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.

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.

On keeping up with the Future

Most novels cover a certain span of time, and we see characters develop over that timeline, regardless of flashbacks or foreshadowing. Some science fiction is set in the future so we begin the story ahead of the present. For writers of science fiction, this can be tricky. Far enough in the future and the author will be long gone and perhaps the copyright expired and the work forgotten so it won't matter how the years turn over after the book is published.

However, writers setting a story in the near future - close enough that readers only a few years from the publication date will be able to look back and read of events which did not happen as the author wrote about them - are screwed. Unfortunately, I've fallen into that trap with the second and third volumes of my vampire trilogy. I failed to predict how the years 2020 and 2021 would actually unfold. 

My vampire trilogy begins with A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, which is the first symptom of vampire transformation our hero Stefan Szekely notices. The book is set in 2014, which is also the year in which I wrote it, and set in the same city where I lived. I actually "lived" our protagonist's experiences week by week so I was up-to-date with whatever events were happening. I included a tornado that actually struck my city. Then I wrote two more novels that were unrelated to this vampire novel.

Eventually I had pondered enough what may have happened to our hero 13 years later - thirteen being an ominous number. So I began writing the sequel, SUNRISE. I knew at the time that it would be a trilogy and I loosely planned the third book (SUNSET) while writing the second book. With the second book beginning in 2027, I felt I was sufficiently far in the future that I wouldn't need to worry about the future catching up to me. But wait!

At one point a character from the first book reappears [trying to avoid spoilers] and because they have been apart for so long, the arriving character tells our protagonist what has transpired during the absence. The narrative switches to a first-person account of the misery the character has lived through. Remember I wrote this second book in 2018, with the story set in 2027-2028. (SUNSET opens in 2099 so we're good.) Then we learn in the pages what happened in 2020: nothing particular. No virus, no pandemic, no lockdowns, no vaccine - as we have seen play out.

Here's the scene, where Penny Park is explaining to Stefan:

Then I got the reality check for real: the mirror.

Remember the mirror, Stefan? We used to stand naked in front of that wide mirror in my bathroom, side by side, staring at ourselves. One woman, one man. You were slender, a geek. Me with no boobs. We were a couple. Those were good days. But you know mirrors can lie. You told me that more than a few times. Especially when you started poking at those dry patches on your face. You cursed the mirror. Then you turned them down or covered them, you said. You refused to look at yourself. But I saw you. I looked at you, Stefan. I was your mirror, and I saw you falling apart. Every single day. I still went ahead and put my eyes on you, no matter how bad you looked.

March 15, 2020. The next worst day of my life. I stared at myself in the mirror. I saw the patch on my cheek. Brown. Scaly. Itchy. Mottled edges, sort of diamond-shaped. If I had never met you I wouldn’t have a clue what it was or how I might have gotten it. I would try what you did, what I first suggested: apply some lotion. Dry skin needs lotion. And hydration. I can’t laugh anymore at how many times I told you to hydrate. Your skin was too dry, so hydrate. Remember?

You know me: I hydrate like a fish. So that was not my problem. I tried lotions, which softened the patch—patches, eventually, on my face, shoulders, back, also my chest. There didn’t seem enough lotion in all the stores of the mall to cover my needs.

But I did know you, so I had a clue. A creeping feeling started to run up my spine.

I know what you’re thinking: Why does she have this problem? She is not Hungarian. She doesn’t have those genes. And she eats a ton of garlic in that Korean food. I wondered that, too. It made no sense. But there I was, naked in front of the mirror in the bathroom, examining myself, staring at my brown-patchy skin, wondering what to do.

And my mother walked in!

“What are you doing?” she asked, half in shock to see me naked.

“I was about to take a shower,” I told her. “I was checking these . . . a few spots of bad skin.”

She stepped closer and took a look at them. She doesn’t have any medical training, but she is a mother. That must count for something, right? But she had no idea. Then it was déjà-vu all over again: “You better see dermatologist.” 

So she gets some medical problem, sure, but she doesn't mention the entire world having a medical problem. Yes, everything is serious in 2027, as though there is a world-wide problem, but nothing is mentioned about what we have all come to experience in 2020-2021. 

What to do? I could explain it away as her focusing only on her own personal issues and not bothering to say anything about a pandemic. I could go back and add a couple sentences to cover it, then republish the novel. Or I could let the trilogy fade into the sunset and write something new.

Well, my latest work-in-progress is about what happened in 2020-2021 and the years after. It's the pandemic novel I tried to start in March 2020 but didn't get far. We sci-fi writers are used to imagining scenarios, even truly awful situations. So when something awful actually happens, we may not feel that it's so real. I wanted to wait and see how it unfolded. More than a year later, I've seen enough that I can write my own version of a post-apocalyptic novel. This one is about a boy and his mother and a tuba. Should be out in 2022...if we live to see that day.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2021 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 Sequels

It is a fate worse than death: to be undead yet stuck with your vampire parents. After 13 years Stefan Szekely can stand them no longer. He wants to get a castle of his own. But first he must make his way to his family's bank in Budapest.

With endless strife across Europe, Stefan hardly recognizes Budapest. Nevertheless, he embarks on the reign of terror he always denied himself, living the playboy lifestyle, being a bad vampire. Until he gets a stern warning from the local vampire clan: You are not welcome!

Should Stefan fight for his right to party like it's 2027? Or flee to the spa resort he bought and ignore the world? Or will an encounter with a dangerous stranger change everything? Or will State Security actions ruin this vampire homeland?

In 2014 my medically accurate vampire novel A DRY PATCH OF SKIN came out to 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 would happen next? So I chose a gap of, say, 13 years (the number seems significant in horror stories). Where did I leave my protagonist? How is he doing? What could have happened since then? 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?

As I started out on another vampire story I quickly realized that I had to also write a science-fiction story. If I were setting the story 13 years after the end of the previous novel, then this sequel would be set in 2027. 

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, 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.

With the current strife in Europe, mass immigration, the increase in crime, the open warfare between left and right groups, I could see that 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 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. For the sake of the 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, Hungary and Poland are resisting accepting refugees and other immigrants and the European Union chastises them for it. Both nations have refused to comply with orders from Brussels and are 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. 

As described in this sequel, the Hungarian Federation (Poland is a separate nation but an ally) 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 Szekely, 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.

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

Regardless, in SUNRISE the world gets darker before the light shines again.



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(C) Copyright 2010-2017 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.