Winning the Trifecta!!!

In honor of the launching of the second book in my third trilogy, FLU SEASON, I thought I would wax poetic over my three trilogies and how they came about and how they proceeded. Of course the third book of my third trilogy has yet to be published but it is complete and considered finished, so it counts. Now I have a set of three trilogies and thus have achieved the Trifecta! These nine volumes make up fully half of my writing output of 17 novels. (All novels are available in paperback and for Kindle; click on links at the top right corner of this blog.)

THE DREAM LAND

The first book, originally titled The Dreamland, was composed back in those days of typewriters and mailing a box of paper to a publisher. It was intended to be a stand-alone novel. Yet being full of interdimensional intrigue on an alien world, there was much room for utilizing the world I'd created. The first book, retitled Long-Distance Voyager, covered everything I had intended for the story and I had no idea for a second book. I eventually had an idea and launched right into the second book. But I got stopped a short way into it. I ran into a plot conundrum and sat it aside to figure out how to proceed. Then life got in the way and I did not return to it for ten years. 

The conundrum was figured out by then and I continued it, taking it into a kind of time travel plot that was quite mind-twisting. When I was ready to throw book 1 into the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award competition, I was also finishing writing book 2. By the time I finally got book 1 published, I knew it would be a trilogy so I came upon the idea for book 3 without too much gnashing of plot lines. As book 2 Dreams of Future's Past, was being published I was already writing book 3, titled Diaspora. It followed immediately after book 2 in the publishing schedule and I was very happy, thinking I might not be able to write more. I did dabble at a book 4 but didn't get very far and have not resumed writing it.

Being first, and introducing a new world of steampunk fashion and geopolitical skulduggery, it did well enough. Book 2, while being more ambitious and thought-provoking, sat on the shelf. Book 3, while deemed by me my most humorous of the three as well as the most horrifying, was hardly touched. That is the issue with trilogies, I suppose.

THE STEFAN SZEKELY TRILOGY

After a while, I decided to join the vampire trend and wrote a novel purportedly a medically accurate vampire story. My hero was Stefan Szekely, an ordinary guy, American of Hungarian ancestry, with an odd background. I threw a lot of personal angst into it, and came to realize I could make a pretty good vampire myself, given the chance. One and done, was my intention. But the ending nagged me through the writing of two other completely unrelated novels.

What happened to our vampire hero after the first novel ended? Because I'd set the story in the same year as I was writing it (2013-14), I began to jump ahead in the timeline. Thirteen years into the future we pick up our story - and a trilogy was born, both novels conceived at the same time although the exact story line was still vague. It was really an exercise in traveling in my head and doing research about Croatia and Hungary and calling them novels.

I wrote SUNRISE and SUNSET back to back. The first novel, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, was well-received and garnered attention among the vampiric crowd. Book 2 was less popular, perhaps because the vampire trend was already receding. So Book 3 received little attention, although I thought I put some amazingly evocative material in it. I planned a book 4 and started writing it but got stopped when the even-further-into-the-future world I set it in began to overwhelm me with technologies I didn't have the patience to figure out.

Then I wrote three stand-alone novels: a sci-fi story with a non-human hero, a contemporary crime thriller, and an action/adventure story about a man-eating tiger. Then I was bored.

FLU SEASON: A Pandemic Trilogy

I've blogged about this trilogy in the past few months, so let me go over some of the history of its creation. I started something at the beginning of our real pandemic but didn't get far. The idea boiled inside my head for another year. When I found a way to start it and thought what would occur in the journey plotline, I still believed it was going to be a stand-alone novel. However, a journey is all well and good, but what happens when our hero and his Mom arrive? What then? 

Giving the first book the subtitle of The Book of Mom, I let it be a narrative by a teen boy about his single mother and all her quirks and whims while fighting to get them to safety from both viruses and violence. Once they arrived at a kind of sanctuary, I knew it had to be a trilogy. I already had ideas of what would happen next. By the end of book 1, I definitely knew how book 2 would begin and end.

By the end of book 2, The Way of the Son, I had book 3 planned - although I do not write out an outline like many authors do. Just as book 2 picks up where book 1 ends (like on the same day!), book 3 also picks up where book 2 ends. The difference is that book 3, Dawn of the Daughters, has a lot of ground to cover story-wise. It could be a stand-alone in its own right, if I had conceived of the story first instead of the book 1 we now have. 

Too early to tell how this trilogy will be received. As of this blog posting, books 1 and 2 are out and available with book 3 scheduled to be published in the fall of 2023. The main thing, I think, is that I've enjoyed creating these various worlds and the characters who inhabit them. I only hope that others will enjoy reading these stories as much as I enjoyed writing them.

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

(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 Trilogy Epidemic

Dear Readers, potential readers, and the merely curious,

Today I wish to address the issue of the trilogy - a series of novels consisting of exactly three volumes and comprising one continuous story or some combination of stories related in such a way that they may be marketed as a series.

I'm not suggesting there is a problem - other than the great proliferation of trilogies, especially in the science fiction and fantasy genre. In other genre, related books are sometimes considered a trilogy, usually because they have the same characters or setting, even though they may not have been considered a trilogy by the author.

For me, I have achieved a kind of trifecta - three trilogies (two completed and one in the process of being completed) - which gives me special status...and not much else.

My first trilogy began as a stand-alone book, THE DREAM LAND, which involved a young couple's misadventures through an interdimensional doorway and how they learned to function in their new realm while often trying to return home. Given the setting - an entire new planet - the possibilities for further stories were endless. I immediately began the second volume upon completion of the first, but I stopped when I ran into a plot conundrum. Then life got in the way, as it may for writers, and I did not finish that second volume (or publish the first book) until ten years later. When I resumed writing on the second book, I decided it had to become a trilogy, and I wrote the third volume straightaway as I concluded Book 2, DREAMS OF FUTURE'S PAST. The idea of a trilogy was not a thing in itself but merely a result of writing three novels involving the same principal players in the same setting. I simply enjoyed the story and kept writing, even with a comet approaching our favorite fictitious world in Book 3, DIASPORA.

I wrote two stand-alone novels after that sci-fi trilogy (A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and AIKO). Then, goaded by the Twilight series' portrayal of vampires, I wrote my own version, based on the finest medical research I could research. A DRY PATCH OF SKIN was intended as another stand-alone, a one-off tale of realistic vampire horror. Yet the ending kept nagging at me: more what-if questions. And so, a few years later, after writing two more stand-alone novels, I picked up the vampire story once more with the idea of making it a trilogy from the start. Titled SUNRISE and SUNSET, respectively, I picked up the story of my vampire hero a few years into his future - and our future - in the second volume and much further into the future in the third volume. I failed, however, to have characters mention the pandemic of 2020-2022 as they recounted their adventures since the first volume's 2014 setting (also written in 2014). (Upon finishing the trilogy, I contemplated a fourth book, making it a tetralogy. I started and then set aside a novel concerning the next generation.)

Then I returned to writing stand-alones. First I wrote a semi-biography based on a real person's life with fictionalized conclusion (A GIRL CALLED WOLF), my most-reviewed book. Then, challenged by my fantasy-writing friends, I wrote an epic fantasy involving dragons (EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS), which is my longest novel - not counting trilogies as a single story. But then I returned to the vampire story and wrote volumes two and three and consider it finished with no threat of a volume four.

After completing the vampire trilogy, I wrote a new novel (EXCHANGE) and I finished a previously written book which I had been revising forever (YEAR OF THE TIGER), as well as completing a sci-fi novel which I had left unfinished for several years (THE MASTERS' RIDDLE) which is told from the point-of-view of a non-human alien hero. So far, so good. 

Then we experienced that pandemic, had lockdowns and virtual school, and I thought it would be the perfect time to write a pandemic novel, a kind of post-apocalyptic sci-fi drama of some kind. I started something by describing my own experiences with the virus then fell silent. I couldn't actually write about something so serious while we were actually dealing with it in such a serious way, so I set it aside.

And then I retired from teaching English (literature, composition, linguistics) and had nothing much to do. So I picked up the pandemic novel scriblings and took another look at it. The main thing for me was to find the right way into the story - something more than coming up with a compelling first page. When something totally unrelated sparked an amusing idea, I knew I'd found the key to enter the story. Even then, I imagined a stand-alone book about a boy and his mother and her tuba fighting to survive in a lawless land. However, before I was very far into the first volume of FLU SEASON: THE BOOK OF MOM, I decided the story would continue into a second - and the inevitable third volume - making it a trilogy. Darn trilogies! Just when I think I'm back to stand-alones the trilogy pulls me back in!

One interesting aspect of my pandemic trilogy is the way Book 1 is actually two books. They make the journey from a chaotic city to the relative sanctuary of a coastal island, which was the story I intended to write when I started. They would reach safety and that would be that. (Sorry if this is a spoiler.) But what happens when they reach that place? I couldn't just leave them there and 'so that's all, folks!' So writing about their uncomfortable experiences on the island was practically another novel. Hence, the two sides of this first novel make it a little on the thick side, but it ends at a better place - and sets up the next book, which is FLU SEASON: THE WAY OF THE SON, which continues our characters' story. The third book will be titled FLU SEASON: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS to complete the FLU SEASON TRILOGY. Have you ever had so much flu season?

However, the second volume of FLU SEASON is more traditional in its structure and does not comprise two separate but related stories like the first volume, and therefore is thinner. In fact, compared to THE DREAM LAND and the vampire trilogy which has come to be named for its hero as the STEFAN SZEKELY TRILOGY, this second volume is shorter than the second volumes of my other trilogies, which tend to be longer because of much more complex things going on. If you look at other trilogies, including in movie series such as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, the second volume features the characters going on separate journeys, hence a dual story which comes together by the end.

The final point I wish to share is that this so-called pandemic trilogy was conceived as a trilogy almost from the start. Unlike my first two trilogies where the first book was written as a stand-alone, FLU SEASON is conceived and plotted as a trilogy, which is a different way of writing for me. However, such a project, seemingly vast in its early stages looking forward, has been a fairly easy and delightfully horrific story to write. I know my readers will be happy to know I enjoyed writing it. It has not been a harsh effort, a droll task to be accomplished, yet I do not relish the abuse and horrors I put my cast through. In FLU SEASON: THE BOOK OF MOM you will find a story told 'close to the vest' in as realistic, contemporary, visceral manner possible, a story which could begin wherever you happen to live, say, in the next couple weeks - although in the trilogy the pandemic has been going on for six years when the first book opens and begins its ninth year as Book 2 ends. 

Happy ending? Like life itself, there is good and bad to everything that happens and it is in that light that we must carry on. My only regret is that there will not be a fourth volume. Maybe another stand-alone will follow. We shall see.

Thanks for your support. Please leave a review on your favorite book review sites.

Your Humble Narrator

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

(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.

On Sequel Addiction

Are you addicted to sequels? What's up with that? Sure, you liked the first book, so you have to get the next, right? And then there's another? Let me at it! And another? How many are there? Ok, how long do I need to keep up with these characters? I'm not sure I can just stop reading and forget them. So I must continue. These characters are part of my life now.

Fortunately there are plenty of trilogies around today. It seems to be the preferred format for books of science fiction, fantasy, and urban fantasy, especially if marketed to young readers. It has to do with marketing, I suppose: get the readers hooked and they will buy two more books. I always believed, apparently erroneously, that the trilogy is based on a good plot arc. Hence the story needed to be told across three books, regardless of the profits that might be made. 

Check out these trilogies. 

As a reader, I'm hesitant to commit to a multiple-book package. It's not the money, not the shelf space involved. It's the time and emotional expenditure involved. Usually I will read the first book and then go ahead and get the second book when I am sufficiently invested in the first book - after the first chapter, half-way through book 1, etc. If a novel has plenty of publicity, made into a TV series, I may get the whole set of books at once. (I did that with George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series yet I'm still in book 1.) 

As a writer, however, I was always dead-set on writing stand-alone books. But when the story, the world, the characters are still there at the end of book 1 calling to you...well, you have to return. Both times I've worked on a trilogy they started with one book which I expected to be it, the whole thing, one and done, enough said. Then, sometime later, with the story still bobbling back and forth in my head, unable to let it go, I sit myself down and begin book 2. Then book 3 usually follows quickly after book 2 because it will certainly be a trilogy. There are not many 2-book series.

I have written two trilogies. The second one was completed last night: book 3 of that trilogy.

The first was my sci-fi/steampunk interdimensional warhorse The Dream Land. Book 1 introduces the main characters and how they discover a doorway to another world and learn to function there, even to rise to prominent ranks and affect their new world. One returns home, however, and finds the situation intolerable. Thus, book 2 - what happens next? Inquiring minds wanted to know. 

In the case of this first book, it was going to be a stand-alone, but immediately upon finishing book 1, I had the idea where to go next. Then I got stuck in a plot conundrum after 50 pages and let it sit for what turned out to be ten years. Life and a lot of academic/ scholarly writing took over. It wasn't until a student of mine showed me his story on a similar theme as mine that I was reminded of the novel I'd left unfinished on my computer. I found that file, saw where I'd left off, and now that the plot conundrum had magically resolved itself in my head during the interim, I could continue. I knew what would happen in book 3 before I finished book 2. I started on a book 4 before I was finished with book 3. I knew I was addicted. I just could not stop living in this world, interacting with these people - er, umm, those characters. (I've left book 4 - just a few pages - to smolder a while and see if I want to write it.)

My second trilogy began as a stand-alone. I had said what I wanted to say in that book and believed the story done. With my daughter hooked on the Twilight series - during which her reading time really expanded! - I was determined to convince her of the truth of vampirism, about the medical conditions which led people to appear as vampires and who populated real reports that became the legends that prompted first Mr. Polidori then Mr. Stoker to pen their Gothic tales. A Dry Patch of Skin was my "medically accurate" vampire story, set in the same year I was writing it (2013-14) and, in part, in the same city where I was living and writing it. I made my point about vampires. My own doctor (who was also working on an MFA in creative writing) found no flaws in the medical side of the story. But what would happen next to my tragic hero? Gotcha.

The question nagged me through the writing of two other stand-alone novels.* Finally, I decided to see where the story might go. I started writing, just as a test. It had to be in the future since book 1 was set in my present. That turned book 2 into a sci-fi novel, which made it more interesting to me as a writer. At that point, I knew there would be a book 3 but I did not yet know what would happen in book 3. The main thing in starting the sequel was picking up the same character again but having him changed over the period of time between the books. The world had changed, too. Depicting that change was the fun part. You can read more about plot considerations on earlier blog posts here and here. All right, and here, too. You're welcome.

Now I have book 3 of this trilogy sitting on my doorstep (metaphor, not literally), the first complete draft literally finished last night. I still have that burst of electricity flashing through me, could hardly sleep, and still thinking about what I might have missed in the story that I need to address this morning. Plenty of time for revision, and editing, and proofreading, of course - and beta reading, and more tweaking, and looking for those five words in the manuscript that everybody but me will see are misspelled. I believe I have fulfilled the promise of a book 3: to give main characters their final arc, to wrap up plot points, to put a nice bow on the end of a three book experience. More on this book next time. For now, the experience of writing a trilogy is both rewarding and sad; we work hard to make things happen, like having our protagonist suffer, our antagonist delight in the suffering, a few jokes tossed here and there, some philosophy delivered by the serious character, a flash of eroticism, and voila! Trilogy. 

Then, almost too quickly it is done. And we have the emptiness in our guts as though someone close to us had died. We want that person back in our lives again. So we imagine it was so. And the sequel is born, the characters re-born, and all is well. A sequel has saved us. A trilogy will save us longer.


*A Girl Called Wolf, although a stand-alone, could be considered a sequel of my novel A Beautiful Chill (which was written first) because the main characters of the latter novel appear in the former novel.

After writing my quest novel Epic Fantasy *With Dragons, I felt compelled to continue the story despite having announced to everyone that I had said everything I needed to say about life and love, heroism, and the universe in that book. However, some of the characters wanted me to go on, so I started a sequel but it remains unfinished after about 75 pages.


---------------------------------------------------------------------
(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.

The Story of AIKO

Last month in this blog, I revisited Korea and got a good dose of nostalgic thrill. Further back in this blog I wrote about another trip to Korea. It's ironic, however, that much more of my time in Asia was spent in Japan. Five years total, in fact, which is a tenth of my life--or a sixth of my adult years! 

As a foreign teacher, my everyday mundane activities were not very exciting--unless you happened to be family members who were curious about everything I was doing there or you were interested in semi-rural and small town Japan life in the late 1980s and early 1990s. As it was, Japan was beginning its "internationalization" program, which included bringing thousands of English-speaking young people from the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia to Japan to help teach English in the public schools. 

I was one of them. It was an experience that was equal parts fascinating and frustrating. The fascination came from discovery of a completely new and different culture from what I had known in my own country, not the tourist sort but right down to the everyday getting through life kind of things. The frustrating part was trying to adapt to a set of customs that did not come naturally to me as well as trying to see things from a different perspective and understanding how in the world it could possibly work just fine that way.

I went first to Saga City, capital of Saga prefecture (state), on the southwest major island of Kyushu, and lived there for two years. I rotated with another American teacher among the city's nine middle schools--when the kids first start to learn English. The city was surrounded by rice fields as far as you could see. It had the remains of a castle. I rode a bicycle everywhere, sometimes the local bus. I ate mostly the Japanese food available to me although there were also plenty of fast food restaurants in town.

Enjoying the English teacher life, I decided it might be a good career move fpr me to become an official English teacher in the U.S., so I returned and entered an Education program back home. I completed everything but the student-teaching semester when I got an offer to return to Japan that I could not pass up.

With more credentials, I arrived in Okayama prefecture, mid-way between Hiroshima and Kobe on the main island of Honshu. I served as the one and only English teacher for three middle schools up in the mountains, living in the village where my main school was and commuting once each week to the other two. It was a picturesque landscape and I settled in rather comfortably. It felt odd when visiting relatives in America for Christmas holiday to "go home" to Japan; my apartment in Nariwa, Okayama felt more like my home than the Kansas City where I'd grown up.

I'm not sure where all this love for Japanese culture began. I can pick out a few starting points, but the main idea of telling all of this is to contrast my actual life in Japan with all the reports about Korea I've posted. They are two very different places--yet to the casual Western tourist somewhat similar. In blogging, I've tried to offer mostly the humorous side of my travels: the stranger in a strange land scenario, where I struggle to understand, often insisting my way is the best way, even the only way, then being soundly corrected. In such a way the stranger comes to appreciate, even prefer, the new culture.

It's kind of like James Clavell's Shogun, where the shipwrecked Englishman gradually becomes Japanese and takes his place in that feudal society. A similar transformation is depicted in the Tom Cruise film The Last Samurai. Those may have been full of cliches and stereotypes, of course (although I trust Clavell to get the facts straight). For some of us, there is something attractive about that culture. I gradually slipped into that culture, too, and I became a stranger when returning to the country of my birth. (Plenty of other examples of this kind of scenario exist that involve other cultures than Japanese.)

This "stranger in a strange land" theme seems to have become my writing focus, my stock in trade. All of my novels deal with characters being in a new and different place than they grew up in. I even took it so far as to have them visit another planet in THE DREAM LAND Trilogy; the Earthling travelers were both amazed and frustrated by what they found. That "stranger" theme usually involves someone also speaking a foreign language and speaking English imperfectly. I'm an English teacher by trade, after all, and a linguist by training, so the language aspects of characters have always fascinated me. (You can see a chart here of what places and languages are in each of my novels.)

So it should come as no surprise that my forthcoming novel AIKO follows that same theme: the stranger coming to the strange land and having to make his way and reach his goal, thwarted at every turn by the rules and customs he does not know, does not understand, or refuses to adapt to. The novel is also set in Japan, a place I feel thoroughly confident in describing--at least from the Western stranger's perspective. I lived in two places there and visited many other locations--all of the big tourist spots as well as places tourists do not visit. I also visited the locations in the novel. 

The story of AIKO is a quest to make things right, to restore a balance in the protagonist's and everyone else's lives. As with any good story, it begins with a conflict, a problem needing to be solved. Our hero tries to solve the problem but finds obstacles. He tries to overcome the obstacles but things get worse. He starts to believe he won't succeed yet fights harder, refusing to give up. Will he succeed or not is the story, of course. In that sense, it's quite simple. The beauty is in the details. 

I've chosen to set this plot in the Japan on the cusp of its internationalization program, a time in the early 1990s when old thinking clashed with modern thinking. The fate of a child is left to the effort of this stranger struggling through this strange land, who is trying to do the right thing--even at the risk of destroying his marriage and losing his career. The situation gets quite desperate for him as he is soon fighting the calendar as well as the bureaucracy Japan is famous for. And then there is the waitress who wants him to take her back to America and the gangster wannabes who just like having fun with this foreign guy.

It was only after writing the initial draft that I recognized some similarities between my story and the story at the heart of the opera Madame Butterfly--similarities which I sought to emphasize, even exploit, in subsequent drafts. I'll tell you about that next time.



---------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) Copyright 2010-2015 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.

Is there a Message in this Novel?

[NOTE: Last time, I shared a report about my brief visit to Seoul, South Korea while I lived in Japan, working as an English teacher. The experience happened more than 20 years ago and when giving it the once-over of revision before posting it, I realized how dated it was. It also may have had a tinge of "cultural imperialism"--although I tried to express positive things about the culture I was experiencing along with what my negative impressions were. I hope I did not offend anyone, especially anyone from Korea or of Korean heritage. My subsequent visits to Korea were quite different and very positive.]

That brings me to the issue of the day: Politics, Social mores, Cultural memes. I might as well throw in mention of all the chaos happening around the world today. Well, for most of this year. Online, friends and colleagues (not necessarily the same) are quick to state or "restate/reblog/share" political and social views. Others are quite quick to respond either superficially (I tend toward a quick sarcastic bit) or, occasionally, with well-considered, even researched, responses that invite further thought regardless of the position of a reader.


I've never been what I would call a politically-minded person. Mostly that comes from my uncertainty of knowing everything I would need to know to make a valid decision on some issue. Also, being someone who purports to teach Argument, I try to present all sides equally, if only to provoke students to seeing sides they had not considered. As a novel writer I also live in a schizophrenic world of multiple characters, each with their own views, positions, and agendas. It can be quite maddening--which is partly why I blog (insert "LOL"). But in light of writing a fictional work supposedly full of realistic personas, we have to accept that, though invented, they must also come with political positions and social agendas.

And so, what do we make of fiction where the characters bring their own politics? Many writers use their characters to present or promote certain ideas. Nothing wrong with that; ideas should be presented. Of course, creative writing teachers preach that there should be no preaching in a story or novel. I say, preaching cannot be excluded if it comes in the form of a character's pontificating. A fine line, yes, but if a character is that type of person, the author must let the character speak freely. And that, friends, brings us to moralizing.

Sorry to say, but I've been thinking about my latest novel, A DRY PATCH of SKIN, and the "moralizing" that comes through in the protagonist's voice. His ideas and the way he speaks of them is steeped in the Western tradition, certainly. In fact, the Judeo-Christian influence on Western Civilization is embedded in the narrative. At first Stefan Szekely refers to "the gods" as though it was an everyday meme. Gradually he switches to "God"--the one and only. Still later, he is directly arguing with God, who he believes has cursed him and his family line. He soon is making deals with God--whether God is in the sky above him or merely in his head, he believes.

By the end this novel may seem like a Christian allegory, but it was never intended to be that. Rather, it is Stefan, the hero, Byronic as he may be, who comes to believe the illusions he has convinced himself are true. He never insists others believe as he does, never chastises others for not believing as he does, and in the end, what is real and what is in his mind are only known to him--and to his confused author.

So is that what I believe? Hard to say. I was drilled with the Bible and those Judeo-Christian beliefs, and schooled in their influence on Western Civilization. I think we have to accept our Western Civilization, for better or worse, as a product of that religious entrenchment--even as I have explored around its edges and found both positive and negative things as alternatives to that religious dogma. It is in my background, my upbringing, my family history, but I like to think I am above all of that "indoctrination." And yet, when inventing characters, I fall back on what I have learned or been exposed to and apply it to a character or two, just to make them more real, more believable.

So what do I believe? As a writer, I have thought long and hard about many, many issues over the years. It's difficult to find the one perfect mantra that will enable everything else in my life to swirl around me in perfect order. Also as a writer, I seem to have fallen back, in these older years of mine, onto author and critic John Gardner's idea in On Moral Fiction: the position that "moral" in fiction is a turn toward life and life-affirming narratives (“True art is moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for an analysis of values. It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force, it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach. It clarifies like an experiment in a chemistry lab, and confirms.”). 

Postmodernism, however, has flipped that around so we get so many stories of death and destruction, fragmentation and dissolution, fear and loathing, and more tragedy than "life-affirming" conclusions. Seemingly for the sake of disrupting the psyche. Or it's all for the sake of the drama. 

Perhaps, I'm the one who's off balance. I grew up with one foot on each side of the great divide, so I see the Utopian stories of my youth and today's Dystopian stories. I believe that a tragic ending can still show us a better way, a "moral" view of the human condition. I also believe that, regardless of one's personal religious, spiritual, political, or social positions, views, beliefs, agendas, everyone wants to live, be happy, be free to pursue happiness, and, at the same time, not fear any harm to self, family, or others of one's community. Or perhaps my neighbor said it best: "I just wanna play WOW* all day and not be f***ed with!"

Perhaps that is simple enough without getting all moralizing and stuff.

For a fun exercise in fictional moralizing, I recommend THE DREAM LAND Trilogy, set in part on another world and, as such, includes alternate religious beliefs, deities, and doctrines--all of which directly impact why and how the people there do what they do. In the third volume, such religiosity serious compromises the population's attempts to evacuate the planet in advance of a lethal comet strike.

Enjoy your week, and many happy weekends to you!


(*World of Warcraft, a computer game in which players take on military roles and seek to kill the enemy.)


---------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) Copyright 2010-2014 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.

What We Gain From Loss

Life makes you take turns, wait your turn, and often turn around so much you get dizzy. Instead of rushing on into the heady world of publishing thrill, I've been forced to pause and consider everything in the world around me. Oh, the new novel is fine, waiting its turn. Summer vacation is full of the usual indolence. The day job is waiting like a closed oyster. And the laundry is done. But something is missing. There is a strange emptiness here.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once famously said that all we have to fear is fear itself. The point was that worrying about something can be as crippling as the effect of the something actually happening. In the same way, fearing loss can be as debilitating as experiencing the loss itself. But loss is its own strange animal. 

Perhaps what a person fears most is loss of him/herself: loss of identity, loss of agency. When you are no longer who you are, who you have always believed yourself to be--when you lose that facade or mask you relied on for so long and people see you for who you really are, a kind of psychological nakedness--that kind of loss can be as real and as painful as death. Loss of agency, your ability to make a mark in the world, to make your own way, to act for your own benefit--can also be as devastating as a physical injury or paralysis yet it can come in psychological forms just as a loss of identity can.

Loss is the principal issue in many of my novels, it seems. It is easy to see in hindsight. Perhaps I chose that theme unconsciously or perhaps there was something intriguing about loss that drove me to explore it and its pain. After all, having a character lose something important and struggle to regain it is always a great way to introduce tension and advance the plot.

Of course there is the obvious loss of the significant other in a character's life. In AFTER ILIUM, Alex Parris loses Elena, the woman he has been having an affair with, and that loss drives him to take all kinds of risks to get her back. Along the way, he is threatened with the loss of his identity--how he sees himself, the kind of man he has been taught to be--and with loss of agency (his inability to act for himself, first by being in a jail, then by peer pressure to act differently than for his own interests, then by violence).

In THE DREAM LAND Trilogy, Sebastian is initially hurt by the loss of his love interest, Gina, but as he grows into his role as interdimensional voyager and accepts all that role entails, he becomes caught up with a life full of threats to his identity. He gets a little schizophrenic (mere IRS clerk or warrior on another world?) and from that wound also paranoid as he sees that others do not see him as he sees himself. Through the trilogy he is constantly losing and fighting to regain many things. It never gets easy. In Book III, Gina faces the loss of her daughter, who she gives up in order to save her.

Eric, the male protagonist in the campus anti-romance A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and his female counterpart, Iris, have each suffered loss in their lives. When they find each other one winter night, they think the losses will cease. They think they have plugged the gaps--only to find they become each other's worst enemy. Each has a plan for the other but they do not accept such plans because they represent loss of identity.

Now, in my new novel, A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, our hero, Stefan, faces the greatest loss of all: his own bodily integrity. As he fights against nature--and God--he fights against the loss of himself. He does not want to transform, against his will, into a hideous and grotesque creature of the night. Moreover, it is that transformation that will cause him to lose Penny, the love of his life, who he refuses to let see him as he becomes uglier. He sees himself condemned to a painful, miserable, lonely existence: complete loss of identity, agency, and love.

People lose lots of things. Some things are given away, purposefully or haphazardly, with or without regret. Others are taken away. Car keys, card games, a race to a traffic light, the city's sports team's championship. People lose first grandparents, then parents, sometimes siblings, sometimes children. Fathers lose wives, mothers lose babies, babies lose fights with nature. People lose jobs. People lose weight. They lose pets. They lose homes. They lose their sense of well-being. They lose their safety. They lose their peace. They lose a pair of shoes they somehow misplaced. But misplacement means the shoes still exist, only they are in another realm. And loss itself can be when something you have is destroyed, whether deliberately or accidentally. You no longer have it. When the tornado comes, people cry out that all is lost--and it often is.

Or loss can be when you hope or expect or anticipate having something and then it doesn't arrive. It's rather like a child's Christmas wish. You have sat on Santa's lap begging for that special toy and the big guy assures you that you'll get it. Parents confirm you'll get it. So you wait anxiously through the days, even counting them off, looking forward to that wonderful day. But instead of that gift you have desired, there is nothing. Not a lump of coal, not even a stocking hung with care. Nothing. It's as though Christmas has been canceled and all the trappings have been taken down. It's as though the holiday never existed and your hopes and dreams never were hoped, never were dreamed. And everything is as it was before. You are returned to the heat of summer and Christmas seems years away again. That is what real loss is: never having that one precious thing.

So grab hold of all you have and be glad for it. Take pictures and stencil id numbers on everything. Lock them away. Then stare into the nearest mirror and make sure you are who you want to be. And always love your bunnies.

---------------------------------------------------------------------
(C) Copyright 2010-2014 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 5th of the 5th of the 5th!

Sure, it's a "made-up" holiday, this May the 4th Be With You Day. It easily follows the laborious Labor Day cum May Day celebrations and is followed in short order by the equally sanctimonious Revenge of the 5th Day (that is, "Revenge of the Sith"). And that coincides with the Mexican holiday of Cinco de Mayo, the 5th of May, the celebration of an old battle victory over the French invaders--if I still have my history correct; it's been a while. 










(Wow, I just wikipedied* it and I'm correct! Most people forget, if they ever knew, the French tried to take over Mexico.)

Nevertheless, I shall celebrate my own day on May 5th (since I eat plenty of tacos throughout the year, anyway), and I shall call this day The 5th of the 5th of the 5th! On this day I shall reveal for public scrutiny the fifth paragraph of the fifth page of the fifth chapter of each of my completed novels...no matter what it may be, whether self-revelatory or not. I am willing to take that risk.

And so without further delay...here are the fifth paragraphs of the fifth pages of the fifth chapters:


1. The Last Song (as this book is divided into four "movements" it does not have a true fifth chapter; thus, I shall offer the fifth paragraph from the fifth chapter-like "section"):

“I learned the theory of the music of the gods, from the Discovery[," the old music teacher grumbled]. The real music! And now...now they’ve gone so far astray. It’s pitiful, downright pitiful. I pity all of them, those greedy, lazy free composers.  Music destroyers is what I call them!”

2. Year of the Tiger (under revision; publication soon)

Between the dull throbbing in his chest and the steady ache in his head, his vivid consciousness began to waver. He slipped back and forth from the soothing pastel walls of his room to a steamy, vegetated world of jungle bird calls and the incessant thumping of native drums. Sweating profoundly, he listened to the drums, then the birds, then the rustling of the leaves around him. A breeze wafted over him, humid and heavy, pressing him deeper into his mattress. The drums faded away, then the birds.

3. Aiko (mercilessly drummed out of Amazon's 2014 Breakthrough Novel Awards competition; publishing soon)

It was the 80s, he considered, wondering where his youth had gone, already in his thirties and fearing he had missed something. Japan was opening up to internationalization, long past recovering from the ravages of war and hardships of reconstruction. Now Japan had stepped out as an equal among nations, pressing for leadership in the international community. Stereotypes were falling away. Slowly. No longer were images of geisha and samurai what people thought of; endless varieties of electronics and quirky pop singers with pink hair and thigh-high boots were the most noticeable imports. Ben had to smile: he had never had any interest in Asia—not the culture, not the food, not the people, their languages, their fashions, nor their ways of doing business. He had only limited experience, anyway. In college his girlfriend had roomed with an exchange student from Korea. And in high school there was a chubby girl by the name of Yoko, but he never considered she was half-Japanese; she was just another American to him. Then he’d arrived in Hawaii.

4. The Dream Land (subsequently labeled Book I "Long Distance Voyager")

“It’s...glorious,” she whispered, and he was surprised she could be so taken in by her own experiment. He had to agree, touching her hand and giving it a reassuring squeeze: it was beyond their expectations.

5. After Ilium

Alex knew they were talking about him, even though the words were Turkish. They sounded strangely like the drunken mutterings of his fraternity buddies, and the shadows shifted to become his roommate, Nick, with a swarthy face and black, curled beard, like statues of the old Greek king, Agamemnon, that he’d seen in museums. Nick had been killed driving home from spring break six weeks before graduation, a trip Alex had reluctantly declined, citing an important paper that was due. The shadows shifted and Nick was replaced by the image of the doctor—the image of how he thought the doctor appeared.

6. A Beautiful Chill

“We are lovers,” she says, taking his arm so there will be no confusion.

7. The Dream Land (Book II "Dreams of Future's Past")

McElroy lowered his head, seething. He had never hit a woman before, though he had come close several times. He had always managed to hit a wall or a door. Once he hit himself—his head—against a door to release his anger. He did not carry his pistol tonight since they were going out to dinner in a nice restaurant. But he could never hit a woman. He had too much respect for—

8. The Dream Land (Book III "Diaspora")

“No, course not.” Tammy giggled. “They are on another planet. How’m I supposed to have contact with them?”

And I'll also give you a bonus: the fifth paragraph of the fifth page of the fifth chapter of my current work-in-progress, A Dry Patch of Skin, a kind of vampire tale.

I resisted the easy double-entendre and responded thus: “My pleasure.” After all, I’ve learned over the years that the best way to assure anyone comes is to not make jokes until after it happens. (Oh, is that a dirty joke? I’m not sorry, nor am I offended that anyone might be offended. I did not come right out and say anything obscene. That is the beauty of the double-entendre: only those privy to the context find it clever. All others sit dumb-faced like wilted flowers. All right then, I apologize. Next time, bring your own jokes.)

Thus is revealed the fifth of the fifth of the fifth! 

I encourage you to enjoy your tacos, your lightsabers, and should the mood strike you, go ahead and get yourself five books. Share with five friends and your life shall be made five-fold better by your generous acts!



*Yes, it's a word, invented in much the same way as Google became the verb "to google" something, hence to search for information using the Google search engine. I can do that. As a trained linguist, I have a license which allows me the right of word invention.

--------------------------------------------------------------------- 
(C) Copyright 2010-2014 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.