OK, here’s my type-casting for a re-make of Lord of the Rings, along with some short notes. Just not sure if the director should be Steven Spielberg or Tim Burton!

Heck, we need to have a little fun with it!

The “Good Guys”:

Aragorn (Joe Biden)
After wandering through the wilderness for decades, he suddenly decides it’s time to be king. But do rangers really wear aviator shades?

Gandalf (Barack Obama)
“Wadda ya mean I die and come back as Gandalf the WHITE? What kind of racist bull is THAT?!?” Still, he’s the go-to guy when you need fireballs!

Gimli (Bernie Sanders)
Chronically angry, constantly fighting, he sports a unique sense of humor appreciated only by others of his kind. Maybe he should have followed Lincoln’s lead and grown a beard.

Legolas (Kamala Harris)
Coming from the Fair Realm renowned for its tree huggers, she’s going to be spewing arrows in all directions.

Boromir (Hillary Clinton)
Heir-apparent for many years, she’s tired of waiting and tries to grab the Ring for herself! And finds she can’t even beat a hobbit!

Frodo (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)
She’s small, she’s unpretentious, and she’s packing one helluva wallop! But will she do what she promised, or will the attraction of the Ring prove too much for her?

Sam (Ayanna Soyini Pressley)
Merry (Ilhan Omar)
Pippin (Rashida Harbi Tlaib)
A squad in support of the Ring-Bearer, they often look pretty silly outside the Shire. But the time may be approaching for the Halflings to stand forth!

The Elves:

Galadriel (Nancy Pelosi)
Reviled and feared Lady of the Dark Wood, she’s really, really old and doesn’t get out much. Her magics spread far and wide and sometimes supply a light when other lights go out.

Celeborn (Chuck Schumer)
Hey, he’s Lady Gs’ consort. Doesn’t seem to do much other than back her up.

Arwyn (Jill Biden)
Talks a good game but mainly smiles a lot from the sidelines.

Elrond (Chief Justice John Roberts)
Lord of a strange and secretive realm, nobody is too sure what he’s going to do next. He just might decide what happens to the One Ring!

Other Players:

Eowyn (Michelle Obama)
Shield-maiden of Rohan, she has spent her life quietly in the shadows of others. But boy, does she deliver when the chips are pushed all-in!

Eomer (Colin Powell)
Banished from the Golden Hall, he goes into exile, but when he returns, there are some wild bugles blowing!

Bilbo (Jimmy Carter)
Everybody’s favorite, but he just sort of sleeps through this one.

Theoden (John McCain)
A good king who fell into the evil snares of the forces of darkness. He makes one heck of a comeback and the good guys never tire of singing his praises even after he’s gone!

Denethor (Lindsey Graham)
Steward of Gondor, keeping the throne warm, but for who? Seems like he was peering into his crystal ball and got it all wrong!

Saruman (Mitt Romney)
Thought he was safe and secure in his western tower, and all he basically did was tick off both sides!

Gollum (Donald Trump Jr.)
Sniveling and sneaky, he wants the Ring all for himself. Except he’s not sure why and not sure what he’ll do with it if he gets it.

The “Bad Guys”:

Sauron (Donald Trump)
After completing his renovations in Mordor, he’s looking to snap up some underdeveloped properties across the river. Barad-Dur located in midtown Manhattan!

Nazgul Lord (Mike Pompeo)
This guy is Mordor’s top diplomat?

Nazgul #1 (Mike Pence)
Dreams of taking over from the Big Guy and can’t even eclipse Pompeo!

Nazgul #2 (Elisabeth DeVos)
Nazgul #3 (Sonny Purdue)
Nazgul #4 (Wilbur Ross)
Nazgul #5 (Steven Mnuchin)
Nazgul #6 (Jared Kushner)
Nazgul #7 (Ivanka Trump)
Nazgul #8 (John Ratcliffe)
They’re flying around in chaotic fashion, stirring up trouble, and really pissing off the good guys. They took the rings from Sauron, and if the Big Guy goes down, they all flame out.

Mouth of Sauron (Sean Spicer; Sarah Sanders; Stephanie Grisham; or Kayleigh McEnany)
Pointless position, given the Dark Lord’s preference to “tweet” everything (High turn-over is a sign of shooting messengers. But at least Kayleigh is prettier than Sean!)

Monstrosities:

Shelob (Mitch McConnel)
Spinning webs on the edge of Mordor, doesn’t really care who is in the Dark Tower as long as the food supply is unbroken.

Balrog (William Barr)
After long years of sleep, it bursts forth in a mindless pursuit of the good guys. Guess we should re-name it the Barrog.

Smaug (Vladimir Putin)
A monster more myth than menace, he makes more trouble with his whispers than with his weapons. Is there really a link between Sauron and Smaug?

Tom Bombadil (Bill Clinton)
A power to be reckoned with from a forgotten time, he just seems a little silly now. Heck, he didn’t even make the Director’s Cut.

If you are like most writers, you love the sound of your own voice.  Or more accurately, you love the Times New Roman 12-pitch dancing across your computer screen as you fill page after page with powerful and engrossing prose.  You love every chapter and every setting, every character and every description, because it’s doing no more than itemizing the dynamic stories even now playing out in your own mind and in your own heart.  Words create images, and since those images are already in your own head, you figure you nailed it!  I got the words right!

Suddenly, you’re thinking:  Wow!  I’m a friggin’ genius!  And consciously or not, you start comparing yourself with the greats in your genre.  Howard, White, Le Guin, but particularly with that titan of Middle-Earth, that true Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien.

I mean, come on.  Was The Rings Trilogy really all that great?  A bunch of chubby little halflings scurrying through the underbrush hiding from anything that carries a mace, a sword, or a pair of hedge trimmers?  THESE are your heroes?  By contrast, I have a couple of 16 year olds, one who becomes a pseudo-wizard, the other the darling of angels who can face down demons!

Gandalf?  I’ve got a legendary wizard, too, and he doesn’t just light up a few pine cones to toss at wolves!  Ranger, Elf, Dwarf?  Try a nearly invincible Paladin and a cunning half-elf thief, both wielding intelligent swords that hate each other!  And instead of a dragon with a name synonymous with air pollution, I have Mraxdavar the Great, the Platinum One, Lord of the Great Wyrms!  Oh, yeah!  That tweed-sporting Brit’s got nothing on me!

Then reality pays a call.  You start re-reading your stuff with a critical eye, and you suddenly realize that series of chapters you thought were all solid “10s” are a roller-coaster of “7s” and “8s” with the occasion “9” slipping in.  Descriptions are barely adequate, character motivations are unclear, and the careful groundwork you laid for the conflict between Paladin and Church just ain’t cuttin’ it.

You pull your battered copy of The Fellowship off the shelf, and you find yourself falling in love again.  Concerning Hobbits.  The flight from the Shire.  Snowstorms on the mountain and drums in the deep.  You are there, with Frodo, with Aragorn, flying from Nazgul and mourning for the fallen Gandalf.  You read the old elvish, you can smell the puffs of pipeweed, and you can share the slowly growing bonds of friendship between hobbits, between men, between elf and dwarf.  And this was all done in longhand, without any electronic 12-pitch to cut, paste, and spell check.

That’s when it slowly dawns.

Maybe I’m not such a friggin’ genius after all.

Yeah.  The fall from such lofty heights can be stunning, shaking one of your central tenets even if it was made up largely of smoke, mirrors, and wishful thinking.  But you never fall too far or too hard.  Because you did have a bunch of “7s” and “8s” with the occasion “9”.  Because you have been growing with each book, each chapter, each one of those endless convoluted lines.  And you wonder if maybe, just maybe, at some point in his career, old JRR had had a similar tumble, a similar rude awakening, a similar questioning and doubt.  Tom Bombadil, bear witness!  Maybe some people are great from the first moment their pen touches paper, and maybe there are people who can tell a gripping story in any media, in any genre.  But I’m willing to bet there are a lot more who built themselves, coming back from every failure, rising up from every blow, learning from the mistakes to make a better story next time, and a better one after that.  Until they stand on the same pedestals as the great ones.

So don’t cut yourself down too far and don’t build Tolkien up too high, because even with his masterpieces, be assured he filled his share of wastebaskets.

After all, did you ever try reading The Silmarillion?

 

Everybody loves a juggler.

Depending, of course, on what they are juggling.

Balls, batons, and bottles full of champagne get cursory smiles that soon fade.

Flaming torches, running chainsaws, and live cats get wide eyes and the occasional gasp.

But what about writers?  Where are the appreciative grins and the occasional cheer for the adventurous scribbler who keeps a range of projects moving at once, everything from novels and blogs to short stories and non-fiction pieces?  Talk about agility!  That’s the equivalent of a physical juggler keeping a lighted torch, a running chainsaw, and a live cat up in the air all at once.  Then throw him a cinder block.

That’s how I’ve been feeling as I work on blogs, blurbs, books and business articles, media as far apart as classical music is from rap.  The cinder block, in this case, are my two major projects:  Piracy and love stories on a secluded island off the Virginia coast set in the modern day and a sword-and-sorcery tale with dragons and wizards and diabolical creatures set in a mystical land known only as This World of Stone (Middle-Earth was already taken).  Eminem played by a string quartet.

True, basic rules still apply in both genres.  Establish a link between reader and character, develop the conflicts, raise the intensity levels, drive to the climax.  What are the emotions I’m hoping to entice in this chapter?  What senses are to be teased in this scene?  Where is the plot twist to draw a wide-eyed “Oh, Crap!” out of the engrossed reader?  You can have smart-asses in both worlds, even if one is speaking with a snarky Brooklyn twang and the other a variant of the thieves’ cant with a mountain dwarf accent.  Sarcasm is not limited by language.

The great advantage to juggling competing pieces is it tends to keep both works fresh.  It means you’re getting a break from the narrative, from the repetitive sentence structure that so often devolves from telling a story to just filling a page with verbs, nouns, and adjectives.  Quantity rather than pulse rate as the criteria for success.   It means coming back with a new perspective, perhaps even recognizing that the successful method in one story works just as well in the other.  The heroine on the beach catches a whiff of charred meat – what is the heroine in the abandoned castle smelling?  The hero finds his eyes drawn to the lines of the bikini worn by the female protagonist – the warrior is having trouble keeping his eyes off the plunging neck line of the young woman already berating him for his lack of civility. Hey, and don’t forget the basics like the need to answer the call of nature in either world.  A perfect contrivance to buy a character a little “alone time” at a critical juncture whether he’s addressing porcelain or an isolated tree.

Oh, sure, there are the occasional hazards.  Like inadvertently mixing devices. You can generally avoid accidentally letting a dragon walk along the Virginia beach or having a wayward volleyball smack into a casting wizard.  But what about people in both worlds with an affection for kittens?  Or afflicted by hay fever?  Or a knight and valley girl both “pausing to look at the clear blue sky with its rare puffs of white” (boy, is THAT embarrassing!)?  More, there is always the danger of corrupting your “voice”, that delicate balance of description and word choice that drives the narrative, the true storyteller. That can be as jarring as substituting a different actor for the same role in the middle of the play; they look a lot alike, but…

So how can you spot a talented writing juggler?  If he/she is good, the answer, simply put is:  you can’t.  If he/she isn’t, it can be as disconcerting as a running chainsaw hitting the ground.  Just as an actor needs to be the master of many characters, so a writer needs to be the master of styles, a master storyteller.  But only one voice at a time.

Kitten, torch, chainsaw, kitten, torch, chainsaw, kitten, torch, chainsaw… CINDERBLOCK!

 

OK, I just wrote a sequel.  Or rather, a second trilogy following hard on the heels of the first:  both high fantasy works (are there any other kind of trilogies?) with a strong dash of political drama and whole bunch of personal conflicts.  My family has quietly considered me nuts – or at least charmingly eccentric – to spend three years writing a follow-up to a trilogy that has gotten a lot of praise but very few sales.  They wanted me to morph into a marketing guy, a salesman for my own material, an agent, an editor, and a publisher all magically rolled into one.  And I’m here to confess: they were right.  Marketing 101 says sell the inventory you’ve got before laying in still more stock.  But just because they were right, and even though I knew they were right, it couldn’t stop me from spending the time to write The Gorgorin Wars.

I didn’t do it because of popular demand or pressure from my editor; people have not (yet) discovered the enchanting beauty of the Tale of Darius, and Amazon is like an old-time revival tent, letting in anyone who comes along, singing from the hymnal.  I did it because sometimes, the story just keeps banging around in your head like the threads of a popular song, and the only way to get it out of there is by putting it down on paper.  I did it because I left several strings dangling at the end of the last trilogy – I mean the only true and final ending is death, right? – and I wanted to find out what happened to these people.  Readers spend only a couple of days with these characters.  I spent more than three years.  But most of all, I did it because I love this world.  And as narcissistic as it may sound, I am my own favorite author.

I “met” Darius a long time ago (around 1981 if memory doesn’t fail), and I’ve gotten to know him better and better over the years, an acquaintance becoming a friend and then, in many ways, a colleague and a collaborator.  Believe me, he tells me right quick when I get something wrong.  You learn his quirks and his obsessions, his weaknesses and his doubts, his likes, his dislikes, and his passions; but most of all, you begin to share the guiding principles that move him, drive him, that form the central core of his life.  Why would you not want to spend time with someone you know that well?

Oh, of course, there are also the obvious advantages to writing a sequel.  You use most of the same characters, same world if not the same settings, same voice, point of view, word choice…well, you get the idea.  More of the same, only (hopefully) better.  Since you have the settings and the people down, it’s easier to focus on the story line, to drive the entire rambling, crazy wonderful mess of a world forward and let it surprise you with the unexpected turns and startling twists that seem to rise up out of nowhere.

Then, there’s the down side, too.  Because I’m not just the author of two trilogies.  I’m also a writer, a vocation that chose me much more than I chose it.  That’s the real danger of the sequel, to repeat what you’ve already done, climb the same mountain a second time.  ‘Cause when you get to the top, you find the view is just the same as before.

Writers should be pushing themselves, exploring new voices, new characters, new themes.  Forget the old adage of write what you know; that might be fine for your first novel when you’re worried about syntax or the correct usage of their, there, or they’re.  But if you only write what you know, you will never grow as a writer; indeed, I would have to ask if you will ever grow as an individual.  You need to try bold new brush strokes, a pallet of different colors, and subjects you were too scared to try before.  Don’t worry about not getting it right the first time; nobody ever does.  That’s what proof-reading and re-writing is for.

The objective is to get it right the last time.

So, in many ways, I wrote The Gorgorin Wars more because I had to than because I wanted to.  A whole range of other intriguing projects kept encroaching on my writing time, luring me away from the commitment I had made, new plots and plans and people just waiting to pour out of my head and onto the paper, held in check by Paladins and dragons and wizards who were in line first.  Well, I have kept faith and held true to my original vision, and I am extremely proud of the six volumes that have sprung forth from those labors.

Not saying I won’t come back a final time for the completing of the series.  But that’s a long way off, and now is the time for something completely different…

Well, I’ve been away for while, as you can easily see by the time stamps of the earlier entries.  Away earning a living, helping to raise a family, and writing another sword-and-sorcery trilogy.  But I’m back now.  My career as a powder monkee (metallurgical engineer) is coming to a close, two of my three daughters have left the emptying nest (with Katie only a year away), and I just today wrote a hard earned “Thus Ends” to the last book of The Gorgorin Trilogy.  I would love to say that they are all triumphant experiences, but they aren’t.  Retiring from a “day job” I have done for some 38 years is like winding down from a furious ride that I am very glad (and a little sad) is finally coming to an end.  The girls are just a continuation of our family wherever their lives take them, and I bless computers for e-mail even more than word processing, as I can also use computers to play games like WoW Classic and get gold online for this, click now for more.  And writing (and re-writing and re-writing and…well, you get the idea) is an ongoing process where “Thus Ends” is only one milestone in a very long journey.

The Gorgorin Wars (do trilogies get underlined?) take up immediately where The Paladin Trilogy ends and forms the next part of the Tale of Darius, this wonderful story of a very human man contending with extraordinary demands when all he really wants is to live a normal life.  The idea started with the story of the middle book of this series, The Fortress of the Three Crowns, and it originally had no connection at all with the earlier work.  It grew out of one of my favorite hobbies: torturing Dave Frost in an e-mail sword-and-sorcery campaign (which I simply call Frost-Baiting).

Dave is an old friend of some 39 years, and we have spent 37 of them locked in an on-going role-playing game that has ranged across fantasy continents and fantasy worlds, with this particular incident involving a menacing citadel he had just encountered named (yes, you guessed it) the Fortress of the Three Crowns.  I poked and mocked and dared him to enter single-handed, only to have the impudent cleric call my bluff and decide to go it all alone.  Well, once he decided to make his move, I had no choice but to design it on the fly, and the resulting volleys of e-mails was one of the most furious and entertaining of our long and storied exchanges (Yes, the SOB got out alive, but not because I wasn’t trying my very best to kill him).

So there it sat for many long years, this enchanting scenario from a role-playing game, and don’t let anyone tell you that novels just grow organically out of fantasy game set-ups, because they are completely different, serving completely different audiences with completely different demands.  But they can contribute.  Girders of storylines to help build the plot, color for the settings, even some nice sensual texture (the fortress is located on a frigid alpine plateau), but all of these are a little like Dr. Frankenstein’s miracle-boy before the big thunderstorm:  cold, lifeless, and even a little gross.  They need, not a spark, but a lightning bolt of inspiration to give them life.

That bolt-from-the-blue, of course, came with the first trilogy, and the inevitable interest in “what happened next”.  The original trilogy was completed back in 2011, and for about a year, I was toying with ideas for a sequel set in the same world only some time in the future.  But my mind kept coming back to Paladin, and many of the ideas started to coalesce around events immediately following the climatic scene, like a magnet drawing little pieces of steel, all of it similar but jumbled up in an impossible mess.  Then one day, the old e-mails about the Fortress arose, and suddenly, it was like I had the skeleton on which all those little piece of steel fit.  And once you’ve got the story, you’ve got to write it, like a quest assigned by the god of writing, a simple joy as you tap away at the keyboard, a growing sense of unease and even discomfort when you stray from the appointed task.

Yeah, I guess Darius – and I – will never be completely free of being a Paladin.

We’ve decided to kick off the holiday season with a free download of the e-book version of the second book in the Trilogy, Upon This World of Stone.  It will be available on Kindle from Sunday Nov. 25th to Thursday Nov 29th, so get ready to download!  We can’t offer the first book (A Rage in the Heavens) a second time because of restrictions imposed by Amazon/Kindle, but if you buy the 1st, you basically get a Buy One/Get One Free.

Amazon now has the paperbacks available as well, but their carrying charge has pushed the price of the books through the roof.  We are looking at finding a way to offer them at a reasonable price through the web site, so keep watching.  And be sure to grab that free download when it becomes available.