All About THE GRANDSONS

You may notice that this blog has been going for 15 years. That in itself may seem amazing, but it hasn't been without its ups and downs. My goal now is to maintain it with one post per month minimum so I have a neat calendar listing on the right side.

As I posted on various social media platforms in the past week, THE GRANDSONS, my latest novel and the next volume in the FLU SEASON Saga, has launched. In fact, launched early - not that it wasn't ready; it was.

Funny story: It was late and I thought to do a last-minute check of the details in all the spaces and pages of the publication process only to come up to the final button. I mistook that button for the "save" button and, having pressed it, the book was launched. But, not to worry, for it was finished, polished, and ready to go. I simply wished to make July 1 the publication date. Seeing the next day that it had actually been launched, I scrambled to check the details of the print edition, then went ahead and launched the paperback, too. Now both are "live" and available to you.

Get them both here: Da Link!

Get the entire series here: Flu Season Saga!

THE GRANDSONS concludes the Flu Season Saga in epic fashion: a feisty Western set in the future, with unexpected science-fiction oddities, outlandish courtroom theatrics, and tear-jerking family drama. 

The Principal Players:

Jake Baumann - flaneur/narrator of the 'present' storyline, dentist and coroner

Assorted townsfolk: Deputy Cal; Doc Baker; Judge Robinson; Mr. Duda & Mr. Hitchens, attorneys-at-law; colorful trial witnesses; random phantoms and freaks 

Maggie Baumann - Jake's grandmother (his mother was adopted by Maggie) & Bart's mother

Bart Baumann - son of Maggie, a teenage boy at the start, full grown man later*

The Culpepper Sisters: Trinity, eldest, "the mean one"; **Trina, "the quiet one"; Triss, "the silly one", outlaws

Nick Ramos - gamekeeper at The Facility

Marina Kvashenaya - scientist at The Facility

Jesus Alvarez - a traveler, follower of the Brethren

*The "15 years earlier" section is written in 3rd-person, as though it's been pieced together by a writer telling what he's heard.

**Who is the "main character" in THE GRANDSONS? I'll just say that Trina is in the first scene and the final scene, connecting with both Bart and Jake. Anything more would be spoiler.

click to enlarge

The Story:

Part 1 - A stranger comes to town bearing two bodies on a cart. The woman is well-known and the deputy takes her into custody to get answers to questions left unanswered for fifteen years. A trial begins, trying to tie her to the crimes of her sisters and an outlaw known as Bad Bart. Jake, town dentist and coroner, gets involved: he sees the woman as someone to save. Jake's grandmother, Maggie (from Book 5), just wants to know what happened to her son the past fifteen years when everyone thought he was dead.

Part 2 - More than 100 years after a pandemic and civil war broke apart the nation (Books 1-3), a new reconstituted America struggles between tyranny in the east and survival in the west (Books 4 & 5). In this western territory, fatherless teen Bart Baumann is stuck between his nagging mother and a domineering uncle, the sheriff, Bart is in a hurry to grow up. Going on a posse after an outlaw gang gives Bart the chance to show everyone he's a man. But that plan doesn't go as expected and his life is forever changed.

Young Bart becomes lost in the wilderness. He stumbles upon the camp of a trio of gunslinger sisters who take him in, teach him the business. As Bart grows up he comes into conflict with the older sister while entering a romance with the middle sister. When his bad deeds earn him a high bounty, he realizes it's better to go straight and live a normal life, but where can he and his young family go? He checks the surrounding towns for a good home.

The answer is forced on him as they are chased by a posse of lawmen into the "forbidden zone", the land west of the western territory. There they discover what has happened to the nation: destruction that has left the land devoid of people. They try to survive in the new environment, a daily struggle finding food and defending against dangers - until they find a hidden facility of scientists who believe the air and land outdoors is poisonous, even as they work to create children immune to the poisons. However, Bart can't help himself: acting badly once more, they must flee again.

Finally settling with one of the scientists from the facility in an abandoned house outside a long-destroyed city, they think they are alone and can just live their lives - only to be caught in battles between religious fanatics and foreign soldiers. A wandering wiseman convinces Bart there's no need to go further west: nothing there. Then a devastating tragedy compels them to return east, where they hope to meet up with the other sisters and live a normal life. 

Part 3 - But the sisters have gotten into more serious trouble while they've been away. Bart becomes an unwitting participant in a final tragedy that threatens to separate him from his found family. The trial in Part 1 concludes with agonizing testimony and an explanation for the nuclear holocaust threatening them. Questions are answered. Yet it is left to Bart's cousin Jake to reconcile everything, especially setting the record straight for future generations.

Stats for Nerds:

File created: May 21, 2024

Draft finished: February 17, 2025
(Approximately 1 year between launch of Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD and THE GRANDSONS, with Book 5: THE GRANDDAUGHTER between them.)

Final revision completed (not counting extra tweaks/edits): April 27, 2025

Pages (including blank pages between chapters; not including frontmatter and endmatter pages): 542

Final word count (not including chapter division marks, etc.): 148,000 

Sessions (opening file to work on it): 1561 

Is this actually the conclusion of the FLU SEASON Saga?

Well, folks.... Before THE GRANDSONS was even half-way done with revisions, I started another book, set 200+ years after the end of THE GRANDSONS, to be titled THE WARRIORS BAUMANN, which follows two ancestors of the family in Book 6 as the world further descends into chaos and a plain medieval society becomes the norm in Missouri. It is written as a comedy, a farce, if you will, yet with a warm-hearted finish that connects with my earlier novel EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, which is set 8000 years in the future. 

Happy reading!

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

(C) Copyright 2010-2025 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.

Writing Motivations: An Exercise in Self Therapy

Sure, writing a story is about creating something chiefly for entertainment. You could also include a message or two. Add some personal episodes. Tell some idea you may have about something, relevant or not. A lot of stories (and novels!) are based to some degree on the author's own experiences. That's not a requirement; usually it's because the real event fits nicely into the story and it's often easier to borrow than to invent from whole cloth. I've certainly done that with my 20 novels.

I began with a cool idea. What if this happened? I wrote it out, exploring the idea, testing it. Not too interesting in itself, I soon learned. Have to add characters who are interesting; they can deal with the problem. Then the problem becomes interesting because readers see it through the eyes and mind of the character. Most of my books begin with an interesting premise but it is always explored through the main characters' experiences.

What about exploring yourself? 

My first completed novel was back in 1981 (remains unpublished). I was not exploring my own issues in that. It took another novel (1983; published in 2020) for me to see something in it that reflected my own condition. In my youth, I often would explore a situation as if I were only an example, a test subject, even though - had I been pressed - I might have realized I was figuring out something about myself. 

That side effort of writing a fictional piece became more apparent as I got to grad school and entered an MFA program I believed would help launch my career (it didn't although I did learn some valuable things). Since then, I've noticed how the things in my real life that nag me, that cause me grief, or puzzle me can be worked out through invented characters substituting for me. I can have characters do what I would never dare do, say, or even think, in my real life.

A few examples.

The example that comes most quickly to my mind, is my so-called crime thriller novel EXCHANGE (May 2020). Although the plot of story doesn't involve anything in my real life, I did draw liberally from my real life to inform certain scenes and find the grief in the main character, making it more real and visceral. Early in 2019 my elderly mother died. Although we knew it was getting close, it still came as a surprise when I received the phone call from the hospice. I didn't feel anything for a while, even as I went through the steps I was supposed to go through, e.g., grieving, settling her estate, etc. But something was boiling deep in me and I let it come out in my writing: the main character in the novel suffers the murder of family members in a mass shooting (not a spoiler). I put everything I was feeling into what I had the character feel, what he said to the psychologist, how he acted. In a strange way, it was easy to write; I felt it and it flowed out my fingers onto the page. And in that way, that letting it out through the page, I did manage to find closure.

When I wrote the first volume of my vampire trilogy, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN (October 2014), I was determined to stay in a hyper-realistic mode. I set the story in the same city and the same time as I was writing it. I used my real feelings to infuse the main character's feelings in regard to his relationship, the love interest, and about his own morality. That was me doing the feeling, doing the thinking, and putting it on the page for others to "enjoy". When I wrote about his relationship with his parents in the second book, SUNRISE (April 2018), I could draw from the relationship I had with my own parents (although they were not vampires). Again I cut and pasted from actual everyday experiences I had with them.

In my FLU SEASON series, which began with what I believed would be a one-off stand-alone novel about a single mother and her teen son surviving a worse pandemic/lockdown than what most of us experienced in real life, I found a lot of connections to exploit. 

The first book, THE BOOK OF MOM (November 2022), is narrated by the teen son who "suffers" from Asperger's syndrome, a form of autism. I chose to have the character that way because I was, at the time, becoming informed about it. Random sources sparked something in me that made me wonder, through the long line of experiences in my life, if I might not also have that syndrome undiagnosed. Turns out many adults find out later in life that they have actually been living (sometimes unsuccessfully) through the unusual aspects of the syndrome. I hadn't been diagnosed at the time I started writing; I merely thought it would make an interesting character - and it did. 

And speaking of Father's Day (which it is as I post this), we have THE BOOK OF DAD (June 2024) which was written as a sequel to the original trilogy. I had more ideas so I wrote another book. In it, I saw a twist on Orwell's "1984" but only inasmuch as the new capital was a repressive place where thought and history were strictly controlled. I let fly all my paranoia and neuroticism in the character of Frank (Isla's last child). I explored my own beliefs about the role of a man in society, as a provider, as a protector, and how society (government) sought to replace those roles, leaving a man with nothing to stand for, nothing to do but manual labor. He rages at his society - as we rage against ours today. But it was therapeutic for me, letting it out of my system, so to speak.

As the series continued through the family lineage, that body of traits is passed along to a greater or lesser degree, right up to Book 6: THE GRANDSONS (coming July 1, 2025). We don't know if the syndrome affects the main character there, if he suspects it or even knows about the possibility. If you know from reading the other books in the series, seeing it unfold in other characters, or you know from your own research, then you may well see it in his actions, but it is not specifically suggested. They say to write what you know, but sometimes you write what you know without knowing you know it. You know?


So I cheat. But at least it's my own life I draw from. There's a lot to draw from, although it's never been my intention to simply write a memoir. I did try that a couple of times. It got boring fast. My advice for new writers, however, would be to try to write your own life. See what is true and see what isn't but may sound true enough to be included. Then you can fictionalize it. A good exercise.

Now, with the FLU SEASON Saga coming to an end (or so they say), I can look back on multiple generations across the six books and see quite clearly the themes, the tropes, the messages I wanted to offer. I think of some words: redemption (in nearly every book I've written), reconciliation (making things right again, especially with other family members), and always: continuity. Maybe too often in these six books a character will remark on those who came before and those who will follow after, and feel a sense of relief at that. Maybe the character thinking it simply feels relief that he/she doesn't need to keep carrying on, that the next generation will take over, will carry the family forward another few decades then pass it off to yet another new generation.

How to make sense of it all? An old MFA professor once told us: "If you want to send a message, put it in a letter, not a story." And yet, where better than a story to offer something valuable? The trick is to let it slip in like a letter under the door, unobtrusive, almost an afterthought yet full of wisdom of a sort when it finally becomes clear to us. 

THE GRANDSONS launches July 1, 2025. I'll be blogging on it between now and then.

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 

(C) Copyright 2010-2025 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.