THE BOOK OF DAD celebrates Father's Day!

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....

Fictional Fathers for Father's Day (June 18, 2023)

(Purely for comparison, you can read here my blog post on different mothers for Mother's Day.)

"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.

Book 1 and 2 are out and Book 3 is finished and coming out this fall. The narrator of Book 1 and 2 is a teen son, describing in Book 1 his sassy never-married mom ("The Book of Mom") and in Book 2 his own family ("The Way of the Son"). So far the story is about this teen boy becoming a man and with that title a husband and father (no spoilers; it was inevitable).

I've done a lot of thinking about that arc as I wrote this family drama. The ideas a boy has about becoming a man and all that comes with that role. The criteria to be met. The duties and responsibilities. The joys and regrets. The fact that the roles keeps changing: son, father, grandfather. Because I've borrowed liberally from my own thoughts and feelings, these novels are deeply personal to me - even though they are, of course, totally fiction. (We know our pandemic ended officially in 2022. But what if it didn't? How would everything be, say, six years on? Eight years? Eleven years? What would remain? How would people carry on?)

Book 3 ("Dawn of the Daughters") is narrated by the daughter of this boy/man/husband/father and tells the continuing story of the family through her entire life, including views of how society has changed post-pandemic. I have ideas for a Book 4 which would be narrated by her grown son, now a father, and describe how he deals with the dystopia of the post-pandemic rebuilt world as well as the effects of having her as his mother. It truly is a vicious circle.

Here is my blog posting for 2020's Father's Day:

Last month, for Mother's Day, I waxed poetic on the three kinds of mothers I happened to have in my novels. Well, turnabout seems fair play, so let me ponder the types of fathers I find in my novels and consider their source.

So I'm sitting comfortably at home this summer, counting the sales of my latest novel, and it hits me! I should be promoting my Father's Day novel, the one titled AIKO. It's a kind of Father's Day story, after all. And because Father's Day is here again, everyone is doing a grad and dad marketing blitz. My just launched novel EXCHANGE has a dad at its center. Unfortunately he has lost his wife and his daughter in a mass shooting, but there are many "dad" tropes as he struggles to put his life back together and find meaning in what remains.

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.

In AIKO, our hero discovers he is a father, then struggles to find his child. There is a brief mention of his own father being stationed in Japan after WWII - like my own father was. After the war, my father went to college on the G.I. Bill and became a social studies teacher, then later a librarian. Now he is deep into retirement, having put his books away for poor eyesight and sleepier days, not to mention the devastation of a hurricane.

When I think of my father, the image that comes most readily to my mind is of him sitting in his reading chair, reading: reading in such a focused, determined manner that I could get away with literally anything because nothing could disturb him. Thus, he was separated from my everyday activities, always there but on the sidelines, uninvolved in my youthful experiences. And that is what I learned of fatherhood: 1) provide the family income, 2) relax at home after the job, 3) fix things around the house and yard. Also, 4) be master of the castle, 5) enforce the rules, and when necessary (6) represent the family like a knight in shining armor when some authority or institution challenges us. He is the (7) champion, the protector, the lord of the manor. And that is, for better or worse, how I portray the fathers in my novels: powerful yet distant. 

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. 

As I think back over the past  years, I can pinpoint a few things I did that might have helped raise this baby to adulthood. But there are just as many other things I did about which I have no clue. Maybe they helped, maybe not. Only my grown child can tell. I'm pleased, even proud, of how this googly little bundle of joy overnight became this awesome adult who vaguely resembles me in appearance and words and behavior. 

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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(C) Copyright 2010-2024 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.

It can now be revealed! (The Long Game Plot)

When I was thirteen, I imagined a grand epic with a medieval setting. (I had been an avid reader of Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles around that time, full disclosure.) The story I came up with involved twin brothers, princes of the realm, who grow apart and then are forced to battle each other, winner take all. I dabbled with starting the story as a novel (when I had barely written short stories by typewriter or by hand). I quickly realized it was too big a project for me to write at that time. Sadly, I set it aside with the intention of working on it when I retired and had lots of time. (Now retirement has come....)

One major feature of my medieval epic was that the setting was in the future, around the year 3000 AD, as I determined. And the place of the story was in a collection of city-states or kingdoms formerly known as the good ol' USA. So we have the Kingdom of Chicago at war with the Kingdom of Cincinnati as the main focus, with other kingdoms coming into play, as well. From the 1970s and 80s - when I got the idea and planned it out, through my effort to get the story down in some complete form by writing it as a screenplay - I believed that after some disastrous event it would take about a thousand years for civilization to devolve to something akin to a medieval society. (I would take no responsibility for said disaster....)

[This will have been well-documented soon after my demise, I shall presume.] 

Here is the revelation part of this blog post: I've been sneaky.

In 2015-2017, when I was dared by fellow authors to write an epic fantasy, which would have to include dragons, titled EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, I conceived of a future world - again set in what characters called "the Americus", a collection of small realms. I set my epic fantasy tale there, basically a quest where an exiled dragonslayer seeks the dragons' nesting grounds so he can wipe them out all at once and win his return home. Along the way, as fantasies tend to go, he has various encounters and meets different people. However, it comes out in pieces what occurred in the era prior to his own. Reference is made by the characters of a great war between five brothers and how the result of that war shaped the era he now found himself in. Ah hah!

Yes, folks! That same story I invented in my youth reappears as a backstory in my epic fantasy novel. The five princes consist of the twin brothers who are at odds, their two younger brothers, and an older-&-wiser cousin who may be their illegitimate brother. I borrowed my original story and put it into my 2017 novel. Scandalous, I know. Apologies!

But guess what happened next. We experience a pandemic in real life, and we know what that did to society. Yet it ended fairly soon. After initial hesitancy, I started a new novel in which I imagined an extended pandemic which would bring a lot more trouble to society. What would that be like? The characters suffer through much worse situations than most of us did, to a desperate degree, enough to make them finally flee the chaotic city. (Main character kept thinking it was about to end only to find it continuing....)

And so the FLU SEASON trilogy was born, beginning with what was expected to be a single, stand-alone, one-off novel titled The Book of Mom. In what became Book 1 of the series, a teenage autistic boy narrates what he and his never-married mother, a tuba player and music professor, do in escaping a ravaged city for the hope of survival in the countryside. Plan A doesn't work out, of course, nor does Plan B, so they have to head to a coastal island where the family has a vacation home. They will wait out the pandemic there....

So far, so good, as disaster stories go. The first book birthed a second book, forcing me to plan a trilogy. I knew by the run up to the conclusion of Book 1 that a second novel would be necessary; I wanted to know what happens next. I knew what would happen in Book 2: The Way of the Son. The autistic son is on his own in the pandemic-stricken world, fighting for survival, on a harsh journey to sanctuary. As I closed in on the conclusion of that book, I knew what Book 3: Dawn of the Daughters would be about: the next generation's story. It became a tome in itself - my second longest novel after Epic Fantasy *With Dragons - covering the end of the pandemic, the decades of lawlessness, a civil war, and the rebuilding of society, plus the reinvention of "modern" gadgets and utilities. I felt it was a bit like Gone With the Wind but set in post-apocalyptic times.

However, that reconstruction period allowed those who were in position to grab power to build a new society in the mold of an authoritarian regime that worked to repress its citizens, forcing people to believe that the pandemic never happened, like a perverted mirror of Orwell's 1984 novel. In Book 4: The Book of Dad [coming June 2024], the youngest son of the Book 3 heroine tells how the next generation of their family struggles to endure the repressive city. But, as is the case each time, another story springs forth....

Book 5, which I'm calling The Granddaughter's Tale (with a wink at Chaucer), follows the daughter of Book 4's tragic hero as she attempts to start a children's band in a small western town called Skinner Canyon, set on the edge of the wilderness. As it nears completion, I'm pleased that I've managed to keep it significantly lighter than previous novels in the series. I've borrowed a plotline from the old musical The Music Man but flipped it on its side. Later in the story, when our heroine travels east, she learns of the advancement of armies from Quebec down across Ontario and over Michigan to claim the city of Chicago and rename it Chicageaux. What? Mon Dieu! Quelle folie! You see, in that story of the twin princes, the Quebecois have indeed conquered the northern tier in the future, requiring the combined armies of the Americus to push them back in the 2900s; however, the city of Chicageaux retains its by then centuries-old name.

Over the course of the whole FLU SEASON series, we have lived through more than 130 years since the pandemic started.

And now you know the rest of the story! I have tied in once again the vast timeline of the long-planned medieval epic of my youth. This is how that timeline begins. 

Back as a teenager, amidst the on-going oil crisis, I had imagined a lack of oil destroying civilization. The idea still works: the collapse of society because of the long pandemic shuts down all industries, including drilling and refining. There is no more fuel for vehicles, as we experience in FLU SEASON Books 1 & 2. In Book 3 everyone is using what horses remain yet uneaten. In Book 4, we have reinvented electricity but its use is limited to the major cities. In Book 5, moving out west, we have even more restriction on electricity - almost as though we had returned to the 1890s.

This is how my grand timeline begins. Although I avoid stating years in the FLU SEASON series, I measure the pandemic (real and in the series) as beginning from 2020 - and six years into the pandemic, it would be 2026 when Book 1 starts. Several generations tell their stories. It is therefore around 2150 when Book 5 ends. More happens, thus preventing civilization from truly returning to what it was before the pandemic, and by the years approaching 3000 we find the land divided into city-states that battle each other over resources. My vision is thus rewarded, rekindled, and fulfilled. Now (already into my retirement), I still have the opportunity to write that youth-created novel - if I am not seen as copying G.R.R. Martin's Song of Ice and Fire series, a worry which has put me off from digging into my epic. 

However, I will need something to work on in the final years lest the final years hasten to their end before I am ready.

There could be a Book 6. I have ideas - two, in fact. I might even merge them. That would take us further into the future, say another 50 years, to about 2200. That should be far enough ahead in time that I won't be tripped up by real events happening or not happening within the publication window of the book.

Anyway, happy reading and, for me, happy trail writing!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2024 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.

The Future of Money...

...And the Nature of Work

You may have noticed that I've cut back on blogging to write on my latest novel, a sequel to my pandemic/post-pandemic trilogy FLU SEASON. It follows after what happens in Book 3: Dawn of the Daughters and tells the story of the grown-up last child of our Book 3 heroine. As society returns to its pre-pandemic form and rebuilding brings us to a new era, we find a society much like the one depicted in Orwell's 1984. If you're going to rebuild a society, why not strive to rebuild the ideal society?

One of the big issues to deal with in constructing a futuristic society is how they get things done. That is, who does the work and how they are paid or otherwise compensated for that work. You find that as part of every science fiction world. The authors rethink what money is and how it may be changed in the future. The term 'credit' is often used as a synonym for money, which makes sense even down to when we get less actual physical money and more ghostly adjustments to the numbers we see on a screen which is a measurement of our account holdings.

However, just what does that account holdings represent? The short answer is how much we have worked. That is, I do this work in exchange for this much "credit" which is stored in my account. My account is now less of a physical place than a cloud collection of numbers, as easily wiped out as compounded by powers bigger than us. And different countries use different forms of money. At one time, according to my grandfather, people used nice seashells as money, which left me looking for very nice shells when on the beach and later finding that nobody would give me money for them. 

Most of us have entered agreements whereby we will do something on a regular basis in exchange for an appropriate amount of compensation. I, myself, have entered such contracts whereby I performed tasks (let's call it a job) and found the balance of numbers in my account increased periodically. Funny how that works. Even funnier is how my colleagues who seemed to do less of the same tasks actually got larger increases in their accounts. Granted, we each had our own way of accomplishing those tasks, so that may explain the differences. It wasn't as though I was offering my hands and my back to pick up and carry things for money. No, I had paid money to learn things and I was employed to teach those things to others. There seemed to be a need when I started doing that. Not like there was a fixed number of people who could do that job, not like the National Football League having only so many positions and a cap on how much money they could allocate to pay those limited number of workers (i.e., players).

We've heard many expressions concerning money and work:

• "We keep you alive to row this ship!" intones the captain aboard Ben-Hur's galley in the movie of the same name.

• "You don't work, you don't eat!" says the Pilgrim's leader at Plymouth.

• "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs," states Mr. Marx.

• "Earned Income vs. Unearned Income" - an important distinction made by the Internal Revenue Service.

• "We no longer use money. We work because we enjoy it." (paraphrased) from a Star Trek episode, Capt. Kirk or Capt. Picard explaining to aliens about the Earth economy.

Different views of this important relationship between effort and reward. I often played games (almost like games) when ordered to do a task by one or the other parent and to get me to do it I was offered an "allowance". I didn't want to do any chores, but I did like getting some money for doing them. It was a cheap thrill to mow a lawn and get a ten for doing it. Once the money was spent it never seemed like enough for the sweat I put into the effort. My first job outside of tasks for family was making French fries in a burger shack in an amusement park, a thankless job that never paid enough for the abuse I endured from surly coworkers, a devious manager, and hot oil. 

Eventually I was employed in a library while otherwise being a college student. I did mostly physical labor: returning materials to the appropriate shelf, which required less strength and more knowledge of the alphabetical order. I felt adequately compensated for my expert application of the alphabet. But in the future, perhaps I would not be compensated. Suppose I only got food for my work? I put in a few hours of work in exchange for a small box of food. Kind of like: if you help me I'll buy us lunch. Or, in more practical terms, call your friends up to help you move and offer them pizza - only some pizza.

I could recount each and every job I had but that would bore you - if you're not by now. But it does raise a recent phenomena I discovered just before I retired from my job. As a professor I often taught a class on doing research. One semester, when assigning a survey project in which students would design and conduct a survey by gathering information from other students, some students complained that they couldn't get anyone to help them. Their fellow students were demanding financial compensation for their time and answers to the survey. I assured them students love to give their opinions about everything - but I was wrong. We had entered the new economy: every effort, down to the most minute detail, was subject to payment. And that wasn't only if you had fans who would willingly pay for what you offered; no, that's commerce, buying and selling a product or service, not labor for compensation. Or is that the same thing?

That brings us to the near-future. After a ten-year pandemic and a couple decades of anarchy and war, there is no more physical money in society (see the FLU SEASON trilogy), nor is there any banking system. By the end of Book 3, society has returned to a basic system, printed new paper money which wipes out the old bills. In the sequel now underway, we move into the cash-less system. Our hero finds that is not a good way of doing things. He works at a menial job in exchange for mostly his weekly food rations. No work, no food. It becomes a dire situation, pushing him to take matters in a dramatic direction. In Orwell's "how-to" manual, the city is a run-down, depressing place but they have food, albeit poor selection at inflated prices. In FLU SEASON 4: THE BOOK OF DAD (coming in 2024), all is gleaming and clean. It is a gilded cage. "Everyone has a place and a place for everyone" goes the Ideal Society's motto. Work or you won't be given food. And there's no place else to get it.

Stop working and you will receive no food. You will die eventually. Annoy your leaders enough and you may be sent for rehabilitation. Or a labor camp where you work for nothing, but they feed you as part of the process to keep the work flowing. Think of your present job and how you are compensated for what you do. Lots of laws put in place to enforce fairness, equity, freedom from unsafe practices and harassment and prejudice. But what if the only job in town is you straining your body every day - and they give you a meal? 

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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.

"1984" Reinvented as FLU SEASON 4

Probably not what you're thinking about today. You're likely focused on football, colorful leaves, Halloween, and pumpkin spice lattes. Certainly not the novel 1984 by George Orwell or countless movie versions of the story of a repressive society in the near future. To be honest, neither am I. However....

Like many teens, I first read 1984 for a class in high school. It was one sci-fi novel  which "felt" like a "normal" story - not my usual fare of space operas or heroic fantasy. What I liked about it was the dire setting; perhaps it fit my teenage mood of hopelessness. Our teacher pointed out the features of the story, what it is famous for, what this really means, and so on, but I never got the implications. Perhaps that was because in that decade we had no realistic fear of life changing too much from the way it was. I also was fascinated with the deliberate changing of the language for political purposes. I first dabbled with making my own language. (I would eventually create alien languages for my own sci-fi novels and study linguistics in graduate school.)

Later, when they made a new movie of the novel for the actual year of 1984, I was ready to understand all that it was suggesting. It wasn't that life had changed enough for me to see something new, something represented in the movie. For me, the movie was more about the downfall of a city, the cold and dull lives of the characters, and how depressing it all was. Seeing that film version prompted me to look for but not find my copy of the book, so I had to buy a new one. Even Apple, the computer company, had a 'Big Brother' advertisement in the Super Bowl of 1984. (By the way, I looked for one of those two copies for my research and did not find them so I had to buy yet another copy.)

More books and movies had a similar 'collapsed society' setting with idealistic characters who fought for a better life - either to destroy the new but cruel society or to take it over in the believe that they could undo the terrible changes. I liked the settings, but not the plots. These newer presentations were not new but rehashes of tropes from Orwell's novel. The main point in them was that if we the people do not stay aware, we could be repressed into a pointless existence. We could no longer live our lives in peace and safety, not to mention in comfort.

For the past few weeks - indeed, for nearly two years - I've bothered you with blog posts and promotional material about my latest creation, FLU SEASON, a trilogy about a family's struggles in an extended pandemic and the lawlessness that follows. In the second half of the third book, however, society is getting back on its feet again and life looks promising. But is that any way to end a trilogy? A happy ending? Really?

No, there's more. What seems to be good is, in fact, merely a facade which hides the evil machinations of a group of politicians who strive to achieve the ideal society - with them at the cushy top of the hierarchy, of course. That's the plot of many futuristic novels and movies. The difference I'm trying for is a natural extension of the story covered in my trilogy. Thus it is not strictly an imitation of Orwell's book but what would seem to me a logical progression from the way everything is at the end of Book 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS. Perhaps if I manage to set up the start of this slow revolution in my new "sequel to the trilogy", the story might then become like the situation in Orwell's book.

When we experienced our own pandemic in 2020 and I wanted to write a story based on it, I decided to start my story in the sixth year of the pandemic - when society had already gone downhill quite a bit. Following a period of anarchy, opposing territories begin to rebuild, fight a new civil war against each other, and finally settle into a more cohesive society. Technology that had been lost is reinvented, sometimes better. Other technologies are deemed less important in rebuilding (e.g., airplanes can wait). It is a society where there is electricity and there is a 'streaming' system (the equivalent of over the airways TV but not internet). There are also cameras and sensors everywhere - for citizens' own safety, of course, both in public areas and within each person's housing unit. There are roaming human safety monitors.

In this new Book 4, working title The Book of Dad, the story centers around Fritz, the last child of Isla Augustine Baumann (born in Book 1, grown narrator of Book 3). When Fritz is older he makes a documentary of his mother (Isla) telling about her life during and after the pandemic, thinking it is good to preserve the history of that era. But he learns it is the wrong history and some powerful people do not want it to be available. The result is trouble for Fritz. Trying to make a new life for himself after 'rehabilitation' and losing everything because of it, he is assigned a street sweeper job - because everyone must have a useful function in this new Ideal Society. Most of all he wants to know why he was targeted and who ordered him arrested years after the documentary was widely praised. What Fritz learns makes for a couple shocking plot twists that will blow the mind of readers of the trilogy. But no more spoilers.

My first consideration is always Will This Be Interesting? Next, I think about how the story embedded in the book will say something to readers beyond what happens in the novel. I don't write a novel to express philosophical ideas or push a message - but messages do appear on their own in the course of writing and I let them stay if appropriate. I also find, sometimes long after publishing, that a novel I wrote has a theme I never anticipated and certainly did not deliberately put into it. Book 3: Dawn of the Daughters has that hidden theme woven throughout that only on the fifth reading have I noticed. (Nope. Not going to tell you. Read it for yourself and see if you notice it.) In Book 4, I'm not pushing any 'watch out' warning; we already know what Orwell was telling us. But the way the drastic change sneaks up on us is what I'm going for in my Book 4 - rather than entering the story with everything already in a terrible condition, like in Orwell's book.

I hope Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD will be out in Summer 2024...or what I like to call "our second 1984". As of this blog, we are close to 50,000 words.

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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.

The Retirement Project vs The Sunset

When I was thirteen and full of stories, I had one idea which I knew was too big for me to work on as a teenager. I started writing the story at thirteen, then put it away, overwhelmed by its scope. When I was in college, I wrote more on it before putting it away again. I knew I had plenty of time. Then I wrote it all out as a screenplay because at that time I was interested in going into the movie business. From that screenplay, I started a novelization but put it away. I never felt bad about putting it away because I designated that story to be my "retirement project" - what I would work on during my retirement to keep me busy and out of trouble. So now that retirement has arrived....

I have kept to that plan, except I haven't returned to it. Honestly, the whole Game of Thrones series of books and TV episodes took away much of my project, dealing with a medieval society not in a fantasy world like Westeros but in a future America after the destruction of our modern society. It could still work, I suppose. But now readers would make comparisons to Martin's story - and arguably he does it much better than I could. My story, titled A Time of Kings (from a piece we played in high school band), is a different story: identical twin princes fight to win the whole kingdom after their father dies. But there's a lot more to it, of course. The story appeared as the historical backstory in my novel EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS (2017).

But I have a Plan B. I've just finished my third trilogy - the trifecta! - yet there are story elements remaining for me to make some hay with. I'm calling it a sequel to the trilogy rather than re-titling the trilogy as a tetralogy. Too much trouble to redo book covers and republish, you know. It may only be a short novel, involving a character from the trilogy, and thus not take up much time in my retirement, yet it does lend itself to allowing me to continue using the world I created for the trilogy by inventing other stories set there.

Now that my pandemic trilogy FLU SEASON is complete (all three novels are available), I have a page for the series. You can get paperback and Kindle editions for all three books on one page: right here, go on now, click it, there ya go!

If you're new to this trilogy, here's a summary:

BOOK 1: THE BOOK OF MOM

Remember that pandemic we had in 2020-22? Well, what if it didn't end but got worse in every way? Besides all the vaccine mandates and mask wearing rules, there are shortages of gas and food, there is rampant crime by both ordinary citizens and government authorities. Life becomes unbearable.

Now let's follow autistic teen Sandy (as narrator) and his single mom as they escape a city in chaos for what they think will be safety in the countryside. Of course, things do not go the way Mom expects and they must shift to a plan B. And plan C. It is a dangerous world, but if they can just find a sanctuary and wait a while everything will go back to normal...Mom dares to believe.

BOOK 2: THE WAY OF THE SON

Fleeing a city in chaos in Book 1, Sandy must now face the savage outerlands without Mom to guide him. He struggles to provide for his young family among the ruins of a collapsed society, and a journey to reconnect with his aunt goes very wrong. In typical heroic fashion, Sandy learns how to be a man, how to be strong, and how to forgive. He finds the way to the future.

BOOK 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS

Hiding away in the forest of a national park in the 9th year of the pandemic, Sandy's family waits for the world to return to normal. But they soon discover other families have the same idea. As the survivalists of the national park work together, Sandy's family faces new challenges and opportunities. They suffer through the vagaries of marauders and war between territories and Sandy is caught up in the fighting. The conflict splits the family into divergent destinies, leaving Sandy's daughter, Isla, to carry the family into the future where they witness the reconstruction of a new society.

BOOK 4: (tentatively titled THE WAY OF THE DAD) work-in-progress!

Isla's youngest is all grown up and getting into trouble in a rebuilt society where government authority reigns supreme, much like in Orwell's 1984, pushing our hero to rebel....

So there is enough to keep me entertained in these final years, as I look harder at each sunset, waiting for the final one to slip away. If I finish, I finish. If I don't, you still have the books I've already written and this blog and perhaps a few memories of my twisted writing advice here and there - like in this post from the past week for fellow Myrddin author Connie J. Jasperson. Number 1 advice? Write now, fix later.

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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.

That NaNo Thing (2020 edition)

So, ladies and gentlemen, each November there is a competition for writers who strive to compose a story of 50,000 words (or possibly a little more). The National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo for insiders) is the Super Bowl for those who have no athletic skills [sic] but have an idea often expressed as "You know what would make a great movie?" 

NaNo was brought to my attention by my writer friends in 2014. Usually it is not a problem to write 50,000 words, even in a month, if I have a lot of free time and a hot idea. So I gave it a go, writing most of a sci-fi novel by the concluding tally of 55,396...which was not the end of the story. I put it aside and finally this year (yes, in 2020) I picked it up and finished it at 95,000 words. It will be available early in 2021.

Usually, I start something in February and write through the spring and summer and finish at the beginning of autumn, then edit and revise through the month of November, precluding my participation. But sometimes it works out. In 2016 I worked on a sequel to my epic fantasy tome and "won" with 52,077 words...but it remains unfinished. In 2018, I worked on a cynical autobiography, based a lot on Grandma's notes of her ancestors and my vague memories of childhood. Again I got to 54,275 words by the end of the month. Lots more to finish that book.

Last year (2019) I was engaged in preparation of my crime thriller novel EXCHANGE (out in May 2020) and skipped the NaNo. But this year...I had no alibi. So I looked at what projects I had started and needed to finish. I picked up my screenplay for a "1984" rip-off and decided to novelize it. We are allowed notes and an outline for NaNo so novelizing a screenplay is not cheating. With 2 days to go, it sits at 49,996 words. I think I can cobble together another 4 words in time.

THE LIE began long, long ago in a high school far, far away. Fresh from a class reading of George Orwell's "1984", I said to myself: "I think I can do better." So I wrote a story about a police state but mine was set in the United States instead of London. I had my own twists on the story so it wasn't entirely a copy. I typed it out on a manual typewriter until the ink ribbon was spent and the typed words faint. Single-spaced, it went to 66 pages - the longest piece of writing I had ever done to that date. I stapled the pages in the top left corner and shared it with a couple guys in my sci-fi nerd circle. They liked it. Others asked to read it so it was passed around for the rest of the semester.

However, I got busy with other things. You know, the usual: college, jobs, relationships, other writing projects, travel, career, family, more writing projects.... 

Back up. In a return to college to take a screenwriting course, I used the story as the plot for my screenplay (see above). The professor of the course had Hollywood ties and he helped some of us get attention. My screenplay was "optioned" by a production company, which meant they paid me for the rights to it for 1 year; if they did not move forward on it within that year the rights reverted to me. Guess who got reverted?

So it went back to the shelf. I ran the high school pages through an OCR system to try to make it able to be edited on a word processor but the optical character recognition system did not recognize very much of my typing. Now (NaNoWriMo 2020) I cannot even find that poor OCR'd file, but I do have the screenplay. So I read the scene in the screenplay format, then write it out as a novel scene. Lots of description needed to be filled in along with the thoughts and feelings of the characters - which the actors and director would take care of in a film production.

Like past projects for NaNoWriMo, I will not finish it by the time I complete the month. But I will get my 50,000 words to win the competition. The project interests me, has a unique take on the basic dystopian themes, and so I will likely finish it eventually - unless a new idea hits me from out of left field.

So that is how I have been spending my November, if anyone wondered where I was. I was assuming you were deep inside one of my latest novels, EXCHANGE or the just launched YEAR OF THE TIGER (read more here), and simply did not realize I had not posted on my blog until now. Next month I will return to that first NaNoWriMo novel, the sci-fi story, and prepare it for launch in 2021.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2020 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.

Beware Vampires! SUNRISE is coming soon!

SUNRISE, the end of the workday for vampires...

For Stefan Székely it is a fate worse than death: To be dead yet stuck with his dead parents. After 13 years Stefan can endure it no longer. He wants a castle of his own. But first he must visit his family’s bank in Budapest.

With endless strife rumbling across Europe, Stefan hardly recognizes Budapest, now capital of the Hungarian Federation. The world has changed. 

Nevertheless, he embarks on the reign of terror he always denied himself, living the vampire playboy lifestyle.  Until he gets a stern warning from the local vampire gang. He is not welcome - unless he plays by their rules.

Should Stefan fight for his right to party like it's 2027? Or will an encounter with a dangerous stranger change everything about his new existence? As clashes between vampire gangs and State Security escalate, Stefan just might be the key to changing the fate of Europe forever! . . . If he can survive three bloody nights in Budapest.

The sequel to A DRY PATCH of SKIN continues the trials and tribulations of Stefan Székely, Vampire.

In 2014 my medically accurate vampire novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN came outto a rave review. My main purpose was to counter the hysteria of the Twilight experience with some medical research crossed with established legends. I wanted to tell a realistic vampire tale. I even set the story in my own city and the action in the story followed the actual days and months I was writing the story. The story and my writing of the story ended the same week. Of course, I revised and edited after that.

Then I thought . . . what could possibly happen next? So I chose a gap of, say, 13 years (the number seems significant in horror stories). Now, where did I leave my protagonist? How is he doing? What could have happened since the end of the first book? What has changed in the world during these 13 years? How would what's different in the world affect his own corner of the world? How would he cope with these changes?

As I started on another vampire story I quickly realized that I had to also write essentially a science-fiction story. A futuristic story. If I were setting the story 13 years after the end of the previous novel, then this sequel would be set in 2027. And it would be somewhere in Europe, which is where our hero was at the end of the first book. 

What did I know of 2027? Not much. Like many sci-fi writers writing about the future, I took the present circumstances, the way things are now (both good and bad), and extrapolated how they might logically progress. Remember that novel by George Orwell, 1984? It was published in 1948 just as fears of a Communist takeover gripped Europe. It was supposed to be a warning. Orwell imagined how the concerns of his present might play out in the future. 

With the current strife in Europe, mass immigration, refugees coming to Europe from the Middle East and Africa, the increase in crime, the open warfare between left and right political groups, I could see all of these happenings extending, continuing and growing through the following decade. The moral question that arises is whether the author should follow his/her own beliefs, that is, how the world should be, a Utopian view - or choose a path of development which would be the best setting for the story (given the plot that would likely unfold), however the society might become - or try to take an honest look at current events and let things fall where they might, for good or ill.

I chose both. If I have to make a choice, I will lean toward what makes a good story over what my own beliefs might be. For the sake of this story and for the way I think society will continue to "progress" or develop or evolve over the next 10 years, I'm letting the European conflicts play out in the sequel: my now less-medically accurate vampire novel, titled SUNRISE.

Today, the governments of Hungary and Poland are resisting the  acceptance refugees and other immigrants and the European Union chastises them for it. Both nations have refused to comply with orders from Brussels and are being threatened with economic punishment. Jump ahead 10 years (from now; 13 from the end of the previous novel) and these countries have broken away from the European Union, formed their own economic block, and run business as usual in ways which are more to their liking. This is the landscape Stefan Székely ventures into from the isolated precincts of his family villa.

As described in this sequel, the new Hungarian Federation is a strictly run Euro-centrist society. The State Security apparatus runs a tidy ship and getting in is very problematic. Staying in if you are a "diseased" resident such as a vampire is dangerous. However, our hero, Stefan Székely, is already within the boundaries of the Hungarian Federation at his family's estate in the former Croatia; therefore, I, the author, must deal with the vagaries of that location. It was not an unpleasant effort. I love to travel vicariously.

 

Needless to say, our hero has difficulties - or there wouldn't be a story. Yet as I charged through the final chapters and then undertook the revision stage, the look and feel, the horrors, and the dystopian ambiance seemed right. Will Stefan escape from the repressive Hungarian Federation? Or will evil powers greater than himself and the vampire gangs of Budapest have the final say? 

Regardless, in SUNRISE the world gets darker before the light shines again. Book 3, to be titled SUNSET, picks up the story even further into the future. By then, we are in full-fledged dystopia territory. But, hey! I'm sure everything will work out just fine...if you transform into a vampire in time, of course.

Look for SUNRISE on or about April 1.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2018 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.