Taking a stand, for the last time.

Last week, I said that A Pius Stand is coming.

It's finally going to be over.



If you've been with this blog since the beginning -- or if you've read "Pius Origins" link on the sidebar -- you know that this started out as a history paper gone amuck. It was a graduate paper in which I examined the truth behind Pope Pius XII and the Holocaust.



SPOILERS FOR A PIUS MAN, but, what I learned from my research was simple. Pius XII did more than any one person to save people in Europe during World War II.  More POWs. More Jews. More refugees. Because life was precious, and if they didn't like it, they could just come and get him.



But if you read any media around Pope Pius XII, you get Hitler's Pope. And Susan Zuccotti. And John Cornwell. And Gary Wills and Michael Phayer. The Wiki page on it has become more balanced, but still incomplete. You don't even want to know what it looked like when I started writing.  All of these great big names trying to spin a story I know to be false, and I spent a whole four months looking at primary documents as a grad student in America. They were journalists and historians. They should have known better.



I don't like liars.



The Pius Trilogy started out as a devotion. One that I tried to make readable for everyone. I wanted the opening to be dark and ominous to trap anti-Catholic to reading on, until they are so hip deep in the book that by the time that the revelation is given, the trap springs shut.



END SPOILERS.



The short version is, this was a devotion.  This was to sing the praises of God and His followers. This was a devotion to the truth, and a war on lies. At the same time, I was making it readable for other people. Heck, one of my friends on Facebook became a friend of mine BECAUSE of A Pius Man, and she's Jewish, I can't make it too much more open and readable than that.



The reason my cast was so big was simple -- I wanted to make it clear that the truth was not some subjective moving target. I needed a doubter, a neutral party, two red herrings, confirmation of the mystery ... well, you'll just have to read it to perform that matching column.



But my premise was that of philosopher Peter Kreeft -- this was an ecumenical jihad, a war against one very specific force of darkness, and one that the religions in A Pius Man could get behind. Because the liars I've been fighting since the beginning all have one thing in common.  What is that thing? Read A Pius Legacy.

But then I couldn't get the Catholic Writer's Guild Seal of Approval for APM. Why? Because the book was too violent, and some poor little dear was squeamish. I know this happened because I had officers of the Guild come up to me and suggested that there needed to be changes in the was the Seal of Approval was handled. Devotion to truth? Devotion to God? Who needs it? I've got a gun-toting Catholic! Run!


Then I had one or two of those officers write positive reviews. I'll take it.



The reason I kept going was that some things needed to be said. Some things needed to be put out there and thrown at people's heads until they either take notice or are bludgeoned to death.  Because the truth is not a game, or a weapon, except against lies. Truth is what happened, and maybe we can speculate about reasons, or about the why of things, and sometimes people will leave a diary detailing what and why they did. Then we hope the poor schmuck isn't a schizophrenic or a pathological liar.



And I kept going because I had to. Because writing is all I have. This trilogy has been my life for ten years. And now it's time for me to say goodbye.

The Videos of A Pius Man

Thus far, anyway.



I was wandering through the video section of the APM Facebook page, and I realized that I haven't done a video trailer for ... a while.

If you're relatively new, you've probably never seen any of the trailers.  Unless you're really diligent in spelunking through the FB page, then you've probably come across them.

This is where I've collected the ones done thus far.

This wasn't the first one, but it was a remodeled version of it. I cleaned up the typeface a little, and I think the visuals are spliced together better.

The images are obviously not done by me. Anyone who's found the Vatican Ninja images I've done will notice that.  They're from a lot of books that take one side of the Pope Pius XII argument, such as it is. And, just maybe, a Dan Brown novel.

I'm subtle like that.

And then, then there were the character trailers.

[More below the break]

Impossible Odds: From Masada to Talisman

"Whether it's the Trojan War, the Battle of Thermopylae, or the Last Stand at the Alamo, many of the famous battles in history were sieges in which small forces took on much larger armies. Unfortunately, sieges don't make good stories because the smaller force won. They make the history books because the little guys fought well, before they died." ~Michael Westen, Burn Notice. Last stand, Ep 4.18

I like thousand to one odds.  Love 'em.  Can't get enough of them. Make it an intelligent war, I'm with you all the way.

300 Spartans (with about 10,000+ other Greeks) versus one hundred thousand (or a million, depending who you ask) Persian Imperial forces?*  I'm there.

Nearly seven hundred Jewish rebels vs. a Roman legion at Masada?** I'm with you ...

The Alamo ... Okay, not so much, but I'm more familiar with the players involved, and I can't say that I liked any of them, on any side.

A hundred thousand Orcs of Mordor versus Gondor? That's at least worth an Academy Award....

In my own writing, I have a tendency to give the bad guys the upper hand as much as possible.  I try not to leave it as a matter of "evil badguy gains upper hand because he's using underhandd methods, while virtuous goodguy never sinks so low." Anyone who had read even one my self defense articles knows better.  When in doubt, bite a nose off, pull at an ear, gouge the eyes, and, of course, kick 'em in the groin, whenever possible.  My characters fight like their lives depend on it, usually because it does.

No, when I give the bad guys the upper hand, it's because they either have better training, better equipment, more people, or all of the above.

That's when I whip out The Anarchist's Cookbook, and go to work.  Because when my characters are out-manned  outgunned, outmaneuvered, and when things have stopped looking grim and have moved on to "we're all going to die" ....

That's when my characters get smart, get sneaky, and become very, very dangerous.

[More below the break]

Current events and Writing. The Problems of Hashim Abasi

Part of the problems with writing a political thriller is that geopolitical situations change all the times. Sometimes daily.  Some writers find their ways around it easily.


Vince Flynn, for example is the creator of Mitch Rapp, CIAssassin. He apparently decided to skip over the Obama administration by writing American Assassin-- I guess he didn't think that having a hit man on the payroll would be compatible with the 2008 election results.

American Assassin was essentially an origin story set soon after the Lockerbie bombing, and showing how his main character got into the business of killing America's enemies.

With the author Brad Thor, he found away around policy changes by taking his main character, Scot Harvath, out of the government altogether. Harvath, a Secret Service agent with a license to kill, had actually been alienated by the federal government well before 2008. Harvath went out to become a private security agent, occasionally pulling jobs for the Department of Defense.

However, the author has been interviewed by Glenn Beck repeatedly, so you can guess where his politics lie.  But, for his novels, the only politics that matter are "People who try to kill Americans wholesale need to be killed."

And then there's my case.  In A Pius Man, you might notice from time to time that there is the name of Hashim Abasi.  Hashim is in the story to bring in various international elements. He is a brilliant street cop, he has a political science degree from Oxford, and he specialized in international politics before being sucked back into his home life. He has a dark secret in his past, but aside from that, he serves as a neutral party in the world of Vatican politics and religious griping -- it's not his religion.

What could be the problem? What could possibly go wrong?

Hashim Abasi is an Egyptian cop.

Want to guess what happened to mess that up?

There was a little revolution in Egypt a while ago. You may have heard about it here and there.  The army had taken over, President Hosni Mubarak had resigned.  Like in Belfast, being an average cop does not seem like a very safe position.


Then it gets better.

While initial rumors had been dismissed, it seems that the Muslim Brotherhood will be assuming a leadership role within the emergent Egyptian government.  In fact, there seems to be a new Nazi party under construction.

Hmm, if this becomes a matter of the MB truly taking over, then Hashim Abasi, who is supposed to be reasonably sane, is going to be screwed.

However, thankfully, I have my father. Who has suggested making a simple readjustment. At one point, Hashim will say, "Whenever the Sunnis are in power, all of the crooks are 'Shi'a,' and when the Shi'a are in power, all of the crooks are 'Sunni'. That way, everyone is happy, and I can do my job."

Some solutions really are easier than others.

Catholic Conspiracies II: Revenge of the Vatican Ninjas.

Last week, I mentioned that the vast, massive conspiracy theories about the Catholic Church amuse me. I discussed some specific issues and theories, but I find them all funny, almost no matter the details. Why?

Dear God in Heaven, where do I start?



The theories are so ludicrous, I hardly know where to begin.



SECRET SOCIETIES



One running theme of most of the conspiracy theories is that there is a “conspiracy of silence” running around within the Vatican, the hierarchy, an order, pick one or all. This pops up in almost any fiction where a Catholic priest appears.



Given the news of the last decade, anyone should see an immediate problem. Not only does the Church of Rome write everything down, they never throw anything out. This is a bureaucracy that has held onto the divorce petition from Henry VIII of England, written in the early 16th century.  We've held onto it for nearly five hundred years, and we haven't thrown it out yet.



If there were a conspiracy in the church, there will likely be paperwork to document it, and they'd hold onto it with their dying breath. Bad habit for a conspiracy.



But, the way I look at it, the Vatican is essentially the world's biggest marble office building, complete with Dilberts and the occasional pointy-haired boss … or pointy-hatted boss.



In the current day and age, any bureaucracy can keep a secret for a few years. But two thousand? Really?



My major problem with that idea isn't so much a matter of my religious background (Catholic), my educational background (history and Philosophy), or anything of the sort. Bureaucracies tend to leak like a sieve. Even the army and law enforcement.



The FBI spawned Deepthroat—a loser who got passed over for promotion.



The Pentagon—Pentagon papers, anyone?



Most intelligence agencies have politicians in the mix somewhere, so that'll screw over practically anyone …



You can have whistle blowers in practically any organization...



The Catholic Church is also a bureaucracy. One disgruntled employee is all you need. End of secret.



Last week, I mentioned that one organization in the Church people like to pick on is the Society of Jesus, a.k.a., the Jesuits.



The Jesuits started as a missionary order, and tended to go out to new worlds, seek out new civilizations, boldly go where no man had gone before … and sometimes get eaten by the locals. Now a teaching order, they've spawned more stupidity than orthodoxy in the Church. If you look up Liberation Theology, Jesuits had a hand in spawning that steaming pile of theological gruel--a gruel that has been banned by every Pope since its inception.



The other order that conspiracy theorists like to shoot at is the Opus Dei … Where do I start? According to reporter John A. Allen, all you need to do to get the Opus Dei to open up is buy them a few rounds. Then the trouble becomes trying to shut them up.



And the biggest problem with using them in a conspiracy: Opus Dei is primarily a lay organization. Of it's nearly 90,000 members, only 2% are priests. I'm sorry, a Catholic organization of civilians are going to be privy to ancient secrets and conspiracies? There is a disconnect here.



THE MUSCLE



Also, I have another problem, one that has great big flashing red lights. All of these big secrets, threats to the Catholic Church, maybe even all of Christendom, are being eliminated. Lives are snuffed out, voices silenced.



Depending on who you ask, Catholics killed President Lincoln and JFK, and we're pulling the strings behind President Obama.



With the tinfoil helmet brigade, the Vatican is so scary, covers up so much, silences so many, controls so much of the planet even in THIS day and age.  Then we have to have muscle men.  We must have kneebreakers  This must mean that the Pope has his own personal assassination squad. People to kill at the nod of his pointy hat … wait.



Matt's Vatican Ninja rendering

Does this mean … that the Vatican has Ninjas?



Hmm, Vatican Ninjas … I wondered why all of those ancient Soviet leaders dropped dead after John Paul II was shot.

I can see it now. Dark, shadowy figures clad in the blue and gold colors of the Swiss Guard. Each of them either Swiss with Special Forces background, or former soldiers who join the priesthood. Once they join the shadowy ranks of the Papal hitmen, they are taught to kill up close with a rosary-garrote. When you turn your back, they smack you over the head with a halberd.  For longer distances, a boomerang shaped like a cross comes out of the darkness and takes down armed guards (It worked in the video game Castlevania).

 

And maybe, just maybe, they can have Throwing Stars of David for every time they worked with the Mossad.

Vatican Ninjas would be awesome!

I want my Vatican Ninjas!

Sigh … I guess I'll have to write my own.

How would I do it?  Simple: the Catholic Church has a screening process to weed out psychos, pederasts, etc.  That's why the majority of bad priests were ordained before the new screening process was installed (I say "new screening process", but it came out in the early 90s).  If I wanted to create actual Vatican Ninjas, I would forward all of the "psycho" pile to a special division, where they can weed out the "special" ones, ones that can be sent to training to Kill For the Lord!  Muahahahaha! 

Problem: who wants a psycho as a hirling?  Seriously?  While the priesthood MUST, statistically, get some nutjobs applying to their ranks, who'd want to bring in a crazy who's impossible to control?  I mean, that's as out there as having an assassin who is a psychotic albino monk with a bad limp ....



Oh, wait, nevermind.

The biggest problem: back to the pointy-hatted Dilbert boss, and the Vatican bureaucracy.  If there were Vatican Ninjas, there would be enough memoirs from them by now to fill a library.

End of the day, the vast conspiracies around and about the Vatican are laughable. In America, our Bishops don't have the charisma to lead a pack of vampires to a blood bank.  Trying to get people to actually teach the faith correctly seems to be impossible (my Catholic schools were nothing to write home about). We can hardly get Cardinals to line up in a row, or organize halfway decent public relations, yet the Vatican is supposed to be leading the charge to take over the world.

Right now, I would sooner believe in a "conspiracy" once jokingly suggested to me by R. Hendershot: that Dan Brown and Stephanie Meyer are in a plot to overhype their books to the entire universe.

However, if there is someone out there in charge of accounting for this vast, Roman Catholic conspiracy, I want a paycheck. Thank you.

 

And this is my rendering of a Vatican Ninja.

This is why I'm grateful to Matt.

And what am I going to be doing tonight?

Why, what I do every night …

TRY TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD!!!!!



On paper.

With my Vatican Ninjas.

Muahaha.

Catholic Conspiracies: The Illuminati Polka and the attack of the Vatican Ninjas.

 

I have decided to make this a comedy posting. Why?



Recently, I went looking for a book on one end of the crazy spectrum. The book had been (loosely) based on an episode during World War II, and it was supposed to “prove” that Pope Pius XII could not qualify as “Hitler's Pope.” Instead, this conspiracy theory had Pope Pius XII using the Jesuits to assassinate Adolf Hitler in World War II.



It was called Vatican Assassins.



On the one hand, it really covered an actual incident during the war: where German Generals who wanted to kill Hitler had expressed a desire to use Pius XII as an intermediary. The Generals thought that Pius XII could be a neutral party when talking to the British, laying the groundwork for a truce after they had assassinated Hitler. Obviously, the plan didn't work, since Hitler killed himself years later.

Vatican Ninja, by Matt

On the other hand ... Vatican Ninjas?  Are we serious?

Okay, Vatican Ninjas would be cool, but that's next week....

Or I can show a very well done photo by Matthew Funtime, for extra gratuitous coolness....

As for Vatican Assassins, I had originally stumbled across this work six years ago, when I first researched the entire matter of “Hitler's Pope” for a graduate paper. This was a few months before I even started writing A Pius Man. Perhaps an entire year before the book.

Recently, I wanted a laugh, and I wanted to see if anything had happened with this particular nutjob and his Vatican Ninjas.



So, I put Vatican Assassins into an Amazon search, and then Google …



Oh my dear God, the results I got…



Eric Jon Phelps: Vatican Assassins: Wounded in the House of my Friends. This, um, interesting work exposes THE TRUTH, about how the Jesuits killed President Lincoln on the orders of the Pope. They also assassinated John F. Kennedy. (paging Oliver Stone, someone is stealing your plot).  It includes a "History Of The Jesuit Order" … I don't even know where to start on this one.



Vaticanassassins.org: which discusses “Obama's White Papal Masters.” Apparently Rome has taken over the White House; I didn't know that we supported the repeal of Don't Ask Don't Tell.



Thewatcherfiles.com: “Vatican Assassins Ordered Attack on WTC World Trade Towers.” Again, the head of the Jesuits is to blame here. The dark, mysterious figure of “The Black Pope,” who everyone knows about (the colors of the Jesuits are black … and black … he lives in Rome, hence “Black Pope”). Proclaimed as welcoming “the New World Order,” a catchphrase of nutjobs for, at a guess, longer than I've been alive.



Also in books, I got: The Entity: Five Centuries of Secret Vatican Espionage.  The "Entity" is supposed to be the Vatican spy service.  The description?

"The Entity has been involved in the killings of monarchs, poisonings of diplomats, financing of South American dictators, protection of war criminals, laundering of Mafia money, manipulation of financial markets, provocation of bank failures, and financing of arms sales to combatants even as their wars were condemned, all in the name of God. The contradiction between God’s justice and Earth’s justice, Christian beliefs and Christian power all fall before the motto of the Entity: With the Cross and the Sword."

Nod very slowly, and back away.  Someone here is a little crazy.

Another book: The Vatican Exposed: Money, Murder, and the Mafia.  Obviously, written by someone who saw Godfather III



WTF?



And, a classic: a 1983 “Secret History of the Jesuits.”   In this book, we are apparently not only responsible for one, but two, count 'em, two world wars.

I'm going to give you one guess, and only one guess: what is the ONLY offensive thing I have found in all of these crackpot conspiracy theories, strange, delusional fantasies, and utter comedy routine?  If you have guessed that it is the image on the right, you guessed correctly

So, at the end of the day, instead of finding a ludicrous conspiracy theory based (very) loosely on an actual event (and that hit every branch of the crazy tree on the way down), I found a whole bunch of borderline schizophrenic theories, brought to you by the tinfoil hat brigade.

Now, it might be me.  It might be I'm strange.  For the most part, I find these people funny. Then again, the theories are so ludicrous, I hardly know where to begin.



At random, shall we start with the Jesuits assassinating President Lincoln? I don't know why the Catholic Church would want to kill him, but before even reading the book or the rest of the book's description, I'm already laughing. Why? Because President Lincoln requested that the Vatican create American Cardinals, moving the United States out of missionary status. Lincoln wanted the Catholic Church in town as an actual establishment. Considering that this was within the decade before Thomas Nast's anti-Catholic propaganda were popular, I can only think this is the closest a non-Catholic like Lincoln could get to being supportive of Rome.



Or, we could look at President Barack H. Obama's "White Papal Masters"..... how anyone can say it with a straight face is beyond me.  As a Democrat, last time I checked, Obama supports abortion in America. He supported the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Funny, I didn't know that Rome supported either of the above.



So, let me get this straight: the Vatican kills people who support us (Lincoln) and controls people with principles that are the opposite of what it publicly postulates …



And, of course, the Vatican started World War II .... a war that tore apart and butchered six million Polish citizens, half of whom were Catholic.  Because, after all, it's an institution that's been around for soooooo long, it can afford to lose three million people like that.



I'd continue, but I'm too busy laughing.  The authors of these various works might have had less than savory motives, or they might even believe this drivel.  If they believe it, they have my condolences, and my suggestion that they see a good shrink. These are almost as stupid as Godfather III, where the theory was that Pope John Paul I, who died within a month of being elected Pontiff, had been assassinated by the people involved in ripping off the Vatican Bank. (Let's completely ignore that Albino Luciani, before becoming John Paul I, had a crappy medical history; if anyone knew what sort of shape he had been in, he would never have been elected. But you can't talk some people out of a good conspiracy.)



And you thought people had a lot of conspiracy theories about the Illuminati.



This is so bad it's laughable. Not to mention that the Jesuits, the root of all of the conspiracy theories, have basically been running amok with “Liberation Theology”-- a concept that had been condemned by the Pope. So, the Jesuits, “the spooooooooky Vatican assassins,” have been at odds with the Popes for at least thirty years. Maybe forty.  And, somehow, the Popes of that time period were not, and have not, been assassinated. Hmm, funny that.



As my friend Jason noted, when I first told him of this blog idea, “[T]he only [C]atholic conspiracy I can buy is that 'Yes, we want Notre Dame to win in the NCAA'. But that goes without saying.”



UPDATE: Part 2: Revenge of the Vatican Ninjas.

Writing A Pius Man, part 4: Selling yourself.

A Pius Man was done. The time had come. Sell the book to... anyone, really.



For those of you who have never researched how a book goes from the pen of the author to the hands of the reader, a quick sketch of the process.



Agents represent the author. 

Their mission: sell your book to a publisher for the highest possible value. Agents make between 10%-15% of the money the author gets. Which isn't bad work if you're the agent for Stephen King. Having 10% of however many millions of books sold adds up to real money. However, 10% of a ten thousand dollar advance isn't much, and ten thousand isn't a common opening bid for an advance on a book.



Advances are made by the publisher, and tend to be broken up into three parts: signing with the publisher, the arrival of the first draft; prompt delivery of the final draft. The publisher is the one that buys the book from you. That's where the money comes from, that's how the book is distributed.



Editors work for the publisher, and goes over the manuscript with a fine tooth comb. They are generally the people who are the feelers for the book. The agents have to cultivate contacts, pitch the book to editors, convincing them to at least look at it.



Simple, right? The author pitches to an agent. The agent pitches the book to an editor in a publishing company. The editor pitches the book to the company s/he works for. The publisher sells the book to you, the audience. The agent doesn't make money until the author does. The publisher doesn't make money until the books fly off the shelves.



But wait, there's more.







Agents act as a filtering mechanism for editors. If an author comes with his own agent, he has passed the first line of defense. There has to be something marketable about the book, otherwise, a good agent wouldn't be bothered with it. An agent would certainly not touch a first time author's book with a ten foot pole unless it was pretty darn good. Consider it this way—the agent only gets approximately 10% of what the author does, and an unknown author (barring a celebrity) has no selling value by themselves. The book had better be good.



And the editors need the filter. Editors have agents pitching manuscripts at them constantly. There are some stories about editors having a seven course meal for lunch, and with each new course came a new agent, and each agent has multiple books to pitch.



And then, editors have to sort through all of the suggested manuscripts pitched in order to select those that would actually be read. Then an editor has to read all of them. Usually, these are samples of fifty pages and a synopsis, but that's still a lot when you consider their already busy life.



And these editors, after sorting through what projects they think will sell, then have to pitch it up the chain of command.



Welcome to publishing. For any first time author, there are two levels of filtering between you and the top of the food chain.



In my case, after two and a half years of discovering that academic politics and I were not compatible, I started to query agent, publishers, editors, and everyone short of personal secretaries. I would be published by hook or by crook. After three months of querying, I had hooked one.



Enter “Josh.” My first agent. He liked the birth name of the Pope—Joshua Kutjok—and liked the premise. However, the ending to “book one” was a little flat. In the original novel, I wrapped up the henchmen, and let the main villain get away without a confrontation at the end. The only change I made was a one page epilogue after wrapping up the support network.



Josh had a good idea. I had gotten lazy after marking down where the books would separate. I had slapped on something that barely even looked like an end—and did everything but have a “To Be Continued” in great big letters at the end.



So, time to play around.



It was surprisingly easy to rewrite. In a matter of days, I had it all worked out, and succeeded in blowing up parts of Leonardo Da Vinci airport.



Fast forward a year. Stuff happens. Josh is too busy to represent me. No harm, no duck. Time to find another agent. And back to the drawing board on A Pius Man. When in doubt, edit further.



I came to the conclusion that I still had too many people. In the first book, I had Giovanni Figlia, the Secret Service Agent, the Egyptian cop, the Interpol Agent, the crazy mercenary, the sinister priest, the Pope, and two spies. Nine characters already—I already had the opening cast of the Lord of the Rings, and book two had even more to come. Granted, some of them would be dead in short order, but still, character clutter—but I still needed to take out people IN ADDITION to those I had already shot, stabbed, and blown up.



After looking through book two (tentatively titled A Pius Legacy), I looked for the person who had the fewest amount of lines. Who could disappear from the book with no problem at all? I found one character who had been mentioned a whopping half a dozen times. Suddenly, upon a review of A Pius Man, this character had a shiny new target on their back.



Rewriting done, it was time to hit the queries again. I went to www.everyonewhoisanyone.com and... I stopped just short of spamming. When there was a fully detailed website for the agents listed, I looked them over, tailored my query letter to their specific tastes, and sent it off. I literally sent out over a hundred query letters in a dense cluster. If there was contact information without any details or specifics, that agent got a standard boilerplate query—the type no one would recommend sending. But I was going to get their attention.



The week before my birthday, 2009, I get a call. An agent wanted my book. He didn't even send me an email, he just called my house directly. We talked for an hour about my book, marketing, tactics of selling it; he understood what I wanted to do with it, and the two sequels, and liked it all.



Within eight months of Josh's busy schedule messing around with my life, I was signed with another agent.



And the then entire publishing industry was slapped with Mjolnir.



Some people—many of them on the New York Times board of editors—blames the publishing industry itself. They never adapted to new technologies. Kindle sideswiped them and they didn't keep up. Random House “expanded like crazy, despite the rising prices of books—both paperbacks and hardcovers,” and supposedly axed ten thousand people in one month of 2008. According to authors at Dragoncon last year, the Star Trek novels have gone through three editors in one year, and the entire department has been downsized; the Star Trek novels contract renewal date is coming up, and as of September, renewal hasn't even been discussed yet.



And, guess what, fiction has been hit especially hard.



Oh, lucky me.

How A Pius Man came to be: Part 3. Writing

Part three: The Creative process—AKA: Writing the darn thing.

During a winter break, I had gone through great pains to finish my thesis. It had been more or less a cultural analysis of Irish Rebel songs, which, like my books, had a lot of property damage, and fighting, with merry and bouncy tunes and boy, were these people having way too much fun.







That made up three credits of a semester where I had only two other classes, and no social life. The paper was mostly finished before the semester had even begun. I was even more finished when I pounded out two term papers before the first month was out.



What part of “no social life” do you not understand?



I started writing A Pius Man in February, 2004. I was finished with it by April. There were a lot of nights where I was up until three in the morning. The story wouldn't get out of my head or leave me alone. For the first time in my life, instead of making it up when I went along, I did an outline. I drew sketches and diagrams.



The sad part is, I kept footnoting the darned thing.



And it all came naturally to me. Two spies would follow the lead of a dead terrorist looking in the Vatican archives, and discover yet another dead researcher from the archives—a crime investigated by Giovanni Figlia. They would have to find Giovanni Figlia and his entourage from the Secret Service and the Egyptian police. And with modern technology, it was easy for the spies to know what the primary investigators were doing. “Sinister looking priest #1” would have to keep up as well, to make certain that nothing inconvenient would be discovered. The Interpol cop from Ireland would have to fly in and confirm that all this was, yes, linked together to Pope Pius XII.



And, thanks to maps on the internet, I can make the bus terminal arriving from the airport be one point on a straight line from the Vatican to the Spanish steps.



Should any of my other books see the light of day, you'll note that I have a pattern of property damage at public places. A gunfight in a science fiction convention; a battle at the Cloisters; a shootout at a Fireworks factory in Long Island; the Muir woods in San Francisco; a hostage situation at a Barnes and Noble bookstore; a chase with MacGyver moments in CostCo. Been there, done that, blown it up.



And for some reason, I couldn't get one image out of my head—an armored SUV going down the Spanish steps.



After that, the characters had to connect the dots, do the research, find a personal connection to the situation, and most of all—what is worth killing over for a secret over sixty years old? No offense to anyone on any side of the “debate,” but if someone proved that Pope Pius XII was a Nazi, or that he was a hero, who would kill for that?



End result: the book was eight hundred pages long. Two hundred thousand words, when the average novel was only one hundred thousand. And I had brought in EVERY, SINGLE, CHARACTER I had ever written, over a dozen books, excluding the science fiction ones. Because what had started with a simple and straightforward murder turned into an all out war, and I needed every person I could conceive of to support what protagonists I had standing. A very small army of light against a large army of darkness, and I didn't even have Sam Raimi.



From 2004-2007, there were several variations on the story. The first had an additional character. One had a character introduced from the very beginning who was used to bring in most of the history; he didn't disappear, but he was shifted. One version took out about 50% of the story and made it around five hundred pages.



Then there was the easy version. Split it up into three books. One character gets deleted, one gets transferred into book two, several sequences get shifted so that the character moments aren't all in one place or another, and ta da, instant trilogy.



Two major plot points in the story became a matter of what intelligence agencies call “blowback.” When someone fires a gun, gunpowder residue gets on the shooter's clothing, even though the gun is pointed away from the shooter.



In the world of intelligence, blowback means that an operation has come back to bite you on the ass: either an assassination went wrong and the target wants to return the favor; some dictator dislikes you blowing up his favorite weapons research facility and would like to bury you, that sort of thing.



If I used the blowback as the basis for completely different books, then dang, book one is only over a hundred thousand words. Excellent. Fill in details and character in books two and three, not to mention “previously, in A Pius Man” moments that I can use to pad the book.... or keep the audience up to speed. Either way....



And then, after all this was done, it was time for the hardest part of all. I had to sell it.



After all, it was only one book, being marketed to a publishing industry that was swamped with hundreds of manuscripts per day, manned by people who had to slog through this slush of paper.



How hard could it be?




Don't ask.

How A Pius Man Came to be: Part 2

Part 2: Now what?

So, you're going to right a history novel that's both thrilling and accurate, without resorting to something over the top fantastical in the meantime?



The answer there is: that's nice, wake me when you're done.



Oh, darn, wait—I want to write it!



Now what?



Before I begin the process of this book's creation, I should make something clear. I've wanted to write for a living since I was sixteen. By the time I had started A Pius Man, I had written almost a dozen other novels; a science fiction quartet that started as fan fiction and turned into a space opera; a thriller trilogy about a Secret Service Agent and the CIA assassin who kept running into each other; a murder mystery set in a Catholic high school summer camp; another mystery set at a science fiction convention; a hostage novel; I won't discuss the short stories. None of them had been published, but I had other things to do—high school, two bachelor's in three years, a master's in one, I was generally busy.



My point: writing wasn't an issue. I had more or less taught myself keyboarding by the time I had gotten the concept of the book, and had developed a mental habit of innovation out of the weirdest little things, as well as the ability to write for thirty hours straight.



But now, a new project. Working on a thriller encapsulating everything I had learned about Pope Pius XII. So, when in doubt, the title had to be a bad pun. Title: A Pius Man.



Then the questions started.



Well, where do I set the novel? Another world hopping journey, digging in the muck and mire, or perhaps solving puzzles laid out from World War II?



Been there, done that, and we've probably all seen that movie. If only for Ian McKellen's acting.



So, if I'm not going to bounce around the planet, where am I going to put this?



A few years prior, I had wanted to make a murder mystery set in the Vatican. I had never gotten past page one, but I wanted to have the scene open with a dead priest and a knife in his back.



So, when dealing with the Roman Catholic church, go to Rome. Check.



We need a conspiracy—what fiction with the Catholic church in it doesn't have some kind of deep dark conspiracy around it? Not counting The Exorcist.... few. Who's behind it? Well, the standard options are the government, the Church, or intelligence agencies.... I came up with a fun combination of all three.



Next step: who was I going to use in this mischegas of a plot? I didn't want an automatic hero. I didn't want a protagonist to leap out of a telephone booth or a police box. It wasn't happening. I needed vague characters. Someone whose loyalty the audience would question along the way. It wasn't going to be a paranoid thriller, but there are segments where it would be close.



One character was someone I had already invented—Commander Giovanni Figlia of the Vatican Office of Vigilance. His job is to protect the Pope. But if the Pope is guilty of a crime, or of conspiracy to commit murder, then what can he do? And just how do you arrest a pontiff anyway? He was already in Rome, a bit player I had invented for the background of a few other novels. It was time to give him a personality. A back story. Anything at all, really.



That's one...but what could possibly get him involved in a conspiracy going back decades?



Oh, that's easy. Kill an academic. Someone going through the Vatican archives. The “secret” archives, even though that's a bad translation error. Kill someone looking into Pope Pius XII.



Now, are we going to kill this guy in the Vatican? Really? Because I can't imagine how else we're going to involve Figlia...



Oooooh, wait, a bomb can fling a body a good distance, right? I can work with that.



Next, we need a fish out of water. Someone for whom the audience can relate to when she goes “Huh?” Especially when the audience is trying to figure out what sort of rabbit hole they fell into. My Alice had to be as out of place in the world of European Catholicism as possible... and who would be more out of place than an American Jew? Yes, my Alice is a Wilhelmina “Villie” Goldberg. Immediately, I had a vision of a short Italian acquaintance come to mind. She'd do for a physical model—about 4'11”. She'd have to be part of a security service, and making her American would make her a Secret Service agent.



Though if I stuck with that physical model, she would be a little short for a Secret Service agent who played human shield. However, foreign governments talk to the Secret Service about improving security, and all you need is a brain for that. So, when in doubt, get her from the NSA—which provided technical support for the protagonists.



How are we going to get her involved? Have her be there when we drop a body on Figlia... or his general area, at least. Check.





Somehow, having all this going on without another interested party being involved seemed unlikely. Someone from Mossad—if the Israelis wouldn't be interested in this subject, who would? Mossad involvement was easy to arrange—I created a character in one of my notebooks, someone who had arrived in Israel as part of a small emigration from the United States. A Gentile in Mossad... we have to call this section the Goyim brigade.



And what would attract anyone in Mossad to Rome? That's easy enough—there had been an earlier victim who had been researching the archives, and he was connected to terrorism. A dead terrorist with no confirmed killer—looks a bit suspicious. And a second dead body connected to Pius XII, seriously suspicious.



Mossad gets most of its intelligence from Germany, and the Germans would be involved anyway, given the subject matter—they are sort of touchy about the 1930s and 40s. So, throw in someone from German Intelligence. Two spies, check.



A neutral party would be good. Some character who has NO horse in this particular race; who has no investment in Pius XII being guilty, innocent, or not guilty by reason of insanity. Jews are out, Christians are out.... and if the Pope was going to declare a propaganda war on the Middle East (see below), he would probably tour it. Which means there would be a security specialist to coordinate with the Swiss Guards. He'd be connected to Figlia, for the coordination, and Goldberg, because she'd be improving security. But it would be too easy to have him be visibly neutral and good. We're suspecting everyone else, why not him? Hmm... oh, yeah, it seems that he stoned his wife to death. That'll work.



Check one investigative team: Papal Security, the Secret Service, and someone from, oh, make it Egypt.



And there's a wild card that has to be tossed in. Just to make everyone wonder what the hell goes on at the Vatican.... well, the man who shot Pope John Paul II was first jumped by a nun. Given how many clergy are in Vatican City, it would be more likely for one of them to first get to an assailant than some of the Swiss Guard. And if that should ever happen again, I would sure as hell want to bring in a security expert to train them....



Enter security specialist Sean A.P. Ryan. Already, he's earned comparisons to the comic book character Deadpool, the mercenary who will, occasionally, do the right thing, if only as a last resort. Not to mention being bat guano crazy. Wild card, check.



And what good is a mystery without a murdered witness? After all, they have Vatican trials for saints. Witnesses appear. One of the better known priests that I knew of was an Irish priest named Fr. Caroll-Abbing; he arranged much of the aide in Rome for fugitives and refugees. Caroll-Abbing was a real figure, but also quite dead when I started writing. However, I'm sure he must have had an aide. Caroll-Abbing was an Irish priest, assume an Irish aide.... and I had another character all ready and sketched out: Interpol Agent Maureen McGrail. And I had given her a previous professional dislike of Sean Ryan. We get to have some more fun that way.



And her arrival will certainly confirm that the events were all about Pope Pius XII—a dead academic may be accident, a murdered terrorist coincidence, but a murdered witness is enemy action.



I had my primary lineup. Two spies; a proper team of Papal Security et al; and two people from out of town. A three-tiered story. Works for me. In several books, Tom Clancy did at least three storylines for a hundred pages before he brought them together in a train wreck. I won't dawdle quite that long.



No, time to insert some paranoia. In any good thriller, you need to be under the impression that you can get it in the neck at any time from any direction. Kind of like a fast season of 24. We're in a thriller with the Catholic church, we must have at least one sinister looking priest, and a highly suspicious looking pope, someone so invested in the reputation of Pius XII, he'd do practically anything to see it's protected.



Hence Pope Pius XIII, who wants to make the World War II pontiff a saint, make him a figure to rally around....for...? Hmm. Rally around for what?



Enter another graduate course I took—problems in Contemporary African history. I had done a paper on the war in the Sudan, a war going on and off since the early 1980s. This Pope would have grown up with his country ignored, left to be bombed to hell, and—Darfur? Really? Thirty years of bloody warfare, civilians killed, churches bombed, and the world media focuses on one town? I suspect he would be a little put out by that, especially if he had lived in a town no one never heard of before or after it was wiped from the map.



How could I possibly make the Pope look sinister? I know—make him somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun. He's using Pope Pius XII as a banner, using one side of the “debate” (mentioned in Part 1 of this article), Pius XII as hero and saint.



But, while making the Pope as sinister figure is nice—he's not going to run around Rome in a white robe trying to be inconspicuous. Especially since he's over two meters tall, and doesn't exactly blend in around Italy. (One acquaintance of mine returned from Rome and said “There are black people in Italy. Oh. My. God.” She was so shocked and appalled... she also wonders why I don't talk to her anymore.) He needs something every good Evil Overlord requires—a lackey. We need another priest.



Already have one. In a previous novel I drafted, I created a priest wandering around in the background—a priest with combat training from his time in special forces. He has martial training, kicks ass, and he has silver hair, and pale skin—no one would ever take him for an albino. Of course not. Suspicious looking lackey, check.



A three-layered plot with a wandering priest tying them all together.



Works for me.



Conspiracy, check.



Characters, check.



Now it has to be written.... Oh, shoot me now...