Sloth & Indolence: A Grand Re-Imagining

Happy New Year! Like most people I know, I have been busier the past couple months than I would have expected or wished. No, it has actually been quite the opposite: a time of sloth and indolence with the best of intentions. Oh, sure, we had our holidays, full of the usual mirth and merriment, family squabbles and sporting events, and the ever-stressful shopping online for the relations. Books were offered up as suitable gifts and I missed the deadline.

Now I'm trying to make amends by pushing out my next here in the early year. I hope that the third book of a trilogy would be enough excitement to get readers of the first two books to the keyboard to click a Kindle into their lives or else to order the full paperback version for its tactile pleasures. Aside from that New Year's wish, I should take time to reintroduce myself.

What is The Deconstruction of the Sekuatean Empire?

When I first hammered this blog from hell's own fire and brimstone, I had in mind a place to post the "back material" for my sci-fi interdimensional drama THE DREAM LAND Trilogy. Because the trilogy is set partly on another world, where the chief political entity of that world, known as the Sekuatean Empire, becomes a focal point. Hence, the title of this blog would make sense: taking apart the history, geography, culture and customs of the place where much of the action of the story occurs. However, as time has progressed, other books have come to the forefront which have nothing to do with Sekuate or its hard-working rebels. It seemed at the time to be too much effort to create a wholly new blog from whole cloth.

You will also note the list of book titles with convenient hyperlinks in the upper right corner of this blog page. They are not simple decoration but actually serve as keys that open doors to my dementia. Experience them and be enlightened forever more! Or, at the least, be entertained, perhaps even enthralled. My writing strives to enfold profound truths of the human condition within pages of action and adventure, liberally marbled with reasonably applied sex and romance while sprinkled with haughty pontifications and jokes best left on the cutting room floor. That sounds a lot like a warning, doesn't it? But it's all in jest. I can assure you that 99.9% of the words are spelled correctly and good grammar is always in use - except for the dialog of those characters who have not been well-educated and then only for the sake of authenticity.

To update you now, the conclusion of my "medically accurate" vampire trilogy is about to launch. The conclusion to the story which began in Book I, A Dry Patch of Skin (2014), and continued through Book II, Sunrise (2018), follows a romantic phlebotomist with a dark family history through his transformation into a vampire (according to medical plausibility) and, in Book II, into his playboy years. Book III takes us up to the year 2099 when he has gained a sizable reputation for cruelty. With Book II being titled Sunrise, Book III's title seems obvious: Sunset. More on this trilogy in my next blog post.

Aside from the latest novel hitting the electronic shelves soon, I have also written science fiction, fantasy (indeed EPIC fantasy!), and a few contemporary (a.k.a. literary) dramas and what I would call action/adventure tales about real; people with real problems in real settings. You know the genre. (You can read samples of other books on the other pages of this blog.) I dabble at poetry. I've written a few screenplays, too. I love to invent stories, generally as a way for me to tease out the answer(s) to an assortment of "what-if" questions. For example, what would it be like if a man and a tiger could read each other's minds? This premise will be available to sort out in my next novel, Year of the Tiger, by the way. Because I am happiest when I am deep in a story, fighting my way through to an end that comes too soon, I will always be writing. I have ideas for the next five years. By then I will have ideas for the next five, and so on. I call these my "five-year plans".

I strive to post a new entry once a week, all the better to take advantage of certain Twitter hashtags (@StephenSwartz1) such as   #SundayBlogShare,  #MondayBlogs,  #TuesdayShares,  #Wednesdayblogs, and  #Blogorama. I do not hold to this schedule religiously, however - as this month's fare will attest. But I try. You know how life tends to interfere with your best intentions? It's doubly so for writers and teachers. Worse yet if one is both a writer and a teacher. But I'm not complaining. Not really. 

In keeping with a "best practices" model of book promotion, I shall attempt to keep blatant marketing efforts to a minimum - except when something new is launched. As always, I expect followers of this blog to read everything I produce and go forth to gather all their family members and friends, coworkers, and just about everyone they encounter in their daily lives, and make them also followers of this blog, readers of these books, and all-around nice people who live to love and love to live, helping all of us enjoy this wonderful world we occupy and yet still be prepared to battle the interstellar aliens who will invade us circa 2345 2217. The choice is yours, as always. But I have high hopes for you!

Thanks for your attention to these matters. Now carry on making the world a better place for me. And I shall return the favor wholeheartedly!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2019 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.