, to vent a few high-brow words I'd not been able to use during this year, to whit: debacle, debunk, missive, vent, [and] whit. But each weekend came and went like the remaining quarter of pie in the fridge. I had thoughts to share, yet also the whiff of extra sleep that bade me back to bed. Then I imagined leaving the month of December as a blank slate, given how so many of us were left sad and alone, surrounded by stacks of [unwanted] holiday gifts or locked onto our online video confrontations convolutions, leaving no time for putting weary eyes upon this weary page. However, there is still time before Stille Nacht bangs through the playlist again.

Christmas, Yule, Winter Solstice, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, D'uoppo, sLari'i, Ma-Em-To, or La-di-la-da, whatever you celebrate. It's all good. Main thing is to get together with family and friends [for as long as one may endure them], usually at the excuse of a communal meal [of dubiously created food], often with added rituals [e.g., the quarter-hourly check of the social streams], concluding with blessings and wishes for the next year to be better [more lucrative, more entertaining] than the current year ending not-soon-enough. So it goes, year after year. For more than 50 years! What holiday decoration ideas remain unused? And I always believed it would be the same, exactly the same [painfully the same] as when I first experienced it [and knew what I was witnessing]: full of wonder, hope, and cheer, with a few toys added. But gradually, it becomes tiresome to get up and do the rituals again, feeling less and less fulfilled in the doing [no matter how faithfully done], and more cynical each time I try to trick myself into feeling that holiday mirth.

So it's easy to become bitter - and let's not even consider the special effects of this present year [was 2020; now 2023] - but bitter is just another taste, or as we see on the TV ads, another "Taste Sensation!" Yes, it's a little like that: the desperate search for sparks (the opposite of triggers) which causes memories to fire and burn bright in our minds. And for an all too brief moment we can feel that same feeling as before, back when this time meant something, when we knew where we were and who we were and everything was right with the world - or, at least, our little corner of it. Then we always slip back, back to the reality we must deal with, [as if waking from a pleasant dream to a dark and stormy morn], strike a bargain, slip some cash over the transom [or in a thin envelope under the door], or write a post-dated check to Dr. Fate, the ultimate debt collector [although he's moved but let me know the new address].

Ok, it's not the best holiday season this year [2020; now 2023]. I recommend reading a good book [i.e., an uplifting book]. I have a few which you might enjoy. In fact, I have a whole new trilogy of pandemic/post-pandemic novels written since 2020 called FLU SEASON, with a sequel to the trilogy coming in 2024. They're distracting enough that you may forget your troubles for a while. That is probably the main reason people read - more so in troubling times. Whatever works for you. I shall turn off the alarm clock, stay up late writing and editing my next book, and consume much of the dessertary substances around which I may come into contact [this year I've elected to have a couple pizzas delivered as I intend to hunker down for hibernation during the next few days], for whatever indulgences I indulge in at this time of the year, the following year provides ample opportunity to forget my lapses and, indeed, to forget everything that does not fit into my perfect world view.

Happy Holidays to you and your associates, short and tall! See you on the other side.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

09 December 2023

Plot Twists & How to Get Them


I don't usually compare my books with other authors' books. It's not that there aren't good comparisons. I tend to read other novels while writing my own, sometimes of a similar theme or at least in the same genre; other times completely different. Either way, I find that reading a story (or seeing a film) pushes the part of my brain that I need pushed in order for me to write. I feel like writing after I come out of a movie theater or finish reading someone's novel. It seems to have always been like this.

Recently, as I work on my latest novel, a sequel to my FLU SEASON trilogy, I noticed something interesting about a pair of books I read by author Maile MeloyLiars and Saints (2003) and A Family Daughter (2006), both about the same family. I also read a collection of her stories, Half in Love (2002). Her style is lean, like mine in my trilogy, yet paints deep portraits of the principal characters, all members of the same family in a saga beginning in WW2 and continuing up through the 1990s. I also saw an indie film, Certain Women, by way of a Netflix DVD before they discontinued DVD-by-mail service. Several of the stories in Half in Love were used in the film.

Here is what happened.
Looking for a good movie to watch - even as I was working on writing my own novel - I found Certain Women, which was about women in Montana. I had just visited Montana earlier in the year as a vacation and I also know a woman in Montana (a friend / book cover artist) although I did not visit her as she was traveling outside of Montana at the time. The DVD arrived and I watched it, enjoyed it, wanted more. So I ordered the book of stories credited in the film. When the book arrived, I skimmed through the stories to find the ones made into the film. A couple were obvious, others not so much. One interesting aspect of the film was one of the four interwoven stories starred Lily Gladstone, playing a ranch hand, the actress who was about to become famous in Killers of the Flower Moon - which hadn't yet opened.

My FLU SEASON trilogy involved a family during and following a long pandemic, heavy on the family drama and just enough of the sci-fi/apocalyptic feel to keep it interesting. I was trying to keep it realistic, more to the plausible (basic survival) than to the fantastic (zombies, etc.). Seeing that film on DVD pushed me to get the first novel by Meloy, Liars and Saints, based on reading the opening pages on Amazon. The understated telling of the young couple marrying before the husband ships out to war drew me in. I enjoyed reading the unfolding drama of a family living mostly in California in the decades after WW2. I can't say I got any ideas for my own family drama from Meloy's novel but, as I stated at the beginning, my reading prompted my writing.


Then I got the second novel, A Family Daughter, based on me learning that it was about the same family but more focused on one important character of the first novel. I assumed this second novel would fill in gaps in events in the first novel. I was reading along happily, as much as one can with dramatic episodes happening, and then, close to half-way, I find myself wondering what was going on. What I was reading in Family did not match events in the first novel, Liars. In one example, a major character dies at a different point in the timeline of the second book than in the first book. I waited to read that it was actually a dream sequence of some kind. I returned to the first book several times to crosscheck episodes. I convinced myself that it was perfectly acceptable for an author use the same set of characters to write a completely different story. But that was not the answer to the mystery of the sharply diverging plot lines.

By the end, I'd figured it out. I won't say in detail what happens because I wouldn't want to leave any spoilers. I will say that the second book, Family, is apparently the "true story" and the first book, Liars, is the "novel" the character in Family writes. That the "novel" written by the character was published first (in real life, as they say) is another odd feature. What I took from this discombobulation was an idea for the perfect plot twist in my own work-in-progress novel, FLU SEASON 4: The Book of Dad, the sequel to the trilogy. Stuck in a crucial scene, I got the answer how to continue. And that answer came, thanks to Meloy's twin novels. (*I do prefer the version of the story in Liars to the one in Family, to be honest; if you are reading both, I recommend reading them in the order I did: Liars first, Family next.)

In a work of fiction, everything is made-up. It's difficult to have characters lie because everything is by definition a lie. But what if the story is going one way with its set of assumptions, truths, and facts - until the plot runs up against a character who doesn't believe those assumptions, truths, and facts? That should be a plot conundrum. But if you read the right books you will find a way through the conundrum and go on to greater and greater twists. So, in this sequel to my trilogy, the story of events laid out in the trilogy is suddenly questioned. Is that really what happened? Was the pandemic simply mass hysteria? The civil war merely border skirmishes between states? How could the protagonist in FLU SEASON 4 not see the truth? The writing is right there on the wall - the same wall with the poster of Big Sister glaring down at the citizenry.


I continue writing on this novel because it's what gets me up in the mornings. It has now passed 80,000 words and looking at 100,000 for a complete first draft (less than the other books, if you're keeping count). Editing should cut it back to 90,000 for the finished version. I hope to have it out in Summer 2024. Meantime, I highly recommend the aforementioned books by Maile Meloy although they are not in any way sci-fi or apocalyptic.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

19 November 2023

The Future of Money...

...And the Nature of Work

You may have noticed that I've cut back on blogging to write on my latest novel, a sequel to my pandemic/post-pandemic trilogy FLU SEASON. It follows after what happens in Book 3: Dawn of the Daughters and tells the story of the grown-up last child of our Book 3 heroine. As society returns to its pre-pandemic form and rebuilding brings us to a new era, we find a society much like the one depicted in Orwell's 1984. If you're going to rebuild a society, why not strive to rebuild the ideal society?

One of the big issues to deal with in constructing a futuristic society is how they get things done. That is, who does the work and how they are paid or otherwise compensated for that work. You find that as part of every science fiction world. The authors rethink what money is and how it may be changed in the future. The term 'credit' is often used as a synonym for money, which makes sense even down to when we get less actual physical money and more ghostly adjustments to the numbers we see on a screen which is a measurement of our account holdings.

However, just what does that account holdings represent? The short answer is how much we have worked. That is, I do this work in exchange for this much "credit" which is stored in my account. My account is now less of a physical place than a cloud collection of numbers, as easily wiped out as compounded by powers bigger than us. And different countries use different forms of money. At one time, according to my grandfather, people used nice seashells as money, which left me looking for very nice shells when on the beach and later finding that nobody would give me money for them. 

Most of us have entered agreements whereby we will do something on a regular basis in exchange for an appropriate amount of compensation. I, myself, have entered such contracts whereby I performed tasks (let's call it a job) and found the balance of numbers in my account increased periodically. Funny how that works. Even funnier is how my colleagues who seemed to do less of the same tasks actually got larger increases in their accounts. Granted, we each had our own way of accomplishing those tasks, so that may explain the differences. It wasn't as though I was offering my hands and my back to pick up and carry things for money. No, I had paid money to learn things and I was employed to teach those things to others. There seemed to be a need when I started doing that. Not like there was a fixed number of people who could do that job, not like the National Football League having only so many positions and a cap on how much money they could allocate to pay those limited number of workers (i.e., players).

We've heard many expressions concerning money and work:
  • "We keep you alive to row this ship!" intones the captain aboard Ben-Hur's galley in the movie of the same name.
  • "You don't work, you don't eat!" says the Pilgrim's leader at Plymouth.
  • "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," states Mr. Marx.
  • "Earned Income vs. Unearned Income" - an important distinction made by the Internal Revenue Service.
  • "We no longer use money. We work because we enjoy it." (paraphrased) from a Star Trek episode, Capt. Kirk or Capt. Picard explaining to aliens about the Earth economy.

Different views of this important relationship between effort and reward. I often played games (almost like games) when ordered to do a task by one or the other parent and to get me to do it I was offered an "allowance". I didn't want to do any chores, but I did like getting some money for doing them. It was a cheap thrill to mow a lawn and get a ten for doing it. Once the money was spent it never seemed like enough for the sweat I put into the effort. My first job outside of tasks for family was making French fries in a burger shack in an amusement park, a thankless job that never paid enough for the abuse I endured from surly coworkers, a devious manager, and hot oil. 

Eventually I was employed in a library while otherwise being a college student. I did mostly physical labor: returning materials to the appropriate shelf, which required less strength and more knowledge of the alphabetical order. I felt adequately compensated for my expert application of the alphabet. But in the future, perhaps I would not be compensated. Suppose I only got food for my work? I put in a few hours of work in exchange for a small box of food. Kind of like: if you help me I'll buy us lunch. Or, in more practical terms, call your friends up to help you move and offer them pizza - only some pizza.

I could recount each and every job I had but that would bore you - if you're not by now. But it does raise a recent phenomena I discovered just before I retired from my job. As a professor I often taught a class on doing research. One semester, when assigning a survey project in which students would design and conduct a survey by gathering information from other students, some students complained that they couldn't get anyone to help them. Their fellow students were demanding financial compensation for their time and answers to the survey. I assured them students love to give their opinions about everything - but I was wrong. We had entered the new economy: every effort, down to the most minute detail, was subject to payment. And that wasn't only if you had fans who would willingly pay for what you offered; no, that's commerce, buying and selling a product or service, not labor for compensation. Or is that the same thing?

That brings us to the near-future. After a ten-year pandemic and a couple decades of anarchy and war, there is no more physical money in society (see the FLU SEASON trilogy), nor is there any banking system. By the end of Book 3, society has returned to a basic system, printed new paper money which wipes out the old bills. In the sequel now underway, we move into the cash-less system. Our hero finds that is not a good way of doing things. He works at a menial job in exchange for mostly his weekly food rations. No work, no food. It becomes a dire situation, pushing him to take matters in a dramatic direction. In Orwell's "how-to" manual, the city is a run-down, depressing place but they have food, albeit poor selection at inflated prices. In FLU SEASON 4: THE BOOK OF DAD (coming in 2024), all is gleaming and clean. It is a gilded cage. "Everyone has a place and a place for everyone" goes the Ideal Society's motto. Work or you won't be given food. And there's no place else to get it.

Stop working and you will receive no food. You will die eventually. Annoy your leaders enough and you may be sent for rehabilitation. Or a labor camp where you work for nothing, but they feed you as part of the process to keep the work flowing. Think of your present job and how you are compensated for what you do. Lots of laws put in place to enforce fairness, equity, freedom from unsafe practices and harassment and prejudice. But what if the only job in town is you straining your body every day - and they give you a meal? 


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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

14 October 2023

"1984" Reinvented as FLU SEASON 4

Probably not what you're thinking about today. You're likely focused on football, colorful leaves, Halloween, and pumpkin spice lattes. Certainly not the novel 1984 by George Orwell or countless movie versions of the story of a repressive society in the near future. To be honest, neither am I. However....

Like many teens, I first read 1984 for a class in high school. It was one sci-fi novel  which "felt" like a "normal" story - not my usual fare of space operas or heroic fantasy. What I liked about it was the dire setting; perhaps it fit my teenage mood of hopelessness. Our teacher pointed out the features of the story, what it is famous for, what this really means, and so on, but I never got the implications. Perhaps that was because in that decade we had no realistic fear of life changing too much from the way it was. I also was fascinated with the deliberate changing of the language for political purposes. I first dabbled with making my own language. (I would eventually create alien languages for my own sci-fi novels and study linguistics in graduate school.)

Later, when they made a new movie of the novel for the actual year of 1984, I was ready to understand all that it was suggesting. It wasn't that life had changed enough for me to see something new, something represented in the movie. For me, the movie was more about the downfall of a city, the cold and dull lives of the characters, and how depressing it all was. Seeing that film version prompted me to look for but not find my copy of the book, so I had to buy a new one. Even Apple, the computer company, had a 'Big Brother' advertisement in the Super Bowl of 1984. (By the way, I looked for one of those two copies for my research and did not find them so I had to buy yet another copy.)

More books and movies had a similar 'collapsed society' setting with idealistic characters who fought for a better life - either to destroy the new but cruel society or to take it over in the believe that they could undo the terrible changes. I liked the settings, but not the plots. These newer presentations were not new but rehashes of tropes from Orwell's novel. The main point in them was that if we the people do not stay aware, we could be repressed into a pointless existence. We could no longer live our lives in peace and safety, not to mention in comfort.

For the past few weeks - indeed, for nearly two years - I've bothered you with blog posts and promotional material about my latest creation, FLU SEASON, a trilogy about a family's struggles in an extended pandemic and the lawlessness that follows. In the second half of the third book, however, society is getting back on its feet again and life looks promising. But is that any way to end a trilogy? A happy ending? Really?

No, there's more. What seems to be good is, in fact, merely a facade which hides the evil machinations of a group of politicians who strive to achieve the ideal society - with them at the cushy top of the hierarchy, of course. That's the plot of many futuristic novels and movies. The difference I'm trying for is a natural extension of the story covered in my trilogy. Thus it is not strictly an imitation of Orwell's book but what would seem to me a logical progression from the way everything is at the end of Book 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS. Perhaps if I manage to set up the start of this slow revolution in my new "sequel to the trilogy", the story might then become like the situation in Orwell's book.

When we experienced our own pandemic in 2020 and I wanted to write a story based on it, I decided to start my story in the sixth year of the pandemic - when society had already gone downhill quite a bit. Following a period of anarchy, opposing territories begin to rebuild, fight a new civil war against each other, and finally settle into a more cohesive society. Technology that had been lost is reinvented, sometimes better. Other technologies are deemed less important in rebuilding (e.g., airplanes can wait). It is a society where there is electricity and there is a 'streaming' system (the equivalent of over the airways TV but not internet). There are also cameras and sensors everywhere - for citizens' own safety, of course, both in public areas and within each person's housing unit. There are roaming human safety monitors.

In this new Book 4, working title The Book of Dad, the story centers around Fritz, the last child of Isla Augustine Baumann (born in Book 1, grown narrator of Book 3). When Fritz is older he makes a documentary of his mother (Isla) telling about her life during and after the pandemic, thinking it is good to preserve the history of that era. But he learns it is the wrong history and some powerful people do not want it to be available. The result is trouble for Fritz. Trying to make a new life for himself after 'rehabilitation' and losing everything because of it, he is assigned a street sweeper job - because everyone must have a useful function in this new Ideal Society. Most of all he wants to know why he was targeted and who ordered him arrested years after the documentary was widely praised. What Fritz learns makes for a couple shocking plot twists that will blow the mind of readers of the trilogy. But no more spoilers.

My first consideration is always Will This Be Interesting? Next, I think about how the story embedded in the book will say something to readers beyond what happens in the novel. I don't write a novel to express philosophical ideas or push a message - but messages do appear on their own in the course of writing and I let them stay if appropriate. I also find, sometimes long after publishing, that a novel I wrote has a theme I never anticipated and certainly did not deliberately put into it. Book 3: Dawn of the Daughters has that hidden theme woven throughout that only on the fifth reading have I noticed. (Nope. Not going to tell you. Read it for yourself and see if you notice it.) In Book 4, I'm not pushing any 'watch out' warning; we already know what Orwell was telling us. But the way the drastic change sneaks up on us is what I'm going for in my Book 4 - rather than entering the story with everything already in a terrible condition, like in Orwell's book.

I hope Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD will be out in Summer 2024...or what I like to call "our second 1984". As of this blog, we are close to 50,000 words.




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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

24 September 2023

Avez-vous des souvenirs?

Got souvenirs?

This topic has been bugging me for some time. As you may know, I went on a road trip at the beginning of the summer with the intention to visit some places I had visited long ago and some places I had yet to visit but had always wanted to see. I never planned to take lots of pictures and create an amazing travelogue, something to equal tourism pamphlets. It was a personal trip. I only started taking pictures to send them home to prove I was where I was at each major stop, such as the Badlands of South Dakota, Devil's Tower in Wyoming, and Yellowstone and Glacier National Parks.
I also did not plan to gather souvenirs. Yet I did. I should've known better, given my recent battle with souvenirs. But what do we mean by 'souvenir'? From French, the word means 'to remember'; hence, a thing that helps you remember a person, place, or event. A memento. Fair enough. But we have photos on our phones (if not in our cameras), and we have memories stuck in our heads. We have music which holds memories, too. So why the need for tactile objects ("objects-de-tactile") to place in our homes and look at occasionally, perhaps pick up and rub in our hands to briefly restore that ephemeral vision of a lost time and place?

It began with my grandparents who traveled around the world from the early days of commercial aviation to well into their retirement. They collected souvenirs from everywhere they visited - long before the shift to limiting how much you could bring onto an airplane. They stuffed souvenirs into every nook and cranny of their home. They gave many souvenirs to my mother (their daughter) and some to me. I was fascinated by all the things from far-away lands. That probably was what got me interested in traveling like them.

My mother tried to follow the family pattern by going on her own trips to places around the world. And she collected souvenirs - some of which I thought worthless. She put them around her home. She bought a curio cabinet just to display some of them. Looking back, I might suggest she was trying to keep up with her parents. The difference was that her parents brought back things which were unique, items you could only get if you went to those far-away places. By the time my mother did her international traveling, those same items could be found in stores in any suburban mall and weren't so unique.

When it was my turn - I actually lived overseas for some years - I tried to be more selective. For example, I brought back boxes of dishes and other typical kitchen items from Japan, intending to replicate a Japanese-style kitchen back home in the US. I bought plenty of other things, too, focusing on what would remind me of this or that adventure in the place. And, once home, how did I display them? With limited space and an apartment rather than a house, I couldn't hang them up or put out everything to remind me of the trips I'd taken. Move after move required me to put them into boxes anyway; gradually, I stopped unpacking those boxes.

And that brings us to the Hurricane that swept through the Texas coast and destroyed my parents' retirement condo just off the beach. I spent a lot of time salvaging the souvenirs from that place. Who cares about clothing on hangers or dishes and cups? What about the sacks of bank records, or every kind of receipt imaginable? No, it was that curio cabinet's wares that I took. Also, my mother's coin collection she thought would be valuable one day (her father had collected rare coins, too, but her brother inherited that). I carefully packed the souvenirs into boxes - only the souvenirs I personally thought were "cool".

The boxes of my parents souvenirs remain unpacked. No room for them. So I'm passing them down to the next generation. I've traveled a bit and will pass along those things, too. But a t-shirt reminds me where I was and I can wear it now. A magnet stuck to the fridge reminds me where I got it. (A magnet given to me has no power; only those I buy for myself while I'm at the place work.) A book, even if unrelated to the location where I bought it, jogs my memory about where I bought it. For example, at the visitor center in the Badlands National Park, I happened to see a book I'd been searching for off and on and bought it finally. I can wear my Montana State University t-shirt and remember that perfectly fine day in early June when I walked the campus, devoid of students, and enjoyed myself.

The point I dare make is that we don't need souvenirs. Sure, they bring a thrill in the moment, and perhaps a few moments later on. But we already have those memories; we can just bring them up to the surface. Maybe seeing a thing can help, maybe it doesn't matter. What does matter is that souvenirs pile up, get boxed up, get passed along, and unless destroyed by a hurricane, tend to last forever - and that's a mighty-long time. Even so, I still bought another t-shirt and mug on my latest trip back to that condo on the beach - sold and repurposed as a rental unit - just to have some closure to the place where my parents last lived.


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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

10 September 2023

The Retirement Project vs The Sunset

When I was thirteen and full of stories, I had one idea which I knew was too big for me to work on as a teenager. I started writing the story at thirteen, then put it away, overwhelmed by its scope. When I was in college, I wrote more on it before putting it away again. I knew I had plenty of time. Then I wrote it all out as a screenplay because at that time I was interested in going into the movie business. From that screenplay, I started a novelization but put it away. I never felt bad about putting it away because I designated that story to be my "retirement project" - what I would work on during my retirement to keep me busy and out of trouble. So now that retirement has arrived....

I have kept to that plan, except I haven't returned to it. Honestly, the whole Game of Thrones series of books and TV episodes took away much of my project, dealing with a medieval society not in a fantasy world like Westeros but in a future America after the destruction of our modern society. It could still work, I suppose. But now readers would make comparisons to Martin's story - and arguably he does it much better than I could. My story, titled A Time of Kings (from a piece we played in high school band), is a different story: identical twin princes fight to win the whole kingdom after their father dies. But there's a lot more to it, of course. The story appeared as the historical backstory in my novel EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS (2017).

But I have a Plan B. I've just finished my third trilogy - the trifecta! - yet there are story elements remaining for me to make some hay with. I'm calling it a sequel to the trilogy rather than re-titling the trilogy as a tetralogy. Too much trouble to redo book covers and republish, you know. It may only be a short novel, involving a character from the trilogy, and thus not take up much time in my retirement, yet it does lend itself to allowing me to continue using the world I created for the trilogy by inventing other stories set there.


Now that my pandemic trilogy
FLU SEASON is complete (all three novels are available), I have a page for the series. You can get paperback and Kindle editions for all three books on one page: right here, go on now, click it, there ya go!

If you're new to this trilogy, here's a summary:

Remember that pandemic we had in 2020-22? Well, what if it didn't end but got worse in every way? Besides all the vaccine mandates and mask wearing rules, there are shortages of gas and food, there is rampant crime by both ordinary citizens and government authorities. Life becomes unbearable.

Now let's follow autistic teen Sandy (as narrator) and his single mom as they escape a city in chaos for what they think will be safety in the countryside. Of course, things do not go the way Mom expects and they must shift to a plan B. And plan C. It is a dangerous world, but if they can just find a sanctuary and wait a while everything will go back to normal...Mom dares to believe.

BOOK 2: THE WAY OF THE SON

Fleeing a city in chaos in Book 1, Sandy must now face the savage outerlands without Mom to guide him. He struggles to provide for his young family among the ruins of a collapsed society, and a journey to reconnect with his aunt goes very wrong. In typical heroic fashion, Sandy learns how to be a man, how to be strong, and how to forgive. He finds the way to the future.

BOOK 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS

Hiding away in the forest of a national park in the 9th year of the pandemic, Sandy's family waits for the world to return to normal. But they soon discover other families have the same idea. As the survivalists of the national park work together, Sandy's family faces new challenges and opportunities. They suffer through the vagaries of marauders and war between territories and Sandy is caught up in the fighting. The conflict splits the family into divergent destinies, leaving Sandy's daughter, Isla, to carry the family into the future where they witness the reconstruction of a new society.

BOOK 4: (tentatively titled THE WAY OF THE DAD) work-in-progress!

Isla's youngest is all grown up and getting into trouble in a rebuilt society where government authority reigns supreme, much like in Orwell's 1984, pushing our hero to rebel....

So there is enough to keep me entertained in these final years, as I look harder at each sunset, waiting for the final one to slip away. If I finish, I finish. If I don't, you still have the books I've already written and this blog and perhaps a few memories of my twisted writing advice here and there - like in this post from the past week for fellow Myrddin author Connie J. JaspersonNumber 1 advice? Write now, fix later.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.