In Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD I bring in Isla's last child, a boy named Fritz (named after the family patriarch) who was born at the end of Book 3. Now he is a grown man with a family but in trouble with the government due to his making of a video of elderly Isla telling her stores about the decades of trouble she lived through. But now the government wants to disavow all of the hardship, the official narrative being that the pandemic was mild and the decades of lawlessness weren't so bad. Fritz is a nervous man and gets into further trouble in the novel, but doing so reveals much of what is wrong with the new, rebuilt society. In Book 3, Fritz's family is mentioned briefly. In Book 4, we meet his children: 2 brothers and young Maggie, all stuck in the oppressive capital city.
25 September 2024
The Writing Life: Behind the Scenes of the FLU SEASON Series
In Book 4: THE BOOK OF DAD I bring in Isla's last child, a boy named Fritz (named after the family patriarch) who was born at the end of Book 3. Now he is a grown man with a family but in trouble with the government due to his making of a video of elderly Isla telling her stores about the decades of trouble she lived through. But now the government wants to disavow all of the hardship, the official narrative being that the pandemic was mild and the decades of lawlessness weren't so bad. Fritz is a nervous man and gets into further trouble in the novel, but doing so reveals much of what is wrong with the new, rebuilt society. In Book 3, Fritz's family is mentioned briefly. In Book 4, we meet his children: 2 brothers and young Maggie, all stuck in the oppressive capital city.
14 September 2024
THE GRANDDAUGHTER Launches!
Does that end the series? Hmmm. I thought I was writing a stand-alone novel when I wrote the first book, THE BOOK OF MOM, but I realized half way into it that the story would have to continue. Because I couldn't see a two-book series, I immediately went for a trilogy while writing Book 2 THE WAY OF THE SON. However, as I was concluding Book 3, DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS, I had ideas for another book. Then, while writing Book 4, THE BOOK OF DAD (out this past June), I had ideas for Book 5 THE GRANDDAUGHTER. I began to wonder when the madness would end while hoping it never would. (I am currently well into the writing of Book 6, THE GRANDSON, which should be the final book in the series.)
Everything changes when you lose your mother, even more if you lose her during a pandemic when everyone is fighting for survival and it is your responsibility to protect her and you fail.
10 August 2024
Pre-Fall Update & BBQ Picnic
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.
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.
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.
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?
27 July 2024
Summer Update & Wine Tasting!
Now I have to count back and forward to make a proper timeline as I work on Book 6. But I know the overall story. If the series begins in our actual year of 2020, and Isla is born in the seventh year of the pandemic, that would, mathematically speaking, be in 2027. A life lived up to 79 would bring us, as readers, to the year 2106. Now go back 10 years to when the heroine of Book 5 was born. Then add 50 years to the story covered in Book 5. And so on. It can be quite maddening - maddening, I tell you!
15 June 2024
THE BOOK OF DAD celebrates Father's Day!
Below is a reprint from last year's Father's Day blog post....
But first, an Update!It seems appropriate that a novel titled The Book of Dad be launched around Father's Day. When I wrote the book and then spent time revising and editing it, I didn't expect to tie it to Father's Day. However, as things work out, it was finished close to the day so I deliberately held off launching it so it could be the same weekend.
(The ebook is available now and the paperback version will be available on June 18.)This sequel to my FLU SEASON trilogy follows the unfortunate exploits of Fritz, Isla's last child, now grown and in trouble for making a video of his mother in which she tells about the 10-year pandemic and the hard decades that followed. Those facts now run counter to the restored government's version of history. The video is removed from streams and all copies confiscated while Fritz, a husband and father of three, is sentenced to rehabilitation.
Returning to the cold, gray city, assigned to a single worker's unit, given a menial job, he finds his wife has filed for dissolution and his sons are stuck in a government school facing the radical new policies of Big Sister, the cruel governor. Fritz tries to stay out of trouble, seeing a counselor weekly to continue receiving his food rations, but he can't help but get into trouble again. He devises a caper to get back his tuba and his grandfather's notebooks - but it goes bad and he winds up in the Department of Social Order.
What will happen to him there? What will happen after? Can his life get any more miserable? All he has are painfully brief meetings with his 6 year old daughter, Maggie - who takes over as main character and narrator in the next book in this series, coming later in 2024. Fritz can only solve his problems, save his family, by making an unfair deal with Big Sister - and accepting the lie about everything that happened during his mother's life.
Yes, there is a deliberate effort to have the story mirror, not parallel, Orwell's "1984". Rather than a different version of "1984", I considered the natural, logical ways a restored society might develop and depicted the result in the cold, gray capital city. I allow a few aspects which could be said to be "like" things in "1984" but those act as Easter eggs for the careful reader. In the end, this is a unique story of one man's fight against the system that wants to remove him from history - not merely get him to agree what 2+2 might equal.
FLU SEASON 5: THE GRANDDAUGHTER'S TALE (available later in 2024) picks up the story, following Fritz's daughter, Maggie, now an adult. She's determined to start a children's band in her dusty western town, efforts which lead her to face a variety of problems....
But first, an Update!
(The ebook is available now and the paperback version will be available on June 18.)
This sequel to my FLU SEASON trilogy follows the unfortunate exploits of Fritz, Isla's last child, now grown and in trouble for making a video of his mother in which she tells about the 10-year pandemic and the hard decades that followed. Those facts now run counter to the restored government's version of history. The video is removed from streams and all copies confiscated while Fritz, a husband and father of three, is sentenced to rehabilitation.
Returning to the cold, gray city, assigned to a single worker's unit, given a menial job, he finds his wife has filed for dissolution and his sons are stuck in a government school facing the radical new policies of Big Sister, the cruel governor. Fritz tries to stay out of trouble, seeing a counselor weekly to continue receiving his food rations, but he can't help but get into trouble again. He devises a caper to get back his tuba and his grandfather's notebooks - but it goes bad and he winds up in the Department of Social Order.
"I've just finished a dystopian trilogy, FLU SEASON, about a quirky family dealing with a pandemic and the violent fallout from that devastating reality.
Everyone knows that grads are tired of reading. Dads tend to be reading averse, too. So maybe books do not make the best gifts. Job search books for grads, perhaps. A book on whatever is dad's current hobby, maybe. But fiction too often falls to the dark, dusty shelf of well-intended gifts. Beside the neckties. My own father would rather read through a stack of history and politics books before he would ever crack the cover of a novel. He is ok with wearing a necktie, however.
So how many books are there that feature Father's Day, anyway? Or about fathers in general? Mothers are easy. Brothers and sisters are common. The sweet aunt and the generous uncle are often seen in literature. Fathers are generally the bad guys, villainous, cruel, authoritarian, mean, and uncaring. They are more often than not portrayed as abusers. Sometimes they only appear as the bad memory of a protagonist and we get a couple of graphic incidents to showcase dad's unpleasantness. (I had to do that in A BEAUTIFUL CHILL and A GIRL CALLED WOLF because they were based on real people and their lives; however, fathers in my other novels are thankfully less abusive.) It's almost a stereotype. Fathers get a bad rap, I think. We tend to only hear about the bad ones. Think of Darth Vader, a.k.a. "Dark Father", and others of his ilk.
I think about the fathers in my other novels. My protagonists seem to relate to their fathers very much like I relate to my own father. Funny, that coincidence, right? Write what you know, they say. Or am I drawing on the only role model I have? (Curiously, I'm an only child and my protagonists tend not to have siblings, also - or siblings that are throw-away characters, mentioned but not active in the story. In AFTER ILIUM, the young hero dislikes his dentist father's strictness and is glad to be on his own touring Greece and Turkey after college. In EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS, our dragonslayer hero's father was a military commander killed in battle, so our hero carries only the memory of a violent, frightening man. In A DRY PATCH OF SKIN, the first volume of my vampire trilogy, our poor hero is transforming into a vampire. He is angry at his father for not warning him and for sending him away to live with an aunt. Otherwise, that fictional dad sounds an awful lot like my own father: haughty, disinterested, aloof. In volume 2, SUNRISE, the father comes across disturbingly like my own father at the time I was writing the book: well-meaning but still authoritarian to an uncomfortable degree.
When I think of my father, the image that comes most readily to my mind is of him sitting in his reading chair, reading: reading in such a focused, determined manner that I could get away with literally anything because nothing could disturb him. Thus, he was separated from my everyday activities, always there but on the sidelines, uninvolved in my youthful experiences. And that is what I learned of fatherhood: 1) provide the family income, 2) relax at home after the job, 3) fix things around the house and yard. Also, 4) be master of the castle, 5) enforce the rules, and when necessary (6) represent the family like a knight in shining armor when some authority or institution challenges us. He is the (7) champion, the protector, the lord of the manor. And that is, for better or worse, how I portray the fathers in my novels: powerful yet distant.
If you've been following this blog you probably know I'm a dad. It's a weird feeling knowing there is someone living in the world partly as a result of my actions. Sure, we can imagine clones, or cyborgs, but another human? That's crazy. Like us and yet not like us. And eventually they go their own ways and have their own lives and we scratch our heads and think What just happened? Now my offspring is finishing college, studying to be something in the medical field. This is after going through Army training to be a combat medic.
UPDATE: Well into her professional career.
As I think back over the past years, I can pinpoint a few things I did that might have helped raise this baby to adulthood. But there are just as many other things I did about which I have no clue. Maybe they helped, maybe not. Only my grown child can tell. I'm pleased, even proud, of how this googly little bundle of joy overnight became this awesome adult who vaguely resembles me in appearance and words and behavior.
So for now, I must pass the reins to my protégé. No longer do I need to concern myself so much with me doing great things and achieving this and that and telling my child about, you know, the things I can boast about. Now it is time for me to boast about my grown child, to note what this new adult is doing, and praise the new things, the new deeds, of this adult - to praise and be proud of what my child has done more than being happy at what I have done. I've actually inserted this idea into the thoughts of my protagonist dad in EXCHANGE. Oh, I will still write books, of course - until the keyboard is ripped from my cold, dead fingers. But now it's no longer all about me. It's about the generation we produce and what they will do as we fade gently into that good night.
09 June 2024
FLU SEASON, a pandemic/post-pandemic series! Where are we now?
[Note: Although our pandemic began in late 2019, in order to keep the story from becoming dated, I do not give a specific year in the series. You can think of Book 1 as beginning in 2026, if you like; count up for the next 80 years to cover subsequent generations.]
However, in Book 5, I manage to tie the story to the way things will be in the future that is that unfinished medieval epic (starts in the year 3000). I also let characters mention the way things are over in Europe during the Book 5 time period, thus linking Flu Season with the Stefan Szekely Vampire Trilogy (Book 2 starts in 2028, Book 3 starts in 2099). (More here.)