We've got you covered!

I've been thinking of this topic for a while. Now that my forthcoming book THE WARRIORS BAUMANN is awaiting its cover art, it seems even more appropriate to offer you a discussion on book covers.

They say the cover is the first marketing tool, and I would agree. You see it on the shelf (or on a website page) and the image catches your eye, draws your attention. For me, that's as far as it goes. Once in my hand I turn the book over and read the blurb - What's this book about? But it was that cover art that first got me to grab the book in order to see more.

I am not a book cover art aficionado; I care less about the art itself than that the cover represents the genre and hints at the particular story. Personally I prefer a simpler design, but I recognize that genre such as fantasy, science fiction, and romance tend to require elaborate cover art. Crime thrillers and literary fiction usually have a more toned-down cover, often symbolic rather than pictorial.

[click on covers to see larger image]

In my career, the first novel I had to arrange cover art for was AFTER ILIUM, a lusty tale of a young man who meets an older woman on a cruise to and tour of the ruins of ancient Troy, also known as Ilium. I tried and tried to think of what would be a compelling scene for the cover. Thankfully, another author offered an idea and then the cover, which I quickly approved. The design gives us three elements: the colors (red for blood), the wall (ruins of Ilium), and the big horse head (representing the gift horse the Greeks used to get into the city; hence, an icon of deception). I think it works very well. The only "flaw" might be that readers picking the book off a shelf may assume it is an ancient tale, a version of the Iliad story (it is, but set in the modern landscape). Thanks, Ceri Clark!

After that, I thought I knew what to do, cover-wise. Think through the story: what are the main elements I wished to get across? For my interdimensional steampunk trilogy, THE DREAM LAND, I had a whole new world to draw from. I also had amateur skills. The first book featured the discovery of a portal to the other world, which is a physical planet having a greenish sky. So I tried to create the effect: two explorers traversing into a greenish something. Not so great. The second book focuses on the evil queen but back when she was young and innocent. Again, the results were not the best. With the third book, which in part deals with a comet's approach, I got better: the cover does reflect the arrival of a comet. But does that draw a reader's attention enough to get the back cover blurb read?

Sometimes the idea is simple yet effective. For my contemporary intercultural romance novel, AIKO, it had to have a Japanesque image. I combined three elements: the child's face (a child is central to the story), the famous woodblock printing of the big wave (The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai) as the sea features significantly in the story, and the Japanese characters incorporated into the title letters (a purely aesthetic touch which emphasizes the Japanese aspect of the story). With a lot of tweaking it came together beautifully and I felt proud of it.

When I accepted the dare of my fellow fantasy authors to write an epic fantasy - and told it must include dragons - I looked for dragon images. I kept in mind the issues of using art for book covers, artist rights, and so on. I didn't find a good dragon image that I would be able to use without a lot of hassle obtaining the rights or worrying about those rights in the future.  Eventually I discovered artwork by a famous painter (Dragon Awakens, by Theodor Kittelsen) which was in the public domain and incorporated it into the cover for EPIC FANTASY *WITH DRAGONS. Although it may seem dull by fantasy book cover standards, I liked it: subtle yet ominous: the dragon emerging from the clouds, ready to attack. One "flaw" is that the artwork has been used for other covers.

One cover I am particularly proud of is my contemporary crime thriller, EXCHANGE, which is about the aftermath of a horrendous crime crossed with the arrival of an exchange student. I had the idea immediately. As I write about all of the gray areas of the gun control issue, I envisioned a cover which would have a band of white and a band of black with the gray in the middle. I found (and bought) a stock photo of a girl resembling the character in the story and positioned her in that gray area. The image continued onto the back cover where a "tattoo" of the sign commonly found at schools ("gun free zone") is placed. The front cover suggests a crime thriller while the back cover gives the blurb in a more intense font style appropriate for a crime thriller.

I work with an artist friend for most of my book covers. We discuss ideas when I don't have one right away and she offers suggestions. I've relied on her for several of my covers and sought her again for what I thought would be a one-off stand-alone novel about the effects of a pandemic on a single mother and her teenage son. That stand-alone became THE BOOK OF MOM, which itself became the first of a trilogy, then another trilogy, then a couple of spin-offs - all part of my FLU SEASON SAGA. For the first book, I imagined the mom's face, in a mask like we were wearing in that early stage of the pandemic, with lockdowns, shortages of everything, and so on. I expected a city in ruins as a background. Manipulation of stock photos.

The second book's concept shows the ghostly image of the Mom (from the first book's cover) as the Son goes off on his own into the woods - highly metaphorical! The third book features four of the daughters of the title, as the next generation takes over the story. 

I thought I was done then, but a story nagged at me, so I wrote Book 4 as a sequel - but it became a main line story, following a grown son into the rebuilding of a new but tyrannical  America - so the cover doesn't show any person, only the banner of the regime (more metaphor). Individuals don't matter in this new society.

But life gets easier for THE GRANDDAUGHTER, an idealistic young woman who starts a kids' band in the western town she and her mother and brothers have escaped to.

However, my artist friend suffered a family tragedy and it would not have been possible for her to devote time to my project. So I tried another artist I found through mutual writer friends on social media. He sent me mock-ups which I thought matched closely my vision. In the end I chose not to use his cover; he did the work so he got paid. I hired an art company, let them give it a try, but their covers turned out to be different from what I wanted - perhaps the first inkling of AI-manipulated art. I said thanks but no thanks. 

By then it was months later and the book was finished, just awaiting a cover. As a sci-fi story, it needed something that showed the general setting of the story (a city in chaos); couldn't avoid it. I was able to return to my artist friend and she produced the cover I liked. She went on to create the other covers in the series - or we agreed on something as a compromise. For example, after working on a more elaborate cover for the latest novel THE GRANDSONS, we switched gears and went with the simpler silhouette image using a stock photo from her collection. This cover image matches some elements in the story: the persistent glow from the east plus the riders on horses (definitely a Western).

Now I have another book ready to go: THE WARRIORS BAUMANN. As a ribald comedy (you read that right!) set 200 years after THE GRANDSONS, it should be sci-fi but civilization has further regressed so we find our main characters in a medieval setting, on a journey across the Ozarks to the capital of Louis (St. Louis) so one of them can wed the princess. It smacks of epic fantasy, so it needs a cover that matches the genre. I have sent my ideas to an artist professional whose work I've seen and like. My artist friend agrees that what I'm asking for is more than she could do effectively to the degree the story deserves.

Now we await the amazing result! THE WARRIORS BAUMANN launches December 1, 2025. 

Meantime, the next book, A TIME OF KINGS, originally conceived in a spiral notebook during social studies class when I was 13 and subsequently put off for years (despite a college screenplay version and two post-college attempts at novelizing the screenplay) is well-underway and should be finished in the foreseeable decade. An elaborate medieval-esque cover shall definitely be required.

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(C) Copyright 2010-2025 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Pre-Fall Update & BBQ Picnic

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 THE BOOK OF MOM (Nov. 2022)

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

opening:

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

ending:

In the end some of us would survive.

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

That was also our beginning. 

2 THE WAY OF THE SON (May 2023)

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

opening:

What was that?

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

ending:

She wrenches her hand free, points across the slope.

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

3 DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS (Sept. 2023)

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

opening:

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

ending: 

It’s time for them to carry on.

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

4 THE BOOK OF DAD (June 2024)

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

opening:

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

ending:

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

5 THE GRANDDAUGHTER (coming in Sept. 2024)

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

opening:

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

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

ending:

[sorry, that's a spoiler]

6 THE GRANDSON (sometime in 2025)

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

opening:

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

ending: 

[not yet written]

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

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

Happy reading!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2024 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Summer Update & Wine Tasting!

Here in these dog days of summer, we pause to reflect on what could've been but wasn't. A taste, yes, but not a full drunken orgy of disease and destruction. The 10-year FLU SEASON that was, in our reality, nipped in the bud. A six-book series (five thus far) that came from that momentary hiccup to our daily lives in the ripe old year of 2020. Drink up!

Last month Book 4 of the series launched. THE BOOK OF DAD was billed as a sequel to the trilogy and continues the saga of the Baumann family. The drama begins with the tuba saved after World War II (we learn that fact in Book 3) and it is subsequently passed down from generation to generation. Along the way, as family members struggle through the pandemic and the lawlessness that follows, we follow the emergence of a very different society. In the capital city of the restored nation, Fritz, the poor hero of Book 4, tries to sort out his miserable life after returning from mandatory rehabilitation, now estranged from his family, given a menial job and a tiny unit to sleep in, surveilled constantly with weekly counseling sessions to prevent backsliding. The city is run by Big Sister who models her efforts on the farm where she grew up - or is it just as much of a lie as what they claim he professes in that video he made of his elderly mother (Isla) telling the truth about everything that happened?

In that novel, we meet his 10-year old daughter Maggie in a few scenes. In the sequel to the sequel, Book 5: THE GRANDDAUGHTER (coming in fall 2024), we meet Maggie again but as a young woman living out west. We follow her through her efforts to start a kids' band in her small town with the help of a musical instrument salesman. There are many obstacles to overcome. But those efforts lead to bigger events in her life, including a major turn in society. Book 6: THE GRANDSON opens fifteen years after the end of Book 5, and is in the drafting stage (I know how it ends) and should be out in 2025.

I've been winging it from the start - a true "pantser" who writes by the seat of his pants - yet the story has been clear in my mind. I've played fast and loose with hard facts. I never name actual cities until Book 5. I never give precise dates so the series will not become "dated" years from now. I give a generic start as "the sixth year of the pandemic" when autistic teen Sandy and his single mother Polly, the tuba player, escape from a city in chaos for the hope of sanctuary on his grandparents' farm. Sandy's daughter, Isla, is born in the seventh year of the pandemic. In Book 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS, Isla narrates her life from 4 years to her final day at age 79.

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!

But that is half (or maybe closer to three-quarters) of the fun of crafting a multi-generation family saga. 

I awaken with the thought "Wonder what he/she/they are doing today? What trouble will they get into that I alone may save them from? or should I let them be, just watch and see what happens and then write about it?" That is often the writer's craft. It is also the chief hobby of the retired class: to sit back and observe the world going by. In Book 6: The Grandson, I'm still deciding who will tell the story. So far, a few different characters have shared what they know. I am merely collecting their stories for easy reading. The most important character in the book is the one who is dead.

Ensconced in my air-cooled abode, I type. And, having typed, I move on.

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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.

FLU SEASON 3: Dawn of the Daughters

LAUNCHING Sept. 1, 2023!

The conclusion to my pandemic/post-pandemic trilogy is about to launch. Officially it is September 1, 2023, but you can pre-order the Kindle edition now. Paperback edition will be available on September 1, too, so you will have something to read over the long weekend.

If you have read Books 1 and 2, then you know what's been happening and will feel right at home on page 1 of Book 3. Although the years aren't clearly spelled out, Book 1 covers roughly 2026-28 and Book 2 the adventurous year of 2028-29. If you haven't read Books 1 and 2, you could still jump right into Book 3 (roughly 2030-2103) and the characters will get you caught up on what's been happening. As a family saga covering the life of the main character, Book 3 is on the long side but reads fairly quickly in my humble opinion (148,000 words). Only my epic fantasy novel is longer (233,000 words). I've already started a "sequel" to the trilogy which will continue the story further into the future.

WHAT'S IT ABOUT?

Book 1 FLU SEASON: THE BOOK OF MOM
The pandemic of 2020-22 has ended, thankfully for us - but what if its worst days continued, extending to 6 years? Follow autistic teen Sandy and his sassy single Mom (& her tuba) as they flee a city in collapse for the hope of sanctuary with relatives in the countryside. But even there, chaos follows them and a crucial Plan B takes them to other relatives' homes, then to an island sanctuary where they hope to wait out the pandemic.

Book 2 FLU SEASON 2: THE WAY OF THE SON
Sanctuary from a pandemic is only good if you can stay there. Rules are harsh, jealousy abounds. When Sandy and his young family are exiled from the island, he struggles to find a way to save them while they face the worsening situation in years 7 and 8 of the pandemic. Without Mom to guide him, Sandy must take on all the responsibilities for their survival in the lawless outerlands. He tries his best but the best-laid plans seldom go as expected.

Book 3 FLU SEASON 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS
There is no safe space - except maybe hiding away in the forest of a national park. Sandy and his young family settle in a dug-out home and life is briefly idyllic. But when others have the same idea, Sandy's family faces a variety of new opportunities and challenges. While Sandy gets caught up in the civil war between North and South, marauders harangue the survivalists in the national park. As the post-pandemic world starts to recover, it is Sandy's daughter who must carry the family forward, no matter the difficulties she must face protecting her mother, sisters, and their daughters.

You can click over to the series page here, or to the Book 3 page here to read a sample. But I'll give you the first 2 pages right below here. Then you can click over to get a copy for yourself. (I prefer the paperbacks so I can carry them around and show them off to everyone, but that's me.)

The narrator in Book 3 is Isla Augustine Baumann, born in a later chapter of Book 1 and carried around through Book 2. In Book 3 she tells the story of her parents, her siblings, the friends and enemies she encounters. Starting at age 2, she takes us through the full experience of living - or trying to live - in a collapsed society bent on rebuilding but not quite there yet. Nothing will be the same as it was before the 10-year pandemic. That age is finished, forgotten. And with Isla at age 79 so is the oral history of that awful time.

The FLU SEASON trilogy could be seen as science fiction because it deals with a situation in the near-future. It could be classified as dystopian fiction because of the way society falls into ruin and how people must struggle to survive. It could also be called a family saga because it covers about 80 years and four generations of the same family. In these days of genre smashing, I think I've achieved a satisfying melding of all of them - with natural humor and occasional joy as much as horrors and sacrifices. While there is no message in particular I wish to push in this novel, the characters repeat a few that they take to heart - but I'll let you come upon them on your own. I do not take sides but allow Good and Evil to spar on a neutral stage for the entertainment and possibly enlightenment of readers.

I sincerely hope you enjoy reading this dramatic trilogy. If you do, please leave a review on the Amazon page and tell your friends. I appreciate every reader who takes a chance on whatever I create. Thank you!

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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.

Fictional Fathers for Father's Day - Update #2

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.

Book 1 and 2 are out and Book 3 is finished and coming out this fall. The narrator of Book 1 and 2 is a teen son, describing in Book 1 his sassy never-married mom ("The Book of Mom") and in Book 2 his own family ("The Way of the Son"). So far the story is about this teen boy becoming a man and with that title a husband and father (no spoilers; it was inevitable).

I've done a lot of thinking about that arc as I wrote this family drama. The ideas a boy has about becoming a man and all that comes with that role. The criteria to be met. The duties and responsibilities. The joys and regrets. The fact that the roles keeps changing: son, father, grandfather. Because I've borrowed liberally from my own thoughts and feelings, these novels are deeply personal to me - even though they are, of course, totally fiction. (We know our pandemic ended officially in 2022. But what if it didn't? How would everything be, say, six years on? Eight years? Eleven years? What would remain? How would people carry on?)

Book 3 ("Dawn of the Daughters") is narrated by the daughter of this boy/man/husband/father and tells the continuing story of the family through her entire life, including views of how society has changed post-pandemic. I have ideas for a Book 4 which would be narrated by her grown son, now a father, and describe how he deals with the dystopia of the post-pandemic rebuilt world as well as the effects of having her as his mother. It truly is a vicious circle.

Here is my blog posting for 2020's Father's Day:

Last month, for Mother's Day, I waxed poetic on the three kinds of mothers I happened to have in my novels. Well, turnabout seems fair play, so let me ponder the types of fathers I find in my novels and consider their source.

So I'm sitting comfortably at home this summer, counting the sales of my latest novel, and it hits me! I should be promoting my Father's Day novel, the one titled AIKO. It's a kind of Father's Day story, after all. And because Father's Day is here again, everyone is doing a grad and dad marketing blitz. My just launched novel EXCHANGE has a dad at its center. Unfortunately he has lost his wife and his daughter in a mass shooting, but there are many "dad" tropes as he struggles to put his life back together and find meaning in what remains.

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.

In AIKO, our hero discovers he is a father, then struggles to find his child. There is a brief mention of his own father being stationed in Japan after WWII - like my own father was. After the war, my father went to college on the G.I. Bill and became a social studies teacher, then later a librarian. Now he is deep into retirement, having put his books away for poor eyesight and sleepier days, not to mention the devastation of a hurricane.

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: Finished university, started her career in medicine, got married, living large.

As I think back on the past 23 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.

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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.

The FLU SEASON Trilogy: Doing What I Do

It has been a week since my new novel FLU SEASON 2: THE WAY OF THE SON launched and the excitement of that minimalistic day still lingers. The thrill of seeing my finger push that button to send a tweet into the void sizzles even now. It's all about the thrill, you see. I really can't stop. It's like a role-playing game and I get to play all the characters and make them do what I want them to do. By the end, I feel like I have put together a million-piece jigsaw puzzle and can finally see the big picture.

Whenever anyone might ask me why I write - a typical question in writing communities online - I pause thoughtfully, then launch into a diatribe about how it is all fun and games until I come to the end. Then I feel a great emptiness as the published book leaves the nest and tries to fly on its own. But the game analogy is valid. When I really think about it, that is what it is: a game. It gets me up in the mornings to play it. I want to see what happens next to these invented characters - blithely acknowledging that I have the power to make things happen in a certain way.

Puppet master? I think not. For as the characters come on stage more and more, they become real and often argue with me, demand a different turn of events, threaten to sit and pout. I offer a quick way out in the form of a murder or unlucky fall, but usually I cannot part with them. Even the villains compel me to assist in their crimes. Sure, there is some clear-headed planning and crafting a narrative that goes this way and that, making arcs, dropping seeds, foreshadowing, flashing back, information dumping but only in spoonfuls here and there. I know what to do.

However, at the bottom of all of that writerly stuff is the game. An old adage for writers goes a little bit like this: Write the story you want to read. And I do. I don't often know what kind of story I want to read when I start, but it comes to me soon enough. It usually comes to me when I've written about 10,000 words. By then, the story stays with me when I'm not actively writing. I start to think of what happens next - and what just happened and what I may have missed and need to add or change - through the day and into the evening. As the story progresses, I may be so driven as to sit down in the middle of the afternoon and type out another scene. Or, surprisingly, delve back in late in the evening just as I was certain it was time to sleep. It's a crazy process, but there it is.

For my FLU SEASON trilogy, which began as a stand-alone book, THE BOOK OF MOM, until 2/3 of the way into writing it, I developed a regular routine (me being a retired fool with little to occupy my hours). I would rise and get coffee while booting up the beast (an old desktop computer running Windows whatever-number, using Word of some kind). I'd sit and open the file, a running manuscript in which I add the next bit straight into the file, which is already set in book format - all the better to see how it will look in the final version. While starting the session, I begin listening to the "soundtrack" I've put together: music which fits the scene, always instrumental (don't need sung words getting in the way of the words in my head).

I usually begin by addressing spots I thought about since the previous session and fix those. Then I might read through the last scene I wrote and revise/edit it, which leaves me ready to dive into the next scene or chapter. In the alternative, if an idea is hot when I'm starting, I may go straight to typing out that scene while it rages, then return to my normal routine. Depending on the scene - writing coaches talk about the goal of a scene - I may begin with a little setting information, or jump into dialog to get it started. I'm always thinking of the mood of the scene - mood of the characters as well as what comes from the setting, like the difference between the same dialog and action in a sunny setting versus a dark and rainy setting. I know from a lot of previous writing how to mix exposition ("telling") with live action and dialog ("showing"), with the thoughts and feelings of the characters.

However, I tend to "write lean" just to get the story down in a basic form, knowing I will go back over it and make it richer. Sometimes an exchange of dialog runs the scene. Other times, getting the look and feel of the place and situation is most important. I find I have the uncanny ability to "become" a character and think, speak, and act as that character would. And yet I was never a great actor! Yet, in becoming my characters, I feel what they feel and that makes the writing effort exhausting - or occasionally energizing. It is almost like going to the gym for a hard workout, depending on the conflict in the scene I'm writing. A lot of that is driven by whatever is happening in my head when my fingers hit the keyboard. I might say it is magic but I don't truly know. Probably a form of mental illness of which I can make full use of its quirky features. Living in one's head is not just a metaphor.

I will write as long as I can. When the scene is finished I will go back immediately and read it through, revising as I go. I add more description (a sentence here or there), fill out dialogue (can't just have the necessary words but also need the extra phrases that make dialog sound real), and add thoughts and feelings (of the protagonist; can't know what other characters are thinking and feeling but I can suggest those through what the protagonist notices). When I get tired or I run up against having to do some other task, I'll pack it up, save everything in 6 places (3 places off the desktop computer), and call it a day.

Then I think about the story as I go through my day. I'll drive to the grocery store but there is the next scene in my mind's eye as I'm sitting at the traffic light. I push the cart through the store and I'm thinking through that last exchange of dialog, perhaps deciding a better phrase to have my character speak. Or I might realize I forgot to include something or I discover in reviewing what I just wrote that I need to add some important detail - something a reader would point out. Later, often lying in bed ready to sleep, I will also find "plot holes" (seldom these days, despite being a make-it-up-as-I-go-along kind of writer) or other spots I need to address. Then, if I'm lucky, I will go on to sleep. And sometimes I will have a dream which relates to the story I'm writing and I'll pop up in the darkness to scribble something on a note pad next to my bed and deal with it in the morning.

So for the two years in which I've worked on three novels, this has been my usual daily work routine. It is good to have a regular schedule when nothing else such as getting to work is there to keep me on track. I often confuse the day of the week now, unless the TV schedule reminds me. After a while they all run together as one big writing session, anyway, and I don't mind that.

I'm not sure what comes next. The FLU SEASON Trilogy is finished with Book 3: DAWN OF THE DAUGHTERS - coming in fall 2023. I have teased that I will have an artificial intelligence app read my trilogy and then create a fourth book. Then a fifth book. And I shall be reduced to mere editor. We shall see. At least read Book 3, the final fully human-written novel of my career!

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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

FLU SEASON 2: THE WAY OF THE SON Launches!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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(C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.

Pandemic Fiction: The Evil That Writers Do

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FLU SEASON Book 2 THE WAY OF THE SON 

Available mid-May 2023 for Kindle and in paperback!

(Pre-Order for Kindle version here!)

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 (C) Copyright 2010-2023 by Stephen M. Swartz. All Rights Reserved. No part of this blog, whether text or image, may be used without me giving you written permission, except for brief excerpts that are accompanied by a link to this entire blog. Violators shall be written into novels as characters who are killed off. Serious violators shall be identified and dealt with according to the laws of the United States of America.