My Historical Fiction

I imagined a world where speech was never confounded into languages. Contagions are unheard of. Weapons of mass destruction are obsolete.

Do you prefer our world as it really is? Is it better because people literally cannot understand each other? Are we blessed with illness? Are weapons of mass destruction what make war interesting?

You have the world as it really is. It is so inspiring that its history is legends and propaganda. Its best fiction is about other worlds.

I did not change things to make anything better. It was to make the world more interesting. A character is humanized by its dialog, so I want the reader to understand the dialog. The stories are supposed to be thrilling, so giving them diarrhea or making them bedridden were bad ideas. I fancy warrior prowess so am uninterested in weapons that indefensibly negate it.

The world changes its history, to make it more interesting or to indoctrinate us. I changed history without pretense. Unlike the non-fiction, it is overtly fiction.

The Sorcerer tetralogy is about a world where the Confederacy won the War Between the States and aligns with Nazi Germany. The title character is the villain: a senior leader in the SS who uses magic, technology and armed force to commit atrocities. The mother of his daughter (or son) is the hero, and fights to stop him.

How would language barriers make the stories more interesting? What about disease or nuclear weapons? Do tell… or forever hold your peace.

Unity, Merit and Exceptionalism

Star Wars and Star Trek and Harry Potter and even The Lord of the Rings are turned into crap… and I don’t care. I write and illustrate my own fiction. I can’t match the production value of these franchises, but the stupidity that controls them assures that my work is better regardless.

Capitalism broke my back and left me to rot… so I have no love for capitalism. On the contrary. Marxism is the socialism of the rich, so I am not a Marxist either.

As of today, December 6, 2024, I am free to share what I write and illustrate with the world. I can even sell it. I am sincerely grateful. It is something that makes capitalism better than socialism… until the capitalists take it away from me, one way or another.

I am a white, heterosexual and male gentile, as were most people who wrote the best fiction and rendered the best art. I am being replaced by diversity hires that cannot make anything interesting no matter the budget allotted them. I shall inevitably outlast my replacements.

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Book of the Ages

In reality, lives are phases. We begin as children, grow into adults then fade away as elderly. We all begin as children. Many of us die before adulthood. Many adults die before elderly. The phases are what they are regardless.

In fiction, ages are not phases. They are personality traits. The innocent or ignorant are children. The good or evil are adults. The wise or weary are elderly.

In my novel The Wayward School for Girls most people are children. They are either innocent or ignorant, as most people are in reality. They are small and weak, as most people are in the grand scheme of our actual world.

Most adults are invisible in the Weird World of the novel. They can be heard but not seen. In reality, we make our voices heard but collectively. We are seldom recognized individually.

Authority is visible adulthood. Such individuals are both seen and heard, even if nameless. They are typically evil, no longer children because they lost their innocence.

The elderly are visible. They are either weary children soon to fade away or wise and immortal. In reality, the very old are noticeable. They are either feeble and need help or accomplished and venerable.

Age is not just a number. It is what it is regardless of our attitudes. We are small and weak as children. We do have responsibilities as adults. We are at our best or worst as individuals when elderly. I am mindful of this.

Juice, Wine or Vinegar

Real people grow up then grow old. Fictional characters are different. They seldom grow up. They are adults in every story. They seldom grow old. They are in their prime forever.

Of course characters are sometimes children, like Newt in Aliens. She never grew up, however. She is a child forever. Darth Vader was a child… but after he died an old man.

I write books. I create fictional characters. Each is the age I need it to be for the story. Few of them are ever children. Few of them ever grow old. They are what they are forever.

Ages are phases in real lives. They are personality traits in fictional characters. Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings, for example, looks like “wisdom” as an old man. Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz looks like “innocence” because of her youth. James Bond looks like “virility” because he is in his prime… and stops looking like James Bond as the actor becomes too old.

A fictional character is an idea. Its aspects convey the idea, its meaning. The following are the general meanings that decide the age of a fictional character:

CHILDHOOD: innocence and hope or selfishness and ignorance

ADOLESENCE: discovery and maturity or irresponsibility and immaturity

ADULTHOOD: responsibility and accomplishment or liberty and guilt

ELDERLY: experience and wisdom or weariness and decay

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The Genre of Reality

What genre would our world be if it was fictional?

Action-Adventure? Horror? Romance? Comedy? Science fiction? Fantasy? Mystery? Thriller? Dystopia? Erotica? Young adult?

Our world is all these things… but a genre is not elements within the fiction. It is what defines the fiction. What genre defines our real world in its entirety?

DRAMA.

Everything in our world is with “drama” in mind. The actions, adventures, horrors, love, silliness, science, dreams, mysteries, thrills, politics, sexuality and adolescence are written to tell a story about people interacting with each other as individuals.

I write fiction. My style emphasizes dialog over exposition. The struggles of good against evil are personal rather than social. The big picture is merely a setting for what happens in the lives of individual characters.

The genre of my fiction is usually action-adventure. It is sometimes horror, usually as survival horror. My thematic specialty is sexy girls as the droves of expendable baddies.

DRAMA.

Sexy, scary or adventurous are thrilling… but cheap thrills unless dramatic. I am mindful of this. The stories I write must be about the characters. Everything else, even the stories themselves, must be secondary.

Storytelling on Track

The most difficult thing about writing fiction is continuity. An otherwise good scene can be bad if it contradicts what came before or comes after it. The imaginary reality becomes uncertain if inconsistent. The writer must remember what he wrote to get things right.

I write stories. I write their sequels and prequels. I write stories set in the same universe that are otherwise unrelated.

The advantage of writing a story from scratch is that continuity is established along the way. A universe is not as deep if it begins and ends with one story, however.

The advantage of linking stories to a common universe is greater context. Every tale is part of something greater than itself. The universe itself is expanded from a mere setting to lore.

I write fiction. Continuity is easier when the stories are fantastic. It is harder when they are realistic. My Weird World and White Empires universes for example: Weird World is dreamlike so inconsistencies can be plot elements rather than errors. White Empires is strange but grounded. Inconsistencies must be corrected, whether by explanation or rewrite.

Continuity is important. Fiction is already make-believe, but if inconsistent, it is sheer nonsense.

A good story is immersive. It can be weird or realistic. So long as its rules of cause and effect are clearly understood, the reader can accept them… so long as they are never actually contradicted. A sequence of events is likewise in this regard. The personalities of the characters are likewise in this regard.

Continuity matters. There is no actual story without it.

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Dream Worlds

If you could live in a fictional universe instead of the real one, would you?

Wonderland, Oz, Middle-earth, the Hyborean Age, The Cthulhu Mythos, Dune, Star Trek, Star Wars and Mass Effect are fictional realities very distinct from our own. There are different versions of these various imaginary universes.

The worlds of Rambo and Dirty Harry are very much like our own… but not really. The movie Enemy at the Gates is supposedly historical… but not really.

Which fictional universe would you live in?

The Mass Effect universe is the one mentioned I find the most interesting. It is everything I find interesting in reality but at its best. I would rather live in the Star Trek universe, however, as it was presented in The Next Generation specifically. The utopian nonsense of Star Trek would be wonderful as a reality.

I write fiction. I create universes. My Other Folk is our real history but the Earth is hollow and the fairy folk live there. My Strange Galaxy is a world of many worlds where “advanced” is either technological or magical. My Black Death is about two big and black sisters who serial kill young white women with impunity. They save the world from magical masterminds who command armies of white henchwomen. My Weird World is dreamlike. Children are the normal people and most adults are invisible.

My fictional universes are not wishful thinking. I would rather live here than in any of them. If I did have to move to one of my fictional universes, I would choose Weird World. I would be a child forever and that would be bad… but the aches and pains of my middle age would be over and that would be good. I could thrive in a world where dream logic is the laws of physics.