Music Blog: Lindsey Stirling, Ice Queen.

The Pius Trilogy is over.

It's been ten years, two agents, three friends, and dozens of rewrites. There's nothing more to say.

So, yeah, this won't be a long one.

As of right this minute, A Pius Stand, A Global Thriller, is published, marking the end of The Pius Trilogy. You can pick up a hard copy here on Createspace, the publisher's site, were I can get more money for what you pay ... though the shipping and handling sucks.  You can click here, and find the paperback on Amazon.com-- I won't get as much cash, but it'd be easier on you, the reader, and your wallet.

Those of you who are into Kindle can find it right here, on Amazon.com, and start reading immediately. :)

What's the premise? you ask?

Well, how does this look to you?

A Pius Legacy asked the question: What happens when someone kidnaps the Pope? When you're Sean A.P. Ryan, security consultant, the answer is easy: get him back. And that rescue pissed off...everyone...and the entire United Nations declared war on the hundred-acre Vatican city.

When the Pope is threatened by the international community, with no help in sight, what's a Pontiff to do? Run and hide? With offers coming from all over the world, it seems like the best course of action. With fifteen-thousand men from armies all over the world coming to end the Catholic Church, it's a threat not even the Pope's bodyguards could handle.

But it's not just about Vatican City. With the Church all over the world in peril, things are not as clear cut for Pope Pius XIII as one might think.

With the forces of darkness closing in, Pius, Sean, and the people they love must make a decision that will affect the lives of billions, and threaten all they hold dear. Do they leave the Vatican to their enemies, or stay, and face certain death?

Once more, this epic conclusion to The Pius Trilogy continues to mix real history with wholehearted adventure. With everything on the line, and no good outcome, the Pope and his champions must decide to either cut and run, or to make a final stand.

Just so we're perfectly clear, in case you've been waiting for the whole thing to come out before you read it, the trilogy goes like this



A Pius Man: A Holy Thriller

A Pius Legacy: A Political Thriller

A Pius Stand: A Global Thriller  (links above)



Codename: Winterborn is not part of this set, though. :)



If you're waiting for your copy to arrive, put on your headphones, turn up the volume, and enjoy the trailer below.



Why?  Because this is war.

Christian Lit and Writing.

Some days, I get really tired of Christian writers who set out to write a story about a faith-related issue, and the results are so heavy-handed, I feel like I've been back-handed. You know what I mean, a story that's so entirely centered on the Christian message, and yet doesn't have any breathing room for the story and the characters to develop beyond that.



The problems a lot of these types of books have is that, well, these things are only preachy if they're not relevant to the plot. For The Pius Trilogy, I made sure that the motives of the bad guys were based around the faith, because their beliefs were antagonistic to "ours" (ours in this case is defined as the entire Judeo-Christian world) What we believe was and is a direct threat to their existence. From there, the books expanded around what we believed, explaining the enemy as "not-us."



For example? Imagine if someone decided to declare war on Hobby Lobby instead of launching a lawsuit? Imagine if the L.G.B.T.Q.M.O.U.S.E. crowd gets smacked down for every legal action taken against a Christian minister who didn't want to perform a gay marriage, and in turn, they decide a wave of assassinations and church bombings.



If you find that unbelievable, make the enemy China over the abortion issue, if someone tried to change them.



You can preach, sure, but the characters will be spending most of their time trying to survive. Get the reader invested in the characters FIRST AND FOREMOST, and then you can do some preaching. Because if we care about the characters, we care about what they believe.

It's almost as bad as those people who says that s/he is just a vehicle for the Holy Spirit, who is writing through him/her. Really? You're taking dictation now, people? Who are you? John Smith? Matt, Mark, Luke and John weren't even taking dictation! There's giving the glory to God, and then there's "my work is perfect with a divine stamp of approval."



Indeed.  Does God make the punctuation mistakes, too?



Frankly, I think it's presumption to assume that everything coming out of one's word processor is "I'm writing for God!!!!"  At best, I write from my gut, or my heart, and maybe my soul if I'm really on fire. But "God did it all!" removes: 1) God-given Free Will, 2) Any ability handed to them BY GOD.  And 3) I think it denies God an ability to create a rational creature that can both act for itself while also seriving God.



I believe it was Dorthy Lee Sayers who wrote the book "The Mind of the Maker."  As she pointed out, the people we write are so alive, they can almost make their own choices, can you imagine what it's like for God?



Now, I can see laying all the responsibility for the greatest of a book at God's feet by saying that He gave one talent and creativity and writing skills, and the friends and family who made the book possible, but saying that one just took dictation makes God look incapable of making a person who can take all of God's gifts and utilize them properly.



In short -- if you want to be a good Christian / religious person, do us a favor, and write your damn story. Save the preaching for later. Preferably, let the actions of the story do the message for you.  If you don't have a good story, you're screwed

Pius Origins: A Pius Legacy.

[Not many spoilers for A Pius Man. Really.  Oh, we did get a new review. It was good.]

Think of this as a continuation from my original Massive Origins Story.

The journey into A Pius Legacy starts with A Pius Man.  If
you remember (and Lord knows it’s long enough that even I forget) A Pius Man was initially an 800 page monster of a novel that shouldn't have been published by a first time author. It went on forever.  Why? Because a character got away from me—namely, the villain—and the bastard wouldn't be stopped even by death. I did everything but drop a house on this guy, and he just wouldn't go down.

So, I let it ride. I wanted to see where it would go.

The answer is straight to Hell.

When A Pius Legacy opens, APM isn’t quite over yet.  People who read the book will remember that it opened with the murder of an academic doing research on Pope Pius XII.  There was also another researcher who was attacked, by the same conspirators and for the same reasons. His name was Matthew Kovach.  Kovach and his fate are the introduction to A Pius Legacy. And there’s still a boatload of blowback involved.

Remember who the bad guys are from A Pius Man … no, not the gunmen,
the people who hired them, and ran them.  How do you deal with people who are,
essentially, governments?  You can’t assassinate them, especially not with the
Catholic church involved. And if you did… well, that would make my Catholic
thriller end like the Godfather, with massive assassinations scattered around in
a montage-like sequence of death.

As I am not writing The Godfather, I don’t think so.

So, how do you bring justice to people like this?

Well, step one: how about we talk to the United
Nations?

What if the people involved in the original conspiracy can buy off members of the
security council?  Oops, didn't think of that, did you?  Remember, around 2/3 of
the countries in the UN are not democracies. Remember when Sudan was on the
Human Rights Commission?  Syria was on the arms proliferation commission? These
are events that make you ask “For, or against?”

Oh, and here’s a problem: what happens when the bad guys
strike back? If you have the right members of the UN, what can you do against a
Church that has been loud, annoying, and inconvenient, speaking out against
human rights violations of … wait for it … 2/3 of the UN General assembly?

This means war. Literally.  After all, the Church is such a
small entity, comparatively, all you really need to do is deal with one man at
the top, and how hard can that be?

If you've read the last book, you know exactly how hard
that can be. We have a collection of international badasses that have already
trashed an airport to stop these guys. 

A Pius Man was about history. A Pius Legacy is about freedom. What does freedom look like? What does it entail? And what price is freedom? What will you risk for it? Your life? Your friends? Your family?

Legacy is also a fairly political book. If you remember, APM was less about church policies and more about where it had come from. I thought it was highly political, though my best reviews/comments were from Stuart West, who is a Democratic atheist, and Daria DiGiovanni, a conservative Catholic.  And I managed three stars from Catholicfiction.net -- that one's new, by the way. 

Can I hit the bulls-eye on the middle, or what?

Legacy is going to be a little different, though. I'll be putting the Catholic church on trial. Kind of literally. How does that happen? Long story. You'll have to buy it. 

However, my version of trial tactics I learned from Perry Mason. The best defense is an overwhelming, crushing offense that will humiliate and destroy the opposition, and I laugh in their faces, dance on their graves, and laugh like a lunatic as I do it....

Then I edit. A lot. I take out the straw men I've set on fire because it made me feel good, and I work a little harder at letting the other side get their say in. Then I strengthen the crushing offense that will humiliate and destroy the opposition.  Edit. Repeat as needed.

With Legacy, I may have done what I did with APM, and hit a political middle, but I don't know. Like I said, I thought A Pius Man was very political, but apparently not.

Thankfully -- sort of-- a lot of things I predicted happening in 2004, when I wrote the first draft, have already happened. Things that have happened with the UN, the World Court, with Occupy Wall Street... no, there wasn't an Occupy movement in 2004.  Funny that. I was ahead of the curve in so many weird, strange ways.

Why "sort of?" A Pius Legacy will end in fire, so I'm really starting to hate being right.  It was all right when I predicted a Jesuit Pope. That was fine. The rest is sort of terrifying.

How do these things come together? And how do you get a second book out of the middle of an 800-page novel? 

We'll discuss that tomorrow, when I tell you exactly how I wrote A Pius Legacy.

Music Blog: Lord of the Rings.

This was just fun. I think I've played this at least three dozen times since it came up.

Review: Night Machines

Night Machines by Kia Heavey



My rating: 5 of 5 stars





Oh, this was a fun little ride of weird.



Kia Heavey, the author

Kia Heavey, the author

This has three interesting character studies. Maggie is the bored housewife married to the "boring" cop, and her brand new boss is the nerdy kid from high school who grew up to be a billionaire with the looks of a guy on the cover of a romance novel. The new boss, Cambien, is a specialist in medication of dreams (which makes me wonder if his name is supposed to rhyme with Ambien).



It's also three stories of obsession. Maggie's husband is consumed by the case of a dead girl. Cambien has thought of Maggie since high school, and his thoughts start sweet and cute, and something darker starts to take shape. And then there's Maggie herself, who decides to have her "non-affair" with Cambien, and it starts to eat her up inside. I would tell you what it made me think of, but it turns out to be a spoiler.



I always thought the Rod Serling meets Robin Cook equaled F. Paul Wilson. Nope. This is chocked-full with more of the irony found in the Twilight Zone. Especially since it starts with Maggie dreaming, and dreaming about what her life could be or should have been ... and oh, boy, does it go the way of Nightmare on Elm Street. No, it's not terrifying, I'd even suggest it could be given to Young Adults, but beware the fact that there are sexual situations, but nothing graphic.



Along the way, Night Machines explores the concepts of family, of love versus lust, and what happens when you live too much in your head. Because there are some times things in the dark that will eat you.



By the start of "act three" of the book ... well, not to give too much away, but there was the scene with Maggie's priest, where I had fulled expected the line "What part of thou shalt not covet did you not understand?" I did not expect the sudden Catholic turn that the novel made, but it addressed every last point I had considered as I read through the book. That chapter alone made it more deeply philosophical and faithful than some books written by members of the Catholic Writer's Guild. And, as a member of said guild, I say that Madam Heavey needs to apply.



At the end of the day, it's a romance book that can even be read by people who hate romance novels.







View all my reviews

Review: Stealing Jenny

Remember once upon a time, when I mentioned that someone at the Catholic Writer's Guild came up to me, asked if I was lost, I introduced myself, and her eyes lit up and she said she was honored to meet me?

Ellen Gable wrote a book called Stealing Jenny, and mentioned that it would be free on Kindle early last week, and we could grab a copy and review it.



I shrugged, figured "If she likes my book, how bad could hers be," and decided to go for it. Lord knows enough people "Oooo"ed and "ahhh"ed over it while I was at the CWG conference. Might as well see what all the fuss was about.



So, where does one begin with Stealing Jenny?  [Below the break]







The setup is quick and painless, and the characters are established in short order.  Jenny Callahan has an interesting life.  She has five children, with one due in a week.  She and her husband have no money problems, only the issues that come with five children.  They're in a nice, loving relationship, where they're biggest problem is her mother-in-law.



Then Jenny gets kidnapped by a total psycho who wants her child for herself, and we're off to the races.



Stealing Jenny is actually not a bad thriller.  It's tightly written, nice and tense, complete with character studies, personal histories, and one of the better bad guys I've seen in a while.  There isn't a single car chase or fight scene, but the story doesn't suffer, even though it decidedly lacks the action usually stuff into the standard thriller.



I like this one for several reasons. One, it has a nice, well-developed family, with its own quirks, personality traits, and history.  We see a neat character arc in Jenny's relationship with her high school love, the development as the antagonist and how she got that way, and even the detective has her own distinctive voice.  The villain also has her own character arc of evil.



Now, one of the things you have to understand is that in my household, my father always had a soft spot for David Mahmet.  We would never keep one of his films, but we always appreciated them. And my father always loved House of Games because the con man in question -- played elegantly by Joe Mantegna -- was an unrepentant bastard right up to the end. It's not something we see much anymore.



One of the nice things about this book is the primary antagonist, Denise.  As noted, Denise has kidnapped Jenny for the sole purpose of stealing her unborn child. Unable to conceive, instead of adopting, Denise figures, quite simply, that Jenny has more than her fair share of children, and that Denise *deserves* the one Jenny is carrying.



Now, is Denise insane? Maybe.  Is she creepy as Hell? Yup. She is also stone cold evil. Nothing matters but herself. When kidnapping Jenny, she tied Jenny's toddler to a sign post with a dog collar and leash, and I was half expecting her to kill him if she heard him crying for a few more seconds. She's not overly violent, there are no schemes to take over the world, though diabolical is a mild way to describe this creature from the black lagoon. Total nut job? Maybe. Evil? Hell yes. I've seen vampires that were less of a blood-sucking monster than Denise.



And even though the author, Ellen Gable, is one of the key members of the Catholic Writers Guild, there is no touchy-feely ending at the end of the book. Is there a moral to the story? I guess you can read one into it -- most of the reviews online refer to it as a "pro-life" novel, but it doesn't necessarily have to be.  It's not preachy or pushy, or particularly loud in its beliefs. The family is Catholic, but they're not saints, and when faced with an implacable evil, they must all come together or fail miserably.  Is there forgiveness and redemption?  After a fashion.



At the end of the day, this was a solid thriller, up there with anything written by Jeffery Deaver or Lee Child.