Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Photo: from St. John Mandel's homepage, here.

Like St. John Mandel's other books, Station Eleven is a story told in different weaves of time and space, following a small handful of characters as they meander through each other's lives. Because it's written this way, the reader is able to see how everyone's paths are touched by what some call "The Butterfly Effect," a philosophy (?) which peaked maybe 10 years ago, but is still hanging around.  This is the magic, and sometimes the detriment, of her writing style.  Everything and everybody connects, sometimes a little too tidily so.

More than her other books (of which Last Night in Montreal is her best), Station Eleven threatens to be a little too tidy at the end.  Thankfully, it never quite gets there, and instead remains a great book with interlocking characters and their stories. 

It begins with a heart attack and it ends with a resolution that does not end with finality, since the main character does not stop long enough to end anything.  She just moves on, because in the post-apocalypse, there is no stopping.  You stop, you die, she seems to say.  The characters of The Walking Dead know this.  You stop, something inside you dies.  This is partly what Station Eleven's about.

One thing it's not about is The End of the World As We Know It.  Yes, there's been a very strong flu that wipes out much (but perhaps not most?) of the known world, and certainly there are problems because there aren't enough people alive anymore to take care of things.  (For example, a guy dies because he steps on a rusty nail and can't get antibiotics.)  But these things are not the story as much as they are the background, the props, the scenery. 

This is a good thing, because haven't we been there and done that?  If we want the Apocalypse, we watch TV.  If we want literature, we read.  Good writers get that distinction.  Good writers' writing focuses intensely on one thing and gets it right.  Station Eleven does that.  It gets its people right--so right that it deserves the National Book Award nomination it got.

And there are some images that'll stick with you.  The most memorable to me is the last view a main character gets: watching ships and barges in the distance as they drift away on a quiet sea.  The woman appreciates this, too, as she is also drifting away on a quiet sea.  This book gets moments like those right.  It is also very readable--a feat for such a literary work.  So if you're into the post-Apocalypse--but also especially if you're not--buy this one and give it a read.  For more information and accolades, see St. John Mandel's homepage here.

The Hobbit--The Battle of the Five Armies

 Photo: Smaug, interviewed by Stephen Colbert, from the movie's Wikipedia page.

There's been some major backlash in my neck of the woods about these Hobbit films.  Not excessive negativity, exactly.  Nobody's saying they hate these films, including this last one.  The consensus is that they're not as good as the Lord of the Rings films.

They're not, of course.  The LOTR films had more relevance, more spirituality (and, strangely, I mean that), more clarity of vision, and more of an iconography going for it than do these films.  I'm on vacation right now, so I watched the three LOTR films and the two previous Hobbit films, and there's certainly no comparison.  The LOTR films are better.

But that doesn't make the Hobbit films bad.  In fact, when I watched the other two, the third one seemed even better to me than it had just on its own.  There is a saga here, a more subtle, less pronounced relevance and spirituality than the LOTR movies.  (And these don't have talking trees, which can't be a bad thing.)  To appreciate this one more, maybe we need to remember the beginning of the first Hobbit movie.

Erebor had been the greatest kingdom ever built.  It was ruled by a king, his son and his grandson.  This grandson, Thorin Oakenshield, is the main character of the Hobbit movies (and maybe of the books, but I have to admit I haven't read them) in much the same way that Aragon was the main character of the LOTR movies.  Both stories were "written" and narrated by hobbits, but they passed themselves off as spectators in their own writings, a la Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.  They were much more than that, of course, and may have been the main characters themselves, but they didn't "write" them that way.  Thematically, much of the relevance is carried by Thorin and Aragon.

This may be one of the major differences, now that I think of it.  Frodo Baggins is the main character of the LOTR movies because he is the Ringbearer.  He's the one on The Quest, as opposed to Aragon and the others, who are on the same such quest as Frodo is, though Aragon is also on his own internal journey: He is the king in the Return of the King, after all.  But his major importance is helping Frodo.  In The Hobbit, it may be the opposite.  Bilbo Baggins is the major character, overall, because he finds the ring, and because he becomes the Ringbearer, though he does not realize it at the time.  If he doesn't steal the ring, Sauron will get when Sauroman gets Gollum; instead, Bilbo the Thief essentially steals it from Gollum and brings it, for awhile, to safety in the Shire.  But for most of the movies, Bilbo is helping Thorin on his quest, not the other way around.  And, as someone mentioned recently, fewer people will care about Thorin.  They wanted to get to the Ring.

But the Hobbit films are really not about the Ring.  They are necessary, however, in the same way that this last film shows: Cause and effect.  The dragon drives Thorin and his people from their home as a symbolic representation of the greed of his people.  If you're going to care that much for the gold, then someone else will, too.  Like a dragon.  So the dragon takes over and the gold--and, more importantly, the mountain and the land--are safe because nobody wants to mess with the dragon.  But when the dragon dies, the gold and the mountain are open for all takers.  Turns out, there are five.

Here's where I think most people lose track of the relevance here, or maybe this is where Tolkien and / or Peter Jackson failed to highlight it enough.  As someone said in this last movie, it's not the gold that's more important, it's the mountain and the land.  The mountain sits in the middle of an important trade route.  Control the mountain, you control the trade.  And the "people" who count on that trade.

For those who know their history--as Tolkien did; he was a respected linguist and expert in old societies and languages long before he was a famous author of high fantasy.  His translation of Beowulf was the standard before Fitzgerald and Heaney came along--this should all sound familiar.  It is the purpose of Thorin's life to recapture his land from its usurpers.  This is the main point.  Bilbo gets it when he tells them why he didn't run away when he had the chances: Because he has a home to go back to.  These people have been kicked out of theirs, and that's not right.  And so he will help them to get it back.

In Tolkien's lifetime, such was exactly the case with the Middle East.  (I'm no historian, so forgive whatever butchery of history may now occur.)  The Middle East is a land mass unlike any other in the world.  Without traveling it, if you want to get to Africa, you'd have to take a ship or plane.  Those who control the Middle East control all trade (today, much or most of the trade) coming and going from all of Africa.  Control that, and you will have riches and power, then and now.  Combine that with the extreme religious significance of those lands (three of the world's major religions spring from it) and combine that with the concentration of oil there, and you've got land that everyone wants.

And they'll all fight for it.  As they all have been, for the last three+ thousand years.  With no end in sight.  If I remember my Old Testament right, the Jews had control of that land--though even in those pages, there were many wars and many different nationalities ruling that land.  Finally, by the time of the writings in the New Testament, the Jews were driven out by the Romans in...60 to 70 BCE (this is all off the top of my head here) and for almost two thousand years had not been officially recognized as the leaders of that area, especially Israel.  But in 1948, the Jewish State (more of a political term than a geographical one, I think) was firmly established and recognized.  And there's been war there ever since, of course.

Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937, but the war over the Middle East and the Jewish insistence on inhabiting that land reached a pitch throughout the thirties, and, as a historian, he was very much aware of it.  Tolkien insisted that the Lord of the Rings books had nothing to do with the Nazis, Jews and World War II, and I'll bet he said that the Hobbit books had nothing to do with what I've just been writing about.  But Robert Frost also said that his poem "The Road Not Taken" was a pastiche of overly-sentimental poetry with Deep Meaning, popular at the time.  But sometimes the artist is the worst judge of his own art, or of the creation of it.  If Tolkien's writing had nothing to do with any of this, I'll eat my next paycheck.  (Instead of the banks and utility companies, who eat them now.)

In fact, it is said in the Hobbit movies that the battle fought for the mountain would be the battles to end all battles.  The final battle would be fought there.  This sounds like the Middle East and the Apocalypse again.  In fact, isn't that the reason for this ultimate battle, in the movie and of the proposed future Armageddon?  Not for the people or of the riches or of the religious significance of the area--but for the fight against those trying to claim them.  It'd be the mother of all battles, involving many armies (The Hobbit has five), because they were not fighting for something, but against it.

At any rate, it's all tied together.  Everything's connected, these books and movies say (though probably more the books than the movies; Tolkien would write more about the history and Jackson would make a movie more about the dragon and gold, as a moviemaker should), and indeed it is.  No Hobbit, no Lord of the Rings.  (I wonder if Tolkien paused while writing--minutely--about the Ring in the Hobbit, which was really more of a children's book.  Did he know he was going to springboard from that when he wrote it, or afterward?)  No Thorin, no Aragon.  Both try not to just reclaim their kingdoms and kingships, but their honor and place in history, as well.  In the fight against the world's worst evils, who wouldn't want to be remembered?

This is more of what the Hobbit movies are about.  It's not as explicit as in the LOTR movies, but it's there.  And that's sort of the point.  History is rarely obvious.  It's a slow and gradual buildup of cause and effect, of things both great and small.  It's knowing there was a Cole before there was a 9/11.

Or, it's just a good CGI / special effects movie with more intelligence and relevance than usual for the genre.  Sometimes I think too much.       

My Interview, Part 1

Following is the beginning of my interview at a cool website for newbie and professional writers, The Writer's Block, at Raychelle-Writes.blogspot.com.  Specifically, you can find my interview here.  But it's an interesting site, so look around!

Welcome to The Writer’s Block! 

1)      Tell us a bit about yourself and where you live and work.

Thanks for having me here at The Writer’s Block, Raychelle.  I have a job I love that pays The Man, and I'm a novelist, short story writer—and so-so poet.  I live in the Northeast, in a quiet area of a loud suburb.  It’s sort of rural where I am, but I’m half a mile from suburban and seven miles from urban.  Also just half an hour to the good beaches, forty minutes to an hour to good walking/biking/hiking trails, an hour and a half from Fenway Park, two hours to the peaks and streams, and five hours from Manhattan—all of which I love and go to as often as possible.

2)      Describe your journey to becoming a writer/author.

Oh, boy.  How much time have ya got?  Well, the short of it is that, when I was about six or so, I wrote a short story in a birthday card for my mother, whose name was Carole.  The story was called something like, “A Christmas Carole, by Charles Dickens, but re-written by Steve Belanger.”  (The misspelling of her name was intentional.  I still have the card somewhere, since she’s passed.)  It made her smile, and I was hooked.  Throw in some slacking, finishing a novel, getting ripped off by an “agent” who scammed me for about a year (she’s still under indictment in NY State after many other victims came forward), and not writing a single creative word for nine years, and then being rescued (creatively and perhaps literally) by a great woman who convinced me to write again.  “Hide the Weird” was the first thing I finished and sent out, and it’s in Space and Time Magazine right now.  I feel I have those nine years to make up for, so I’m full speed ahead with many projects.

3)      Do you gravitate toward specific genres in your writing?

Well, I don’t know.  “Hide the Weird” is speculative fiction, I guess, though I’m not happy with that label.  I just sold a very short nonfiction piece about how adopting a greyhound changed my life.  I also finished a much longer nonfiction piece about managing anxiety in ten easy steps, with examples, anecdotes and short summaries.  I’ll be sending that out soon.  I’ve written (and am now re-writing) a zombie story that has quite a bit of the feel of Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.”  And a tiny bit of the Sox collapsing last year.  Cuz they just rolled over and died, get it?  (Sorry.)  My edited and re-edited, finished and re-finished (knock on wood) novel is a mystery titled Cursing the Darkness.  A draft of a sequel (or maybe a prequel, we’ll see) titled Remembering James is about half done.  My novel The Gravediggers is a historical fiction horror novel, which I guess is what Dan Simmons’ The Terror was.  It’s about the TB epidemic in 1880s and 1890s New England (specifically RI and NH) and how a creature really could have hidden in the shadows of the hysteria and walked in the footsteps of the disease—suspected, but never seen.  Or was it?  The Mercy Brown folklore of Rhode Island plays a part, as does the unbelievable sacrifice of the village of Eyam, England during the Plague (look both of those up).  Modern-day, hysteria-inducing diseases, like 1980s AIDS, does, too, at least in the draft so far.  I’m writing a memoir as well, and even my poems are of differing subjects and themes.  Oh, yeah, and a book of my existentialist philosophy, titled Faith & Reality: Jumping Realities.  And I’m about 100 pages into a semi-autobiographical novel, The Observer.  And a collection of essays and articles about my experience in education, titled When No Child Gets Ahead, No Child Gets Left Behind: Adventures and Lessons in Education.  And a concentration camp novel, about a camp the Nazis used as a sort of positive advertising to the world’s cameras (the prisoners were shown performing whatever talent they had, like singing; they ate only for the cameras, and were told to smile or be shot after the cameras were shut off).  A small group of courageous adults try to save the life of a young boy who has no obvious talent whatsoever, at first by hiding him in a chorus.  And a novel about a different sort of Armageddon, titled Apocalypse.  So, no, actually I’d have to say I’m all over the place!  I guess there are two different theories for not-yet-firmly established writers: write what’s selling (Do we really need another teenage paranormal romance?) or write what you want and work your butt off trying to sell it.  I do the latter.

(Me again.)  There are 10 total questions, so there'll be more to come.  Thanks for reading.  Try out her site!

One-Sentence Summaries

To further become focused on my writing, it made sense to me this morning (after reading an article in Writer's Digest's "Write Your Novel in Thirty Days issue) to type up one-sentence summaries of the novel I'm currently working on.  Then, while I was at it, I wrote one-sentence summaries for a few other novels currently gestating in the ole noggin as well.  This is more challenging than you might think, but ultimately it's necessary.  Think of it as a thesis statement for an essay or paper: If you don't know what you're writing toward--or even what you're writing about--how can you expect yourself to write it?  You have to know what you're doing; to an extent, you have to also know where you're going.

So, though they may not be perfectly formed yet, here are my one-sentence summaries for a few novels.  Brief notes or explanations may follow each one.  Please feel free to post a comment or send me an email about any thoughts you may have about any of these.  I look forward to your ideas!  And while you're at it, why not do the same for your own writing?  (This would work for any type of writing, and for any length.)

One sentence summary:

The Gravediggers

Fears and bias surrounding an outbreak of TB in 1890s Exeter, Rhode Island, hide the scourge of a true vampire in the town and surrounding area.  [May be combined with the Plague in 1665-6 Eyam, England and AIDS in early 1980s America, and a small RI town today.]  This could be a series, as each of those ideas could be separate novels.

One sentence summary:

Untitled Concentration Camp Novel

A young boy with no artistic talent must either learn one or successfully fake it in order to survive his internment in a Nazi concentration camp whose purpose is to show the world how “well” Germany treats its Jews.

One sentence summary:

Apocalypse

Small groups of people in Kansas City, MO, Warwick, RI, and other major cities throughout the world must survive wars and natural disasters as they attempt to completely revamp what they thought was their “society.”  This includes attitudes about patriotism, religion, and the Bible itself.  This could be a series as well, as each of the last three things could constitute its own novel.

One sentence summary:

The Observer

After a breakdown nobody knew he had, one man must suppress the beliefs of his existence that held him together in order to re-establish himself in the mundane process of everyday American living.

Who Do You Write For?

Been gone for a couple of days.  Very, very tired, and a little sick, and overall very blah.  Happy New Year to you, too.

An online friend wrote something to me today that, paraphrased, said: "When you write something inspirational, please let me know..." and so on.  Very nice person, offered to have me on her site as a guest writer, and so on.  But this got me thinking.  Should writers write what they want, what they feel?  Or should they write what they hear will sell?

My writing, for those who've gone to the site to check it out, tends to be a bit dark.  Okay, it's very dark.  Okay, my better half's right--it's straight out depressing and horrifying, if not somewhat interesting.  I am, after all, writing a concentration camp novel, an apocalyptic novel, and the finished novel is about murder and mayhem.  So, okay, no happy/smiley here.  Even my blog, I'm told, could use a touch of the light.

Should I write something happy/smiley?  Or should I write what comes?  Or, maybe more to the point, should what comes be more happy/smiley?  Now were talking personal psyche and psychology.  I'm not that bad, or sad, or horrifying, I assure you.  Stephen King isn't a complete psycho, despite his stories, and a lot of people actually wouldn't be traced back to their characters or stories if they weren't attached by name or fame.

Though it has been pointed out to me (many times) that Brad Foster and I are essentially the same.  I don't have shots of Dewar's at nine a.m., and he doesn't have my job (which WOULD make many people have shots of Dewar's at nine a.m.), but I admit that he and I are alike in...spirit.  Mood.  I am much more pleasant.  And I don't carry a gun.  We both have somewhat the same attitude towards society, though he's darker, and I suppose the dead-end alley effects both of us, though he more than I.  Hmmm...

But I digress.  Not, "What to write?" but, I guess, "What to write like?"  I don't know about everyone else, but my answer to that has always been that I can't write what I don't want to write.  If forced to write something light, fluffy and amusing, I'm not sure I could do it.  Foster is very funny, I'm told (and I agree), but admittedly he's not in a life-of-the-party kind of way.  If you like your dose of reality with a heavy touch of sarcasm and slight exaggeration, he's your guy.  Cursing does end with inspiration, though that's born out of a hole in Hell to begin with.  There was nowhere to go but up, mood-wise.

But what to write like?  This is to be continued, but I also have to point out that the question applies to blog entries themselves.  A couple of rules of thumb for blogs is that the entries should stick to mostly one theme or subject (mine kinda don't) and the entries should be just a few paragraphs, certainly no more than 4 or 5 (many of mine are much longer than that).  The stats bore this out: The longer blogs are read (much) less frequently.  In fact, they tend to be skipped, just like long paragraphs of description.  So one frame of thought is, "Don't do that because your readers don't like it."  And another is: "I'll write what I want, and those who like it enough will read it."  Guess which one I favor?

Bottom line, I suppose, is: Who do you write for?  If I wrote for my readers, I'd write more light and fluffy, and my entries would fall under the same category (and, no, not just mental), and they'd be much shorter.

And so--I write for me.

Writers Group and New Novel

Photo: Faed's Shakespeare and His Friends at the Mermaid Tavern


Hello to all the new faces at the writers group tonight!  Nice to meet you guys; good to see the familiar faces, too.  Some pockets of great writing in all the pieces covered tonight.  I look forward to seeing you guys next month.  Can you believe it'll be 2011?!?  Obama's been president for over 2 years, by the way.  Weird...

Speaking of writing, I'm happy as hell to announce that I've started the novel about the concentration camp, about how the prisoners must know a creative talent to make their captors look "good" to the world via forced and fake propaganda.  I found a comfy place to write--in a huge comfortable chair, which I can curl up in, in the living room with my better half--and I handwrote the first eight pages of this new novel.  Eight pages of my tiny handwriting is about 10 full pages of type.  Not too bad.  And I've never written fiction in front of someone before, in the same room as someone.  Harlan Coben once told me that he wrote in restaurants, in parks, etc. all the time, that he hardly ever wrote in his own office.  I can't imagine that, but it would be much more convenient if I could do that.  So I am going to try.

If I'm confident enough with this new writing, I'll place an excerpt here sometime soon.  My better half said tonight: "Wow!  You're really great at starting things!  But you're terrible at finishing them!!!"  (She's wanted me to finish Apocalypse before I started something new.  This advice will undoubtedly prove to be correct.)

So true, so true.  But I'm gettin' there.

Just Do It

I told a friend of the new novella/novel idea expressed in the last blog, and he said, "Another one?"  Then I told my better half about the idea, and she said the exact same thing.  And so it's occurred to me that I've got too many things going on at the same time, and not too much time to write any of them.  Doubly frustrating!!!

Right now I'm working on:

1.  Novel idea expressed last time.
2.  The Gravediggers--one of the Novels in Progress that may form a trilogy with...
3.  Apocalypse--one of the Novels in Progress that takes place right at the end of a major world calamity and the end of WW3.  Most of it takes place in Kansas City, NYC, Rhode Island, and occasionally at a few other points throughout the world.  A couple of excerpts of this NIP are in blog entries below.  This is the NIP I'm probably furthest into, and will probably form a trilogy with The Gravediggers, and with...
4.  The novel about the plague(s) throughout history, one of which will happen in the timeline of Apocalypse and The Gravediggers, but that also took place in places like Eyam, England, a similar locale of which forms the backbone of this NIP.  See excerpts and research in blogs below.
5.  The Observer--a NIP that I really like, on which I've written many chapters, fragments, etc. over the years, but which I'm maybe still not ready to fully get into.  You can just feel that, you know?

So that's, what, 5 novels (or NIP)?  That's a lot.  But also there are...

6.  A long article on Pedro Martinez's peak brilliance, as compared to the peaks of others, in our time and before, using some stats (and common sense) that I have not found on baseball-reference.com, or in anything by Bill James, or in Baseball Digest, etc.  Maybe excerpts of #6 and #7 on my sports blog?
7.  A long series of articles on the Hall of Fame voting for MLB.  This series is unique because it focuses not on the fact that HOF players got into the Hall, but on the number of voters who felt that they didn't belong.  Large numbers of voters felt that Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, etc. did not belong in the Hall.  There has never been a 100% unanimous selection to the HOF.
8.  Research for short story and novel submissions--and the actual submissions themselves.
9.  Critiques for the pieces submitted by members of the three writers groups I belong to.
10.  My house, my better half, and the fact that I have an actual life, which also includes my career.

I need to set some sort of schedule.  I just finished my grad. class, thank God.  Now I have to pick one of the novels above, just go for it and finish a draft, while spending time with the submissions as well.

And the energy to do it all.  I heard that J.K. Rowling woke up at about 4 a.m. and wrote until 6 a.m. to get her kids to school, and then wrote until she had to pick them up, and then wrote after she put them to bed.  And then over and over again.  Good Lord, give me the strength!  How?!?  I guess...just do it.

Another Apocalypse Fragment

I don't know yet where in the novel this will go.  The setting is at a Kansas City, Missouri community of survivors.  This area is now largely arid, wasted land.  The "I" is the main character, David Bancroft.  Those of you on top of your Old Testament will recognize this as the dinner shared by the elders and...well, you'll see.  The reactions of both are derived from the Old Testamental story.  I remind you that this is a rough draft.

[By the way, for those of you having trouble posting from Word to Blogger, use Notepad as an intermediary.]

An Immense Dread  

I felt an immense dread that transcended simple feeling.  It was a weight that pushed on me; I was scared, full of terrible wonder.  The wind was a hurricane that howled and knocked upon my door like a demon.
    I opened this door and found outside a dust-storm.  The red sand obliterated most of the sun; it flew in a puckered sheet right to left, and what sun shone through was a fixed red eye, a fireball, a barrel, locked and loaded, pointing at me from forever.
    And yet I saw to my right a large table covered by an overflowing white cloth; upon it lay more food than this camp would ever see—and four tall candles of white wax, their flames a solid life unwavering in the breeze.  Sitting in simple wooden thrones were the other seventy-three, each side holding thirty-six, all of them smiling, speechless, every eating movement slow and without noise.  The throne closest to me, with most of its back to me, sat vacant, turned slightly to the left, waiting for me as if it lived and breathed.
    Then the wind stilled and I was filled with terror.  A moan I didn’t recognize escaped from my dry, dust-covered lips; an indescribable dread chilled my heart so that I could not feel it beat.  A mania of awareness surged through me in this terror.  The sun was still a red eye, despite the stillness.  Again it seemed to me a red eye, unblinking, aimed at me directly.  In this dread I looked again at the people, at the table, and finally beyond them.
    And there, at a distance, beneath the frozen grey clouds, from out of the air and dissolving mist, appeared the giant figure that had always been there, now discernable in the stillness.  He crouched like a catcher, the toes barely touching the red dust and earth, the heels and large rounded knees not at all.  A huge muscled hand cupped each knee; the hands were bony, etched, despite their size and muscle.
    The massive face wore the color and lines of the desert on it; the blues of the eyes startling in a bright sea of whiteness.  This figure appeared and disappeared and appeared again in this stance, as if a cartoon character drawn incompletely on flipping pages that did not catch each small movement, causing it to flit in and out of this reality.
    As I walked slowly towards the table, trance-like, full of dread and terror, I saw that everyone else watched this image also.  All were transfixed and open-mouthed, unsmiling as I was, full of awe and terror.  A scream rose in my throat then, for as we watched this fleeting figure, as we gazed upon him, so he too watched us, gazed upon us.
    And his face was as terrified as ours, unsmiling, mouth open; as he moved his face closer, closer, still closer, his brown eyebrows descended into a solid wall that covered the upper-corners of his eyes.  Deep furrows dug into his forehead, and a feeling of death, of something beyond dread and terror, consumed me so that I felt that I would never stop dying, even as I lived.
    His cheeks thinned as he inhaled.  Its vacuum-wind blew out the candles, creating a three-second darkness that died when we were consumed by the red-eye sun that finally blinked and fired.
    And then he breathed.

New Novel Fragment

I write novels in fragments, sometimes entire chapters, but hardly ever in a linear fashion.  An image, an idea, or whatever occurs to me, and so I write it.  It just happens, and I piece it all together later.  How much later?  When I have to.  I'll know it when it happens.  I don't outline because I just report what happens; in that way I'm more like a reporter than a writer.  I did finally outline towards the end of Cursing the Darkness, and I filled in a few glaring holes that I wouldn't have caught otherwise, but I'm happy overall with my design.  I think all of that might change with this newest novel, Apocalypse.  I see a trilogy forming here, one mostly focusing on flu or plague dominated scenes, and their aftermath, and all of their intricacies, told from 1st person limited POV and 3rd person omniscient POV, as well as journals and diaries, and some of the characters may intermingle with others who are also telling the story, and I'll jump around, too, telling this story from both 1665 and 2022, and maybe points in between.  I've already discussed the Eyam scenario (see posts below), but how about a diary entry written from sub-Saharan Africa, from the epicenter of the AIDS virus, while it was wiping out entire villages in the 60s and 70s and nobody knew what the hell was going on?  For that matter, how about such a scenario now, when everyone does know what the hell is going on but the numbers are the worst ever, and getting worse?  Imagine being someone in sub-Saharan Africa, or Eyam, England, and watching everyone die around you?  I see some social criticism seeping into this novel as well--How couldn't it?

So here's a little fragment I wrote today:

H7N1.  Sounds like a Bingo call, a Battleship turn.  Not a virus strain.  Not like somthing that killed millions.  Like coordinates.  Like a code.  They say it started in chickens, in fowl.  In crows.  On the streets of Singapore.  India.  China.  It's always been around.  But then a slight mutation.  A simple virus, like a cold.

It all started with a sneeze.  A handshake.  An opening of a door.  It ended the War.  It ended the world.

(Me again.)  That's it.  I have tons of other fragments.  Sections.  Chapters.  It's taking shape; I can see it more clearly.  That's how I know it'll take three books to tell it, each veering in a different direction once The End of Days happens.  (See a recent post, below.)  I've got the design of Book 1 figured out, or at least I think it'll be the first of the trilogy.  I won't know until I work more on it.  I won't force it.  If the second or third one comes out first, so be it.  You can't force such things.  "The War," by the way, refers to World War 3, don't you see, and the fact is: You can't fight it if you're too sick.  It can't be fought if there's soon to be a lack of people to fight it.  Three or four things happen at once, a perfect storm of events.  Something else happens that stops it all, too.

On the Fire

Photo credit: Olympus Imaging Corp./ Philippe Giabbanelli/ DoctorPete

A few things on the fire right now:

1.  Can you imagine being the one person immune to a disease wiping out your entire family?  Everyone's dying around you, no known cure, lots of wild theories and rumors, and, after everyone dies off and you survive, you walk out of your home--which had been quarantined--only to find that your whole village had been wiped out.  Sound crazy?  Look at this link, about Eyam, Derbyshire, England, a village that suffered for 14 months with the plague in 1665-6 and deliberately quarantined itself.  About 25% of the village survived; entire families were wiped out.  (Look at the pic of the Rose Cottage, about the Thorpe family.)  Some people in the village, like a woman who buried her whole family, and the town gravedigger, survived, though they came in touch with countless of the infected.  Imagine being that woman, who survived as all of her family died around her?  Or being that gravedigger?  What happened to his family?  How did he feel burying all his friends?  Working on this now; setting either in 1665, or present day, I don't know.  Leaning towards present-day.  Novella or novel.

2.  The other short story I'm excited about because it's my first non-genre piece, called "So Many Reasons to Celebrate the Season."  It's about a writer coming home from a book tour at Christmas Eve, to a wife he knows is cheating on him and wants to divorce him.  His internal struggles on the plane ride home, in the airport with a fan as his wife approaches, and then on the ride home, when his wife tells him that her parents are already there, and that she's leaving him after the holidays for the guy she's been having the affair with.  Both pieces are ready to ship out.

3.  News, soon, about a short story recently accepted.  TBA.

4.  I have to send out two new short stories, one of them a Brad Foster short, called "Pink Lemonade."  There's another short story of Foster out there right now, knocking on doors, looking for a home.  (Foster is the main character and 1st person narrator of Cursing the Darkness, the prologue of which is below, with Chapter One waiting in the wings at my website.)  A poem is out there, too.

5.  Follow-up to Cursing the Darkness.  Leaning towards a prequel.  Writing decisions are hard.

6.  Finishing "Cribbage," a short story about a father and son (wife/mother has recently died) who bond over a game of cribbage; the boy has an adult-consciousness epiphany at the end.

7.  Novels: The Observer and Apocalypse.

8.  Novella that needs and wants to be a novel: The Gravediggers.  An existentialist/horror/vampire tale.  I began it in the mid- to late-90s, before everyone wrote vampire stuff.

9.  My day job.

10.  Spending less time at the computer.