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.
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.
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?
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.
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!
(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.
