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.

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 Meloy: Liars 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.