THEN & NOW

The Journey is Complete

Now that FLU SEASON 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS is finished and available for pre-order (delivered to your Kindle on September 1, 2023; paperback also available on that date), I can shift from my summer travelogue to a reflection of the writing life. It's been a long journey and, like the tip of an iceberg, most of you don't see everything going on beneath the surface of 'Here's my book, please read it."

THEN

How It Started

Even as a young boy I was annoying. I made up stories. Some were like stories I read or saw on TV (having 3 channels), but others were invented from thin air. I liked playing in situations that were not available in real life. It likely began when my mother, a church organist, insisted I attend church every Sunday morning. Bored, I drew on pads of paper a kind of story that was more like a comic three panel strip. After the service, I would give the comic to the pastor on our way out. Sometimes I didn't get to give the paper to him so I kept it. At school I made up stories, partly recounting stories I'd read. It was a way to be popular. This was long before video, computers, games, or cable TV. One 66-page single-spaced story of mine that was a variation on "1984" was passed around, on typed pages stapled together, among friends in my high school and garnered a lot of praise.

In school I always excelled at English, especially when we had to write a poem or a story. Teachers praised my stories and I grew emboldened. In real life I tended to see myself moving through an imaginary world populated with annoying real people getting in my way. Gradually I matured and took on the roles expected of me in society. But I continued to enjoy imagining different scenarios. I wrote some of them as stories, mostly with a fantasy or science fiction theme. This continued up through college. My only limitations were how much pounding the manual typewriter could take (later an IBM Selectric) and the cost of ink ribbons/cartridges. 

I had one grand story in my head when I went to Japan to be an English teacher and I finally got it out and onto a floppy disk - several of them as each file could only hold one chapter. I printed it out on the dot-matrix printer I had, bound it at the local copy shop, and put it on my shelf. It was a monument of sorts. I thought that sci-fi tome might be my ticket to the kind of life I'd dreamed of: author. That was THE DREAM LAND (first version completed in 1990). But with more years in Japan, I also crafted a contemporary literary love story drama set in Hawaii and Japan. It took a few years but eventually, with revisions, I got it published as AIKO.

Thanks to the notoriety of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, which I did not win, I was noticed (thankfully or not). After a few detours I managed to get my first novels published. All were written before the ABNA but I still revised them thoroughly. First of these was AFTER ILIUM, a short novel I offered as a test (first written in 1998). Next came my steampunkish interdimensional sci-fi tome, THE DREAM LAND (which went on to become a trilogy). Then my MFA thesis, much revised, came third: A BEAUTIFUL CHILL, a campus affair anti-romance (written in 2000-02). My actual first-written novel, YEAR OF THE TIGER (from a 1980 short story and a 1983 screenplay; first novelized in 1987), remained on the shelf until I had time to give it a serious rewrite, then finally published it during the pandemic era when people needed lots of reading material (2020).

Between these first four novels and my present trilogy, I wrote an arctic adventure, an epic fantasy, a vampire trilogy, a modern crime thriller, and a hard sci-fi novel with a non-human as the main character. Then I sat around thinking what to write next.

NOW

How It's Going

I've just finished the third volume of my pandemic trilogy. Three books in two years. Very proud of myself. Not in a boastful way but simply amazed I could do it. I've blogged about the origins of this trilogy in other blog posts. Suffice to say, a lot of pressure is now off of me. I would hate to announce a trilogy and then not get that third book finished. But I did, and it turns out to be my second-longest novel (148,000) after my EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS (233,000). It's long because it covers a lot of years of the main character's life (age 2 to 79). Not good to just say "Grandma was born and got married then had kids and grew old and died." Not too interesting that way. So I wrote out many of the episodes in her life - as you would expect for any family saga covering three-plus generations. (I believe, however, that it reads fast; lots of action and dialog vs long descriptions, etc.)

Now what shall I do? I have other unfinished book manuscripts to work on. I also have some short stories I might put together in one volume. I have a lot of poetry, maybe enough good ones to make a thin chapbook. I've dabbled on a kind of autobiography but not sure how much to share. I've started a sequel to the FLU SEASON trilogy (Isla's youngest's story). But no matter what I do in these final restless years, I've completed my third trilogy, the trifecta, and that might be my crowning achievement.

TO RECAP

The FLU SEASON trilogy begins in the sixth year of the pandemic that started for us in 2020 and, thankfully, ended in 2022. But suppose it didn't end and all of the worst experiences we had then kept going and got even worse? Eventually life becomes so unbearable that a single mom and her autistic teen son choose to drive out of the city with her prized tuba, hoping to wait out the pandemic in the countryside by staying at the grandparents' farm. 

Book 1 THE BOOK OF MOM

When autistic teen Sandy & his single Mom flee a city in chaos they find plenty of dangers in the pandemic ravaged countryside. Gathering relatives, they arrive on a resort island, believing they are safe there but they are confronted by a community with extreme utopian views.

Book 2 THE WAY OF THE SON

Sandy and his young family are exiled from the island and must find sanctuary in the savage outerlands where there are no laws and it's every desperate person for themselves. But Sandy has a plan, what he calls 'The Way of the Son' - definitely not the way his mom would go.

Book 3 DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS (preorder; delivered Sept. 1, 2023)

There is no safe space - except maybe hiding in the forest of a national park waiting for the world to return to normal. But when others have the same idea, Sandy's happy family faces a variety of opportunities and challenges. As the pandemic world recovers and the country erupts into civil war, it is his daughter who must carry the family forward, no matter the difficulties she must face.

NEXT: More about FLU SEASON 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS

ALL BOOKS ALSO AVAILABLE IN PAPERBACK!

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