Below is a reprint from last year's Father's Day blog post....
But first, an Update!It seems appropriate that a novel titled The Book of Dad be launched around Father's Day. When I wrote the book and then spent time revising and editing it, I didn't expect to tie it to Father's Day. However, as things work out, it was finished close to the day so I deliberately held off launching it so it could be the same weekend.
(The ebook is available now and the paperback version will be available on June 18.)This sequel to my FLU SEASON trilogy follows the unfortunate exploits of Fritz, Isla's last child, now grown and in trouble for making a video of his mother in which she tells about the 10-year pandemic and the hard decades that followed. Those facts now run counter to the restored government's version of history. The video is removed from streams and all copies confiscated while Fritz, a husband and father of three, is sentenced to rehabilitation.
Returning to the cold, gray city, assigned to a single worker's unit, given a menial job, he finds his wife has filed for dissolution and his sons are stuck in a government school facing the radical new policies of Big Sister, the cruel governor. Fritz tries to stay out of trouble, seeing a counselor weekly to continue receiving his food rations, but he can't help but get into trouble again. He devises a caper to get back his tuba and his grandfather's notebooks - but it goes bad and he winds up in the Department of Social Order.
What will happen to him there? What will happen after? Can his life get any more miserable? All he has are painfully brief meetings with his 6 year old daughter, Maggie - who takes over as main character and narrator in the next book in this series, coming later in 2024. Fritz can only solve his problems, save his family, by making an unfair deal with Big Sister - and accepting the lie about everything that happened during his mother's life.
Yes, there is a deliberate effort to have the story mirror, not parallel, Orwell's "1984". Rather than a different version of "1984", I considered the natural, logical ways a restored society might develop and depicted the result in the cold, gray capital city. I allow a few aspects which could be said to be "like" things in "1984" but those act as Easter eggs for the careful reader. In the end, this is a unique story of one man's fight against the system that wants to remove him from history - not merely get him to agree what 2+2 might equal.
FLU SEASON 5: THE GRANDDAUGHTER'S TALE (available later in 2024) picks up the story, following Fritz's daughter, Maggie, now an adult. She's determined to start a children's band in her dusty western town, efforts which lead her to face a variety of problems....
But first, an Update!
(The ebook is available now and the paperback version will be available on June 18.)
This sequel to my FLU SEASON trilogy follows the unfortunate exploits of Fritz, Isla's last child, now grown and in trouble for making a video of his mother in which she tells about the 10-year pandemic and the hard decades that followed. Those facts now run counter to the restored government's version of history. The video is removed from streams and all copies confiscated while Fritz, a husband and father of three, is sentenced to rehabilitation.
Returning to the cold, gray city, assigned to a single worker's unit, given a menial job, he finds his wife has filed for dissolution and his sons are stuck in a government school facing the radical new policies of Big Sister, the cruel governor. Fritz tries to stay out of trouble, seeing a counselor weekly to continue receiving his food rations, but he can't help but get into trouble again. He devises a caper to get back his tuba and his grandfather's notebooks - but it goes bad and he winds up in the Department of Social Order.
"I've just finished a dystopian trilogy, FLU SEASON, about a quirky family dealing with a pandemic and the violent fallout from that devastating reality.
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Everyone knows that grads are tired of reading. Dads tend to be reading averse, too. So maybe books do not make the best gifts. Job search books for grads, perhaps. A book on whatever is dad's current hobby, maybe. But fiction too often falls to the dark, dusty shelf of well-intended gifts. Beside the neckties. My own father would rather read through a stack of history and politics books before he would ever crack the cover of a novel. He is ok with wearing a necktie, however.
So how many books are there that feature Father's Day, anyway? Or about fathers in general? Mothers are easy. Brothers and sisters are common. The sweet aunt and the generous uncle are often seen in literature. Fathers are generally the bad guys, villainous, cruel, authoritarian, mean, and uncaring. They are more often than not portrayed as abusers. Sometimes they only appear as the bad memory of a protagonist and we get a couple of graphic incidents to showcase dad's unpleasantness. (I had to do that in A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and A GIRL CALLED WOLF because they were based on real people and their lives; however, fathers in my other novels are thankfully less abusive.) It's almost a stereotype. Fathers get a bad rap, I think. We tend to only hear about the bad ones. Think of Darth Vader, a.k.a. "Dark Father", and others of his ilk.
I think about the fathers in my other novels. My protagonists seem to relate to their fathers very much like I relate to my own father. Funny, that coincidence, right? Write what you know, they say. Or am I drawing on the only role model I have? (Curiously, I'm an only child and my protagonists tend not to have siblings, also - or siblings that are throw-away characters, mentioned but not active in the story. In AFTER ILIUM, the young hero dislikes his dentist father's strictness and is glad to be on his own touring Greece and Turkey after college. In EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, our dragonslayer hero's father was a military commander killed in battle, so our hero carries only the memory of a violent, frightening man. In A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, the first volume of my vampire trilogy, our poor hero is transforming into a vampire. He is angry at his father for not warning him and for sending him away to live with an aunt. Otherwise, that fictional dad sounds an awful lot like my own father: haughty, disinterested, aloof. In volume 2, SUNRISE, the father comes across disturbingly like my own father at the time I was writing the book: well-meaning but still authoritarian to an uncomfortable degree.
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If you've been following this blog you probably know I'm a dad. It's a weird feeling knowing there is someone living in the world partly as a result of my actions. Sure, we can imagine clones, or cyborgs, but another human? That's crazy. Like us and yet not like us. And eventually they go their own ways and have their own lives and we scratch our heads and think What just happened? Now my offspring is finishing college, studying to be something in the medical field. This is after going through Army training to be a combat medic.
UPDATE: Well into her professional career.
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So for now, I must pass the reins to my protégé. No longer do I need to concern myself so much with me doing great things and achieving this and that and telling my child about, you know, the things I can boast about. Now it is time for me to boast about my grown child, to note what this new adult is doing, and praise the new things, the new deeds, of this adult - to praise and be proud of what my child has done more than being happy at what I have done. I've actually inserted this idea into the thoughts of my protagonist dad in EXCHANGE. Oh, I will still write books, of course - until the keyboard is ripped from my cold, dead fingers. But now it's no longer all about me. It's about the generation we produce and what they will do as we fade gently into that good night.
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