Backstory: "Angels Unawares"

This installment of my "Backstory" series not only celebrates a short story of mine that is now available as an e-book on Smashwords, but it also represents a major step into the "Way-Back" machine.  "Angels Unawares" is the first story I ever published in any form.  It was originally posted onto a site called www.sffworld.com back in 2003 and no longer appears on that site.  Granted, publishing there at the time was really easy: Just post your story.  No editors, no acceptances or rejections.  The first story of mine to actually get accepted by an editor was "The Other Woman," which is also on Smashwords and which will be the next "Backstory" entry.  But I digress.

Backstory: "The Siege of Peter Marak" (Part 2)

For a long time, I've toyed with the idea of a character who isolates himself into his house as a defense against some sort of threat.  This character would then be approached by someone in dire need, thus presenting him with a choice: Protecting himself and thus sacrificing a bit of his humanity, or trying to help the person in need and then exposing himself to whatever it was that he feared so much in the first place.  After trying to make that idea work in other contexts, I finally found a home for it in "The Siege of Peter Marak."  The dilemma of whether to face his fear or save himself is the driving force of this story.

Backstory: "The Siege of the Peter Marak" (Part 1)

Like "The Alabama Hammer," this is a story that has become one of my pesonal favorites.  Like "Darkest Before Dawn," this is also a story that will need more than one blog entry to thoroughly unpack.  So, without further ado, let's delve into "The Siege of Peter Marak."

I've always been the kind of person who says, "If I'm well enough to drive myself to the doctor, I'm not sick enough to need a doctor."  Whereas I don't have a problem with my wife or kids going if they're sick, I usually will try to treat myself with over-the-counter medicine or even home remedies when I come down with something.  Most of the time, that strategy works out well enough and saves money on co-pays.  However, in late February/early March 2011, I got something that I couldn't shake.  What I thought was just a routine cold steadily got worse and worse, until finally Cindy insisted that I burn a sick day and go to the doctor.

Backstory: "Traveled So Far"

Years ago, Arthur C. Clarke wrote a short story entitled "The Star."  It was award-winning and critically acclaimed, and it was even adapted for the 1980s version of The Twilight Zone.  With all due respect to the late Mr. Clarke, however, it's not one of my favorites.  Without recapping/spoiling it here, suffice it to say that its approach to the Christmas story is cynical to say the least.

Backstory: "Just Passing Through"

This story is proof positive that "shelving" an incomplete story does not necessarily mean that it will never get finished.  I actually started "Just Passing Through" back in 2007, with the idea of making it into a novella of about 10,000-20,000 words or so.  In time, however, I came to a dead end and tabled it, leaving off with Colby confronting Verdict in the sewer.  It wasn't until Crossed Genres magazine announced an issue dealing with villains that I came back to this piece.  In rereading it, I came to an important decision.

Backstory: "Judgment Day"

The inspiration for "Judgment Day" actually came from a mixture of sources, like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle coming together to from a picture.  Among the different elements coming together were:

• The tendency of many Christians to ignore the Scriptural directive of Matthew 7:1-2, "Do not judge so that you will not be judged.  For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you."  Yes, we're supposed to hate sin, but we're also supposed to love the sinner and try to lead them to the path of righteousness.  How often do we get the first part right, only to miss the second completely?

Backstory: "Fealty"

As I have had a number of short stories published since the release of Zero Hour, I've decided to revive the "Backstory" series to share for all posterity what my thought processes were with each story.  Well, OK, maybe posterity won't be overly interested, or maybe they will.  Either way, this will allow me to get this information off my chest and to keep the blog going, good enough reasons for me anyway.

Backstory: "Darkest Before Dawn" (Part 2)

As promised, Part 2 of my Backstory entry for "Darkest Before Dawn" will center on the Christian themes that entered into this story.

The simplest one to address is that of the darkness itself.  As I've mentioned previously, the ten plagues of Egypt have given me some fertile ground for inspiration in the past.  "In the Shadow of the Sphinx" dealt directly with the plague of boils from Exodus 9:8-17, while "The Watchman" draws its inspiration from the
plague of gnats in Exodus 8:16-19.  Well, the ninth plague was darkness, coming into play in Exodus 10:21-29.  I didn't allude to it in the text as directly as I did with the other two instances, but I cannot and will not attempt to deny that it had an influence on this tale.

Backstory: "Darkest Before Dawn" (Part 1)

There's a lot to say about the last story in the collection, so I'm going to break this up into two entries this time around.

First off, the Twilight Zone influence is alive and well on this story.  When I was a kid, I remember that Channel 46 (then an independent station, now Atlanta's CBS affiliate) would show TZ reruns every weeknight at 11 PM.  I was in my early teens before I was ever allowed to sit up to watch them, and then only on Friday nights or during summer vacation.  However, that never stopped me from reading the tantalizing one-sentence blurbs for them in the TV Guide (back when that publication was still the size of a Reader's Digest).  The descriptions never failed to tickle my imagination, and I can remember some of them to this day.  "A hospitalized woman waits to see if surgeons have been able to repair her disfigured face" ("The Eye of the Beholder").  "An Army major, a clown, a ballerina, a bagpipe player, and a hobo try to find escape from their mysterious cylindrical prison" ("Five Characters in Search of an Exit").

Backstory: "The Alabama Hammer"

Someone once asked me which of the stories in Zero Hour was my favorite.  That's a difficult question to answer as each of them is special to me in its own way.  However, I can say without reservation that, of the fifteen stories, I probably had the most fun writing "The Alabama Hammer."

Backstory: "The Watchman"

First off, a bit of trivia: "The Watchman" wasn't the first story I had published overall, but it was the first story that someone actually paid me to publish.  The now-defunct Dragons, Knights, and Angels purchased one-time publication rights to this story back in July 2006 for $10.00 and published it a month later.  It was the first time that my dream of being a published, paid author had ever met with any sort of validation.  For that reason, "The Watchman" will always be special to me.  Incidentally, it is also the oldest/earliest of the fifteen in Zero Hour.

Backstory: "Square Peg"

Most of us, if we're truly honest, know what it is to feel like a square peg.  We've all had times in our lives when we have felt like misfits for whatever reason, like we somehow didn't fit in with the people around us.  That feeling--one with which I am as familiar as anyone else--was the driving force behind "Square Peg."

Backstory: "The Bloody Bucket"

Sometimes, stories about your own family--even family members you've never met yourself--can provide the seeds for stories.

Personally, I don't drink, but there have been a lot of alcoholics in my family (which, in turn, is part of the reason I don't drink...I don't want to risk having inherited that particular gene).  In fact, whenever my Grandma would tell me a story about one of my uncles, many of whom had passed on before I was born, the stories would often start with the phrase, "There was this one time when your Uncle Whoever got drunk and..."

Backstory: "The Pride of Guillermo"

Sometimes, you just want to stand convention on its ear.

Superspies/secret agents are "stock characters" that usually seem to follow the trail blazed by James Bond: Suave, sophisticated, confident, and armed to the teeth with all sorts of high-tech weaponry that can masquerade as ordinary objects.  That image of secret agents is what I wanted to shake up in "The Pride of Guillermo."  I wanted to come up with a character--Kirk Ransom--who was green, wasn't considered to be the top of his field by his superiors, who made mistakes, and who had to rely on his own wits rather than a bunch of gadgets to escape danger.  Creating a character who was so unlike James Bond was a lot of fun for me as a writer.  Another story using the Kirk Ransom character, "Bring Out Your Dead," can be found on Residential Aliens by clicking this link: http://www.resaliens.com/2010/04/bring-out-your-dead/#more-708

As the title suggests, I also wanted to deal with the issue of pride.  The Bible is loaded with warnings against letting our pride get the better of us.  Proverbs 16:18 says, "Pride goes before destruction,And a haughty spirit before stumbling."  Both James 4:6 and 1 Peter 5:5 tells us that "God is opposed to the proud but gives grace to the humble" (New American Standard).  In crafting the character of Emil Guillermo, I wanted a bad guy whose pride would...well, if you haven't read the story, I won't spoil it for you.

The mutated, amphibious sharks were inspired by an old episode of the original Outer Limits entitled "Tourist Attraction."  As I may have mentioned before, sometimes I get a lot of inspiration from classic shows like that and The Twilight Zone.



Philippians 4:13.--SMS

Backstory: "Phobos"

Fear.  Everybody has it.  The only variables are 1) what makes us afraid and 2) how we respond to that fear.  Snakes scare me, but some fortunate people are unphased by them.  By the same token, insects don't scare me at all, but I know some people find them terrifying.

With "Phobos," I wanted to do a play on words.  On the one hand, it refers to its setting, the Martian moon of (yeah, you guessed it) Phobos.  But I also felt that the only natural direction for a story with such a title, with such a setting, would be one dealing with fear.  Since human psychology covers a wide range of fears and phobias, I had a lot to choose from.  In dealing with the personal phobia of my protagonist, Travis Lyle, I decided that it would be too easy to pick something like snakes or spiders, or even something less tangible but more common, like acrophobia (heights) or claustrophobia.  I prayed that God would lead me to something that wasn't that obvious but that could still support a story.  So, after doing some research into phobias, I stumbled across something suitably subtle, and then the story grew quickly from there.  Prayer answered.

So what does "spiriutal suspense" have to do with a story about fear?  The Bible tells us 365 times (yep, one for each day of the year) to "Fear not."  Fear is normal, but those of us who are Christians can place our faith and trust in God, who is bigger than whatever scares us.  He never leaves us, nor does he forsake us.  He is with us no matter what.  Because of that truth, we can overcome our fears.  We can trust in Him to hold us up even as we face what scares us.

Philippians 4:13.--SMS

Backstory: "Smokescreen"

This entry is a challenge, since there's not a lot I can say about so short a story without giving too much away.  However, there is a message behind it that needs to be heard.

Too often in America, we take our freedoms for granted.  We never imagine what it would be like to live without them, what it must be like for people in other countries who have to live with far more restrictions.  What would happen if we lost some of our freedom, simply by our lack of appreciation for it, our unwillingness to stand up for it until it's too late?  That, my friends, is the heart of "Smokescreen."

Phillipians 4:13.--SMS

Backstory: "Doomsday Falls on a Tuesday This Year"

First off, of all the 15 story titles you see on the table of contents, this one has to be my favorite.  I can't remember exactly how the title came to me, but I know that I had it in mind for years, long before I ever had any idea what it could possibly be about.  Therefore, finally being able to connect it to a story made me very happy; to have it published was icing on the cake.  Maybe one day some of these other titles that sound so cool in my head will also be attached to stories of their own...

The inspiration from the story itself comes from Mark 13:31-33, which reads, "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words will never pass away. But about that day or hour no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.  Be on guard!  Be alert!  You do not know when that time will come."  Down through the years, a number of people have tried--and failed--to predict the date when the end will come.  My first exposure to that came as a young teenager in 1988, when I was in a bookstore with my grandmother and saw a book entitled, "88 Reasons the Lord Will Come Back in 1988."  A year later, I remember seeing one with a very similar cover entitled, "89 Reasons the Lord Will Come Back in 1989."  I'm just guessing reason number 89 was something along the lines of, "Because He didn't do it in 1988."  Every attempt throughout history to predict the exact time has failed.  With that said, I'm guessing it's pretty safe to make plans for 2012, but I digress...

Anyway, we've all heard street preachers who, no matter how great their intentions might be, aren't taken seriously by their impromptu audiences.  In some cases, that may be their own doing, or it may be that they are actually preaching a solid message but get torpedoed by the reputation created by their more outlandish counterparts.  So, I decided to take a well-meaning street preacher (and yes, "Harold Hilltop" has some intentional double-meaning) whose zeal sometimes gets the better of him and put him in a totally unique situation.

Philippians 4:13.--SMS

Backstory: "Can't Get There From Here"

In looking back at "Can't Get There From Here," I have to give credit to a good friend of mine, a worship minister by the name of Dan Riordan.  Back around 2005 (give or take a year), the church we attended then had a radio ministry.  Dan had approached me about writing a script for the radio program, a short drama dealing with how there is only one road that leads to Heaven.  One of the possible suggestions he had thrown out was that of a man who had died and is trying to find the right road into the afterlife he wants.  For a number of reasons, the radio ministry was discontinued before I could complete a script, but I thought the idea had plenty of "meat" and adapted it into the story that appears in "Zero Hour."

Acts 4:12 tells us that, in regard to Christ, "Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be saved."  However, we live in a world that for the most part tries to ignore this simple truth.  "All roads lead to Heaven," they say.  "As long as you believe in something, you're all right," they try to tell us.  "Everybody gets to Heaven sooner or later," they argue.  The thing is, if you believe the Bible, then you can't believe this line of reasoning that the world tries to sell.  The two ideas are mutually exclusive.  For my part, obviously, I choose to believe what the Bible says on this matter.

If by any chance you are reading this blog and have never put your faith in Christ as your Savior, let me urge you to do so now.  All of us have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom. 3:23); in other words, we're all guilty.  For those sins, an eternity in Hell would be what we deserve, but Christ gives us the opportunity to have eternal life with Him in Heaven (Rom. 6:23).  Jesus Christ, God in human flesh, paid the price for us with His life even while we were still lost in our sins (Rom. 5:8) as a shows of His love and mercy toward us.  If we trust Him as our Savior and confess His name, we will be saved (Rom. 10:13).  Nothing else--not good works, not any other religion that denies the deity of Christ, not anything else you can throw out there--is going to compensate for our sins if we don't accept Christ as Savior and Lord.

Have a great day, everybody.  Acts 4:12.--SMS

Backstory: "We Serve All Kinds Here"

Redemption is a key theme in Christian fiction.  By defintion, telling a redemption story involves having characters who have messed up in some way.  That's really not too hard to do--after all, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Romans 3:23).  The only difference from one person to another, from any of you to me, is where our individual transgressions have come.  In crafting the background for the narrator, I decided that it needed to involve a criminal record, simply for dramatic purposes.  As the story unfolded, he found a form of redemption by owning up to his past and using his experiences to prevent someone else from duplicating his mistake.  After all, once Christ has saved us, He wants us to reach out to others, and sometimes our past mistakes cause us to better relate to others facing similar experiences.

As for the setting...if you've ever been to a Waffle House, Krystal, or any other 24-hour restaurant after midnight, you see a cross-section of people that is interesting to say the least.  I figured that might be a setting where a character such as Gonzalez might enter in hopes of attracting minimal attention, although that didn't completely work out for him in the story.

Philippians 4:13.--SMS

Backstory: "All Hail Sam"

1. To truly understand the background of "All Hail Sam," you have to know a little bit about my hometown of Griffin, GA.  For decades, textile mills were the backbone of the local economy.  Around each mill, there sprang up little neighborhoods known as "mill villages," where mill employees could rent dwellings (from the mill) within walking distance of their work.  Although this sort of set-up has vanished in reality as the mills have shut down, I wanted to put the character of Sam in that sort of situation.

2. I actually wrote the character of Sam with a real person in mind, a man I once knew whose life had fallen into a rut not unlike Sam's.

3. In sending Sam to an alternate reality, I wanted to emphasize that the grass isn't always greener on the other side of the fence by taking that message to its extreme.  We as human beings want any number of things, and often the things we think we want aren't going to make us happy and may not even be good for us in the first place.  Sometimes what we want isn't "bad" per se, but God wants us to wait for His timing.  In Jeremiah 29:11, we read, "For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the LORD, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future."  We need to learn to trust in Him and to be thankful for what we have...a hard lesson for us all at times, myself included.

The next installment will be a closer look at "We Serve All Kinds Here."  Philippians 4:13.--SMS