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!

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(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.

End of 2024 Review

The year 2024 has been a year of regrets, I regret to say. Regrets for things I didn't do; for things I did do but perhaps shouldn't have; for things I said and failed to say; for looking back far too much; for not getting that time machine built.

This has been one of the most difficult years I've had since my toddler years when much was not actually my fault. A lot happened. Some good, some not so good. I'll try to keep it light for the holiday season.

I began the year in the dark weeks of winter by deciding to move to a new residence out of spite for the changes the management made during the previous year (after I signed the lease). My new place was more in-town, a mere 3 miles south of the old place, was of a more traditional style. So far, it has been comfortable - but my neighbors changed and now I have loud talkers below me. I don't complain much because at least they are not loud music buffs.

I settled in and returned to working on whatever the latest book was, putting off unpacking for when the muses insisted on napping. Spring came over the land and I noticed. Didn't do anything, but I noticed. Had thoughts of this summer's road trip. Studied maps. 

Next I helped my daughter move. That is: sell a big house and buy a small house. Then the truck and the lifting and the carrying. You know the drill. That stressed me enough that I had to be checked out by my newest doctors. I say newest because I had moved here two years earlier upon retirement and had to switch from doctors in the old location in another state. Plus the hassle of setting up various government programs designed to keep paying taxes for as long as possible. So far, so good as I arrived at the summer. I was put back together and sent on my way. No road trip.

I decided to take it easy the rest of the year, relax and let the world come to me. I've actually accomplished that goal. In fact, I still have not finished unpacking since I moved in to this new home. I think about it. Instead, I get up, do some writing, check the socials, run errands as needed, take a nap, get up and watch TV, get dinner, watch YouTube videos or a movie or write more, then read and go to bed. An easy schedule. A simple life.

Next I shall elaborate on my writing during the year. If you've read about this topic in previous blog posts, that's fine. Thanks. I still urge you to read on; the grammar is better this time.

Professionally (if I may use the term for a non-paid vocation), I managed to complete Book 4 in my Flu Season series. I'd thought a trilogy was enough to hang my hat on - my third trilogy, achieving the trifecta! Yet another book idea kept pushing into my head until I had to write it in order to stop the noise. Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD continues the misadventures of one of the family members as he suffers through the 'Ideal Society' of the capital after the pandemic years and civil war have passed. The theme is about truth, what it is and how it can be so easily corrupted - as he learns from Big Sister. Appropriately, THE BOOK OF DAD launched on Father's Day.

By that publication date, I had already started yet another book in the series, calling Book 4 a sequel to the trilogy. However, starting Book 5 forced me to see the continuing project as a new trilogy. This new book is narrated by the daughter of the main character of Book 4. It is a lighter story with an emphasis on music as a vital aspect of human experience, lost during the previous reconstruction era. In Book 5: THE GRANDDAUGHTER, a simple country girl living out west in this post-everything world decides to start a kids band in her little town. But she is noticed through some music events and rises to a full musical career. I often call this story a remake of the musical The Music Man but with a post-apocalyptic Western setting. THE GRANDDAUGHTER launched in September.

What does a pair of books need to become a trilogy? 

Yes, by then, I had started what I expect to be the final volume in the Flu Season Saga: THE GRANDSONS. As of this blog posting, this novel is, by my estimation, roughly half finished. It is a complex book using a frame story. We begin in the "present" of the story which is 15 years after the end of Book 5. Then we slip back in time to reveal what has been happening to the characters during that 15 year span. Finally, we arrive again at the book's present time and, having now learned all that happened, the concluding chapters are poignant and a fitting conclusion to the entire six-book series. When all is said and done, we are well into the future and on the way to connecting with my vampire series and my epic fantasy novel. Book 6: THE GRANDSONS should launch in fall 2025 if all goes well.

The end of the year is always a quiet time. I'm not much for lavish parties although I attend them sometimes. Not a fan of loud celebrations. Not much for the religious devotions yet still appreciate the music. That's just not me. Been that way most of my life. I prefer periods of quiet reflection. That often leads to a list of regrets. Thinking over what I've done, what I've witnessed through the year, and what could've been done better - not that I can go back and fix anything. I might be able to rewrite some things as fiction, a better version of the truth.

At this stage of my life, I make few plans. Other than finish the book mentioned above - and I have no plans to start another following it, although I have a couple manuscripts in unfinished condition I might take another look at - I will hopefully awaken each day and only then make a decision what to do. Then another decision as the day blossoms. Then another. Hard to say. It's something to do.

I wish you all the happiest of holidays now passed, and a better new year in 2025 than any past year!

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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.

Pre-Fall Update & BBQ Picnic

What a glorious time of the year! Usually this is my least favorite time: hottest part of the year, having to return to school, cicadas by day, crickets by night, all the things I planned to do during the summer but didn't.... Anyway, those days are gone and I can sit back and watch others go back to school (hah hah!) as I go off to various doctor appointments hoping for the best.

As we head toward yet another autumn, I am preparing to launch my newest novel, the fifth in the FLU SEASON series, which began as a stand-alone, then became a trilogy and birthed a sequel and - now - another sequel. A sixth book is in the works and should be out in 2025 if we make it that far.

Book 5: THE GRANDDAUGHTER is really one of my favorite books of all 19 novels I've written to date. It has a compelling narrator/protagonist with an intriguing storyline and a host of obstacles to her goals which resolve in logical ways yet in dramatic fashion. Good messages, beautiful descriptions, snappy dialogue, clever homages to works of music and literature, and a lot of moral gray area.

Set ten years after the end of Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD (June 2024) in the western town of a restored post-pandemic, post-reconstruction era, child Maggie of Book 4 is now a grown woman with her own life who thinks starting a kid's band is what the town needs. It also gives her a handy excuse to play the family tuba - previously owned by her dad, his mother, her grandmother, and on back to World War II. 

Book 6: THE GRANDSON (coming in 2025) is set fifteen years after the end of Book 5. That puts readers approximately in the 2150s. The world is harsh and a dangerous new threat from the east coast is spreading across to the same western town where Maggie is an old woman. But no spoilers.

To summarize this series of post-pandemic novels, I thought it might be amusing to match first and last paragraphs - the exact first paragraph(s) and the final paragraph(s) - as well as give you other basic information.

1 THE BOOK OF MOM (Nov. 2022)

Narrator/Protagonist: Sandy, the autistic teen son of a single mother (a music professor and tuba player). Focus: Mom's behavior, decisions.

opening:

Mom told me she named me Sandy because she was lounging on a beach when I was conceived. I got only bits and pieces of the story until I was a teenager. Then one night, half-drunk with sorrow at yet another pandemic spreading over us, she held me close, like I was still her baby, and gave up the whole tale.

ending:

In the end some of us would survive.

It wasn’t so much the conveyor belt of viruses and variants that killed us but ourselves. Trained month after month to be suspicious of each other, we eventually unleashed our pent-up fury, driving hate into everything around us, without mercy, and that was our end.

That was also our beginning. 

2 THE WAY OF THE SON (May 2023)

Narrator/Protagonist: Sandy. Focus: He and his cousin Hannah and baby Isla.

opening:

What was that?

Another snap of a twig somewhere in this forest, just as dusk is creeping upon me. Somebody coming to kill us, or just a woodland critter? I’m not supposed to be afraid. Even so, I put my pen down and reach for Mom’s pistol on the grass beside me, give it a pat.

ending:

She wrenches her hand free, points across the slope.

“Dee-dee,” she says, and we turn to see the whitetail doe and her fawn quietly feeding between the trees, unafraid of us, like it is the most natural thing in the world.

3 DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS (Sept. 2023)

Narrator/Protagonist: Isla, daughter of Sandy and Hannah. Focus: Isla's life from age 4 to 79.

opening:

My daddy liked to say there are two kinds of fear: the dark kind and the light kind. You’ll have to face both of them sooner or later, he would remind me. The dark kind is shapeless, without limits, yet lacking detail, a huge menacing presence that you know will get you. It is immense, bigger than you, bigger than your family. The only thing to do is hide and hope it ignores you, gets bored and moves on. Or else you can shine a light on it. Sometimes, the light will scare it away. But sometimes the light will enrage it more.

ending: 

It’s time for them to carry on.

For you to carry on! Choose from among you who will play that ancient tuba to call forth everyone to build this world back. Who will take up Tubal-Cain’s great horn and blow the world into existence? Which one of you?

4 THE BOOK OF DAD (June 2024)

Narrator/Protagonist: Fritz (who prefers to go by Frank), Isla's last child. Focus: Fritz's life in the capital after returning from forced rehabilitation.

opening:

I have to get out. I’m beginning to realize how much I hate this place: this cold, gray city straining at the cusp of winter, ready to bite back anyone who dares smile or lets show the happy thought born of some unexpected joy (an unapproved word no longer allowed); nor the anticipation of a holiday break and welcome time spent with family. Forbidden. 

ending:

P.S. I really don’t mind a tuba. We ain’t got no music here but some banjos.

5 THE GRANDDAUGHTER (coming in Sept. 2024)

Narrator/Protagonist: Maggie, grown daughter of Fritz. Focus: Maggie's life out west and her musical ambitions.

opening:

“Ain’t it just short fer Margaret?” asks this thin woman in the plain beige dress, not looking at all appropriate for a funeral. She wears a sincere smile, though, like a child, but her long hair is uncombed and she smells like she hasn’t bathed in a while.

“I don’t really know,” I respond, a bit put off by her abruptness. “I’ve always been called Maggie. Never really thought about it.”

ending:

[sorry, that's a spoiler]

6 THE GRANDSON (sometime in 2025)

Narrator/Protagonist: Jacob "Jake" Little Bear (Maggie's adopted grandson). Focus: Jake's life as the town doctor's assistant and the one who uncovers what's happened to a character in Book 5.

opening:

A lone rider approaches out of the orange palette painting the sky across the horizon, as it has for many days, many weeks, the sun refusing to set at night, the glow continuing. Townsfolk feel the itchy heat, smell the fire, yet its source is too far off to be known, something from the distant east and its dirty industry perhaps that cries out in the night for production or a groan of dissatisfaction at what humanity has done to this world in only a few short centuries of miscalculation. We’ve wrought what we’ve sown, some like to say.

ending: 

[not yet written]

In these final days of my career, my eyes go bleary, my fingers hit the keys less precisely, and my energy is reduced. I write about two hours a day, occasionally at other times when the ideas strike and more so when I'm deep in the throes of creation. But I am in no real hurry; only the calendar races me. It may be a form of insanity, but making up stuff keeps my mind going and my body follows. I try to keep it going - will keep it going as long as I can. One reason I like to make each book, even in a series, able to stand as a satisfying conclusion to what has come before so the story can stand as finished even if I don't get to finish the next book. That itself is a kind of game I play, so far a stalemate. I've made my move and I wait.

Thanks as always for your support. I write for my own pleasure and I like to share what I create. If you read it and like it, that's great. If you don't like what I write, that too is quite all right. For me the writing is the main thing. If anyone buys a book, if anyone reads and reviews a book, that is a bonus. That part is already long past the part that gives me satisfaction. 

Happy reading!

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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 Musical Life of an Author

Greetings for 2024!

I hope you had a lovely holiday period and are rested and ready for all the new year has in store for you. As for me, I continue dabbling at yet another novel in my FLU SEASON series, revising Book 4 and starting Book 5.

However, for those of you who may only know me as a writer of dubious fiction, in my previous life I was actually deep into music and known as a tuba player and composer. A strange set of circumstances indeed! I was reminded of that recently with the Netflix film MAESTRO, concerning the life of Leonard Bernstein. This blog post is not so much a review of that film, which I enjoyed very much, but the odd connections seeing this film brought back to me of my previous life.

Not long ago I watched another orchestra conductor movie, TAR, which turned out (after googling some info) to be entirely fictitious. I still enjoyed the film and it brought similar memories back to me. So I couldn't help but compare them and my own sordid career in music. Truth be told, after high school I became a music student at the Conservatory of Music in Kansas City. My goal was to become a Classical music composer at a time when rock'n'roll was king and top-40 pop ruled. I had written some music during high school and arranged others for our concert band, jazz band, and choir. (I also had a knack for writing stories at the time, mostly of science fiction or fantasy.)

At the Conservatory, I studied music theory and the related courses which had me composing more music. My instrument there was the tuba, which I had been playing since junior high school after starting on French horn at age 7 before switching. I was the principal tubist in the wind ensemble, the only tuba player in the orchestra. As part of my education, I learned to play several other instruments, including harp, mostly so I would know how to write music for them. Later, when I transferred to my parents' alma mater for my final two years, I also played in brass ensembles and had my music played in different situations and performed in  concert. It was a big thrill for me but I knew I was not up to the standards of the composers I admired.

At the Conservatory, I worked in the music library where I had easy access to all the music of the world. I knew Leonard Bernstein as a famous conductor and knew he had written West Side Story, Candide, and three symphonies - I listened to all of them, following along with the scores. This was a common way for me to learn how to compose and orchestrate music. One day I found a set of recordings titled The Unanswered Question, which was a series of lectures by Bernstein linking music and language which I found utterly fascinating. I listened to the reel-to-reel tape as I followed along in the accompanying booklets; I had no access then to the video version of the lectures, which are now available on YouTube. That was the limit of my Bernstein knowledge: conductor, composer, music teacher - nothing more about his life, relationships, provocations, and so on ever entered my understanding in those days as a music student.

So I eagerly anticipated the film and was pleased when I first watched it. It was not so much a documentary of his career but more a study of his relationship with his wife and their children during his career. This presented much that I hadn't known or considered wanting to know previously. Throughout the film excerpts of Bernstein's music filled the soundtrack, as appropriate. I didn't recognize many of them. One that caught my attention was the scene where Bernstein is sitting at his piano composing a new work. We hear the music as we see a close up of his pencil drawing notes and lyrics on the score paper set on the piano, an experience I, too, had often done in my youth. The music we hear is from his composition Mass, a re-envisioning of the traditional Latin mass. That music caused me to recall that I, too, had written a mass and I rushed to the nostalgia trunks in the basement to dig it up.

Not to toot my own horn, but... I scribbled out what I called a mass on green score paper, marking off the sections of instruments and chorus, using the traditional text. I was not a religious person wanting to create a mass so much as a composer who found inspiration in other masses, particularly by Berlioz, Mozart, and a few others. I recalled I had titled my mass the "Brass Mass" because it began with a magnificent brass fanfare. I got obsessed with finding it and twice I pulled out music I thought was it only to find as I read through it that it was not the Brass Mass but something else. Eventually, I concluded that "Brass Mass" was only my nickname and not the true title written at the top. At any rate, there it was: most of a mass, ready to be copied neatly from my scribblings! Oh, but that was long ago and far from where I am today as a scribbler of novels.

From the movie, I had to look for my CDs of Bernstein music. I opened the first of several boxes which I knew contained my collection of CDs and there - right on top - was the double CD box of Bernstein's three symphonies. It seemed to be an omen. Of course, I listened to them once more. I followed the scores on YouTube. I watched performances on YouTube with Bernstein conducting. I ordered a CD of Mass and went through it several times. I became a little obsessed with my music career that had been put away for so many decades as I switched to English and became a professor of English instead of Music. I feel a little sad that I made that turn, but it seems now is too late to dive back into that pool and hope to swim again. I still have that trunk full of music manuscripts, most of them never played even in a read-through session. I include here a few excerpts as a kind of proof. 

"Only the Music Moved" was a composition class assignment: we had to set the text to music. This is my version. You are welcome to play it, perform it, and enjoy it.

As for the subject of the film Maestro, I can see and perhaps understand the creative drive that pushed him, confounded him, and gave him pleasure. His was an uncanny life and career, so unlike those who preceded him (conductors and composers) and so forward-thinking in many respects in forming a particularly American musical genre (musical theater). Reviews have pointed to flaws and inaccuracies, but as a film focusing on the singular relationship at the center of his life, I think it was well-done and compelling as its own work of drama. It definitely is not a documentary or even a docu-drama but truly a work of film art. And I, too, had my period involved with film, once considering being a cinematographer.

But, alas, in Kansas City there were few opportunities I knew of or was willing to pursue. I expected them to open for me, to be invited in, rather than working hard and making connections, schmoozing and galavanting to get a project green-lighted. I was rather shy in those days, although I meant well and had, by my own admission, good ideas. C'est la vie! I had my chance. Nevertheless, I did succeed in my new career: switching to English, writing stories instead of music (but always using music to inspire stories), and when the publishing world evolved past sending a box of paper around to offices hoping someone might read them and make me famous, well, I happened to get something published. That began a new career for me.

Now my eighteenth novel is soon to be available (part of the FLU SEASON series) and, for what it may be worth, I am happy just to complete it to my satisfaction and make it available to readers. The rest, the remaining steps of the process, is up to readers. I could have written music to make myself happy, and shared it with those who might also enjoy it. But I learned early on how much trouble it was to copy out the parts for an orchestra work versus typing a single copy of a novel manuscript then taking it to Kinko's for additional copies to send out. I'm reminded of a 66-page single-spaced novelette I typed out during high school that I offered to a friend who passed it to another friend who passed it on around the school. Everyone loved it (a rip-off of 1984). I doubt that a piece of music would have been heard by as many fellow students as that stapled manuscript was read. Such is life. The experiences we have somehow inform other experiences and we reach a point where we see those connections and life makes sense.

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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.

FLU SEASON 2: THE WAY OF THE SON Launches!

Hurray! The Way of the Son, the second book in my pandemic trilogy, FLU SEASON, has launched! Paperback is available now and the ebook for Kindle will be delivered May 15 although you can pre-order it now. Click the links.

Sanctuary from a pandemic is only good if you can stay there. When Sandy and his young family are exiled from the island, he struggles to find a way to save them while they face the worsening situation. Without Mom to guide him, Sandy must now take on all the responsibilities of survival in the lawless Outerlands.

It's hard to believe that a couple years ago I was fumbling around for a way to write a novel based on the very same pandemic we were all going through and constantly getting to a dead end, no pun intended. Now I've achieved a miraculous goal of writing three novels in two years, with two of them published and the third book already completed.

Meanwhile, I've interacted with other writers on various social media platforms, and an interesting question keeps coming up about my pandemic trilogy. What's the genre? My immediate knee-jerk reply is "science fiction". But then I have to stop myself and wonder. I worry that many sci-fi readers might be confused by the story I've put together in this trilogy. 

In this on-going interaction with other writers I came upon the term "psychological sci-fi" which seemed to be used for stories like Orwell's 1984, in which the focus is on the psychological (and social/cultural) aspects of the setting and how characters face it. The term doesn't mean it is about the psychology of the characters, not their mental illnesses or such, but rather, how the story may influence the psychological aspects of the reader's experience. In this way, the story need not have a fantastical setting or be filled with wonderful new technology.

Psychological science fiction = involves a "complex theme, ethical dilemma, existential questions" and exists "beyond time and space", involving "what it means to be human"; it may "reflect on the influence of science and technology", focus on "reality and consciousness", and morality. (cobbled together from remarks spoken in a video, link lost)

This may be compared to "literary sci-fi" in that both sub-genre might have similar subject matter but "literary" - at least to my thinking - is more about the style and depth of the writing and not specifically the setting or subject of the story. Note that in all three books the narrator speaks in first-person so we get the style of that person's manner of speech, which grows more uneducated and uses more Southern dialect as the story unfolds.

The FLU SEASON trilogy is traditional sci-fi only in that the people in the story are in distress as a result of science (virus) and technology (electric grid down, fuel runs out, etc.), and the story shows how they find solutions to the problems or find other ways to get by. This is done in a world/setting that is realistic in today's terms rather than fantastic or only plausible in the future or in extreme circumstances. The closeness to the present moment and the lack of things more typical of post-apocalyptic fiction makes FLU SEASON psychological sci-fi. But it is also action and adventure fiction. It also has a teen romance story line. There is humor and dark humor. And...well, you get the idea: it's like life itself, full of everything.

The immediate cause of both my writing and the story's setting is the coronavirus outbreak of late 2019 through late 2022. I pondered, in the days when our society seemed most set upon, what people would do if it got even worse. Suppose this "present situation" (think summer and fall of 2020) lasted six years - four more years beyond our "present" experience. How much worse would everything get? How would, say, an autistic teen and his single mother cope? What would they do? What would be the results of their efforts? And that was my story. And what would become of Mom's *tuba?

I wasn't but a little past the half-way point when I knew this stand-alone novel had to be a trilogy, although I had no firm idea what would happen next. As I finished Book 1 The Book of Mom and waited through all the miscellaneous hassles (cover art, etc.), I started right in on Book 2 The Way of the Son. Here, that teenage boy is on his own, without Mom to guide him, and he learns an awful lot on his journey.

Book 3 Dawn of the Daughters (now in the 'tweaking, then tweaking back' stage) picks up the story from the end of Book 2 and takes readers through the lives of our hero's growing family, in epic multi-generational tradition, as they experience a bloody civil war and the painful reconstruction of society afterwards - much like Gone With the Wind but set in 2035 with a deadly virus.

*Mom (of The Book of Mom) is a professional tubist and music professor, who refuses to leave her instrument behind when they flee the chaos of the city. Her son dutifully takes care of the tuba (Book 2), and his daughter eventually learns the backstory of the instrument and why it is so precious (Book 3).

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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.

Pandemic Fiction: The Evil That Writers Do

Actually, I don't know what I'm doing.

For a while now, I've gotten up in the mornings and gone immediately to my computer to write the next whatever in this file some might call a role-playing game. Before I fully awaken I am immersing myself into a fantasy world, not as a character, not even as an observer (well, sometimes), but as a god, creating everything, pulling all the strings (though some may break), directing the action. And in this way, I entertain myself. I like entering the story each day. I like adding the next episode. I like seeing how my creations react to what I throw at them. And in this way I become evil.

In my latest evil incarnation, I've taken our very real pandemic and its associated unpleasantries and extended it into the future. I've introduced a family consisting of a teen boy and his single mother and thrown them into this near-future situation. Just to see what would happen if... if the pandemic, at its worst, continued for six more years. While other writers have taken viral pandemic-caused apocalypses into seriously bizarre or otherworldly directions, I've bent over backwards to 'keep it real'. Because the scariest situations come from real possibilities.

In Book 1 of my FLU SEASON trilogy, The Book of Mom (available now; click title to read more), an autistic teen son and his tuba-playing mom escape a city in chaos to seek refuge at the grandparents' farm - only to discover upon arrival that the location is undesirable as a sanctuary. Traveling onward to first one of the mom's sisters then another sister, trying to save other relatives, then to an island where the family has vacationed previously, we experience the kind of shocking episodes people in that kind of long-term pandemic would face: precautions for the virus, yes, but more likely and more often the violence of fellow survivors trying to get by in an every-man-for-himself 'new normal' world.

In Book 2, The Way of the Son (coming May 2023), our teen boy hero is a couple years older and has a family. But the situation has turned ugly. Exiled from their island sanctuary, the young family faces an uncertain existence in the dangerous outerlands where the deadly virus is less of a problem than are other survivors of the pandemic. Faced with greater responsibilities, they must grow up quickly and fight to stay together in this new normal. 

For the back cover blurb, I borrowed from text in the novel:

Everything changes when you lose your mother, even more if you lose her during a pandemic when everyone is fighting for survival and it's your responsibility to protect her and you fail. 

Now you have a wife and baby to protect in the savage outerlands - where danger lurks in every shadow, every man for himself.

I call it the Way of the Son - definitely not the way Mom would've gone. 

“The road is finite, and well-marked, so you only need to go along it, following the path that’s already set before you. Yet sometimes it will lead you in the wrong direction. Sometimes you will end up in the wrong place.” 

You have to find your way home again, wherever that may be - even through a pandemic and the chaos that comes after.

(Pre-order the Kindle version here! Delivered May 15, 2023.)

In Book 3, Dawn of the Daughters (coming Fall 2023), our family is hidden away in the forest of a national park - or so they think. Giving in to changing situations, new dangers and new opportunities pull them apart, leading to story lines that take us on the characters' contrasting journeys covering the decades of civil war and the reconstruction of a new world. We also learn the history of the precious tuba and why it matters.

To define "pandemic fiction" I want to ask: What is post-apocalyptic fiction? 

Answer:  A made-up story of how life is following some worldwide disaster that shatters the long-standing, ordinary, stable society of before and forces people to try to survive in new circumstances, none of which are easy. Imagining that kind of awful future isn't easy - mostly because we, being stuck in the present, can only guess how it will be. This brings me back to an assignment I gave my college composition students years ago.

I called it the Future Project. I allowed them to make it fiction (i.e., a post-apocalyptic story) or non-fiction (e.g., reporting on some technological development). Most students found the project fun and I got many great results from them. In the prompt, I asked students to look back 20 years and compare life then with life today. How much had things changed in 20 years? Then turn it around and consider the same degree of change that would occur in 20 years from today. To illustrate, we sampled music from 20 years ago with music today: what was popular back then vs. what is popular today. One requirement was to tie the subject of the paper to something that was real today; they couldn't simply go off into fantasy land and make up something that had no connection to what exists today.

I tried a similar approach when I wrote my vampire trilogy. The story began in the same year in which I wrote it (2013-2014), but the second book was set in 2027-2028. There was an awkward development in Book 2, however: one character, in looking back from 2028, describes what happened in 2020 - yet never mentions any pandemic. Book 3 was easier because it was set in 2099. But you get the idea: it's hard to stay current with future events. 

For my FLU SEASON trilogy, I deliberately kept things vague with regard to years. We acknowledge the start of the pandemic in 2020 but start the story six years later, what would be 2026. Obviously, the pandemic we experienced has been called off now (early 2023), no longer an emergency, so this trilogy becomes a great What-If exercise. I could calculate that Book 1 covers 2026-2028 and Book 2 covers 2028-2029. Book 3 is the generational epic and so it covers the years 2030 to 2098 - although the number of the years are never mentioned. Everything is different, anyway: ruined then rebuilt. So it hardly matters what the actual year is; it's a fresh start.

Bad things happen; that is what makes a story. (I promise my next novel will be full of happy events, one after another, and our characters will have easy lives and never lack anything, and nothing much ever happens.) For a post-apocalyptic adventure tale, however, bad things must happen, and they must:

1) be realistic or plausible in the story's context (that is, not just thrown in for the sake of drama), and

2) cause the reader to feel unnerved, sick/disgusted, uncomfortable, off-balance, shocked, and/or deeply concerned without using too many cheat codes (i.e., emotional tropes).

In the FLU SEASON trilogy, I "let" bad things happen, because they likely would happen in that situation. While I feel bad for putting the characters through these episodes, I know the reader will be better off for following them through. That is my hope. As one character says to another while writing events down in a notebook: "Every page is a lesson."

FLU SEASON is more than a cautionary tale of what you might have to face in an extended emergency (although you might glean some survival tips from the text). It is a story like most stories where you identify with characters who seem real, get to know them, care about them, and want to shout "Don't open the door!" when you can feel that moment coming on the page. That is what I do, like a mad scientist, like an evil god with a whole world to play with. That is what gets me up in the mornings.

FLU SEASON Book 2 THE WAY OF THE SON 

Available mid-May 2023 for Kindle and in paperback!

(Pre-Order for Kindle version here!)

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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.

Narrative and Writing a Compelling Story

Please note that if you are currently in the stages of holiday shopping, books make a fine gift and several books composed by me are available for your reading enjoyment. You will find them all with purchase links, cover art, and blurbs/descriptions on my previous blog post, so click here and be happy!

Pardon me. I awoke too late after not getting a good sleep. I'm doing the best I can to fulfill my obligations to what I imagine are throngs of blog readers anxiously sitting before their screens in eager anticipation for what words of wisdom or whimsy I might offer to them. And, to tell the truth, I seldom have any idea what will come from my keyboard until it does - and then it may be too late to prevent the ruination of my typing skills or my pedantic bent. In most cases, I prefer to confer everything I think about practically everything through the pages of a novel.

First, however, we must invent a compelling story - a narrative so bold and beautiful that none can resist following it to its end. You got to hook 'em and cook' em, a professor in my MFA program was wont to remind us plebes - mere word cobblers to him. I've written previously in blog posts about the abuse we endured in those hallowed halls. Suffice to say, the vaunted professor preferred one and only one kind of story and all others were dismissed outright or ridiculed to the point where the poor young author had to flee in tears.

I learned a few things nevertheless. One: put the characters first. That is, craft an interesting character your readers will want to know about and want to follow through the story no matter what happens in the story. At the time of that MFA program, I felt my protagonists were compelling characters; they were, after all, largely modeled after me. That seldom was a delicious recipe, as you can imagine, because seldom would my protagonist act as I would act. Communication between us was unsteady and I was frequently frustrated. Still, we carried on and came to certain understandings about who does what and what the terms of engagement were to be.

Two: what is interesting to readers (caveat: most readers, although the adage came at us as every reader) is not what happens in the story but what happens to the character because of what happens in the story. That may seem an infernal circle yet it does make a crude kind of sense. If we are "caring" about the hero/heroine then we "care" what happens to them - almost as though they were real people who we actually know and worry about, like Kevin who lives down the street. I came to realize I did treat my characters as though they were real, and I worried about them, waking in the mornings wondering if they would get out of that predicament I'd let them slip into, or whether they would still obey me after I helped them escape a conundrum I'd set up for them.

For a story to be compelling - a word this professor used - it must involve a primary character we care about and a situation that is not immediately disturbing but has the hint of great disturbance to come. Nuances and subtleties. Like laying out a puzzle. Will readers catch it, or should I bash them over the head with the idea? Bread crumbs here and there along the dark forest path or a nicely paved way with neon signs? I think I've learned the art of nuances, as intended by that professor. Of course, I can never know  - short of a book review, perhaps, or an angry tweet - whether a reader catches the subtle clues or not. I can only try my best to tip-toe through the daisies along the primrose path and up Strawberry Hill to Mary Sue's house.

Sorry. I slipped into a purple prose paragraph again. It happens on these kind of late mornings when I haven't slept well yet need to produce a blog post to let the world know I remain alive and verbose. So, I suppose I've achieved my goal. Actually, my goal was the notice at the top to potential readers of my library. Simple as that. But then I kept typing and, well, this is the result. I'm not ashamed; I enjoy typing although the number of mistypes and the corrections increase with each passing day.

Did I mention I have a new novel out now? It's Book 1 of a series called FLU SEASON. The first book is titled THE BOOK OF MOM, a kind of memoir. It's a near-future (almost contemporary) story of a teen boy and his single mother who try to survive the chaos of a pandemic and its worsening society by fleeing the city for what they hope will be relative safety at the grandparents farm, only to find that life in the country isn't much better and they must come up with Plan B, then Plan C, until they reach a small coastal island where the family previously vacationed and have a house - but the survivors there have set up their own strange community and the teen son and his mom must decide whether to stay and obey or hold off the strict requirements until it is safe to leave for a better place. It is a tale of survival, of family relations, of dark secrets, and a teen romance - as well as the dystopian undertones of an odd collection of characters trying their best to get by in the new normal. And Mom plays her tuba quite a lot, I should add.

Book 2 THE WAY OF THE SON is complete and coming in late spring.
Book 3 DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS is started and the writing continues. 

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(C) Copyright 2010-2022 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.

FLU SEASON : a pandemic trilogy

Contrary to rumors, I have not been mindlessly lazing away my summer. I have been writing and editing the second volume of my pandemic trilogy, titled The Way of the Son, which as of this blog is around 75,000 words with about 30,000 to go in order to complete the story. It is a continuation of the first book, obviously, but do not allow that fact to be a spoiler.

Now that I finally have the cover artwork, I can continue the process of production and begin marketing this newest science fiction novel of mine. Here is a summary (as much as I can reveal) of Book I:

I. The Book of Mom

In the beginning was the virus and the virus was with us. Or something like that. Just as you and I experienced in 2020. We faced uncertainty, fear, the unknown, and reacted to what politicians and scientists thought was the best way to deal with the emergency. What we know now in 2022 may be different than our initial thoughts and actions. But what if it continued unabated? We feel safe again, returning to some kind of normal life yet with some elements not quite the same as we knew them before the pandemic. Yet what if we were in a longer crisis?

In FLU SEASON, a stand-alone novel that has blossomed into a trilogy, we follow teenage son Sandy as he accompanies his mother in fleeing their city. With the pandemic in its sixth year, everything has collapsed into an unbearable situation. Mom decides it's time to leave the chaos of the city for what she believes will be relative safety at her parents' farm. After the struggle to get to the farm, however, they find the chaos has invaded the rural areas, as well. Violence and the stark reality of survival hit them hard. What to do? They cannot return to the city.

They will go to Mom's older sister's house in another city. But everything there is also not what they expected and not a good place to stay, so they travel on to the other sister's home. There they face a big turning point in their plans, one that shapes the rest of the trilogy. Along the way we experience as they do the ways the world has changed, what the new normal actually means with random violence, no law and order, lack of food and fuel, as well as the on-going pandemic and the necessary precautions everyone must take. We follow how they figure out how to live in this altered world. They encounter others along the way, who represent various views of what is happening, some who have a better chance of surviving than others.

Ultimately, Mom takes Sandy and his cousins to the barrier island where the family has a beach house, a place they often visited when Mom and her sisters were young. It is a place with special memories for Mom - memories which she has kept hidden from Sandy all his life. On the island, however, are already people who are trying to survive. Their leader has set the island community on a path to become some kind of utopian society, but one that is not very appealing to Mom. But what can they do? Endure the strict rules for a year or so then leave when the mainland is safe again? Or can Mom make the island community into a safe place for as long as sanctuary is needed?

Our narrator is 19-year old Sandy but his focus is on his 36-year old mother, a single, never-married woman who had a wild side during his childhood yet became a professional tuba player and music professor. Her precious tuba is a family heirloom, not to be left behind or mistreated. Music saves her and she relies on her tuba in times of stress. Sandy doesn't get it; all he knows is his Mom has been his whole life, the only person he has been able to rely on. The pandemic suddenly throws everything out of balance and he grasps at whatever stability he can find while struggling with his Asperger's syndrome (high-functioning autism) and his Mom's often erratic behavior.

FLU SEASON : Book I. The Book of Mom is coming this fall...which is only a few weeks away...available in paperback and for Kindle.

[NOTE: FLU SEASON contains scenes of violence and adult situations but none are gratuitously portrayed.]

You can read the blog post introduction to the FLU SEASON trilogy here.

Read about the challenges of writing a disaster story here.

The writer as main character (or not), using FLU SEASON as an example, is here.

Tying FLU SEASON to the long line of apocalyptic fiction is discussed here.

How to write Young Adult Erotica, like in FLU SEASON, is explored here.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2022 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.