Ian Lewis's Blog: Ian Lewis Fiction - Posts Tagged "dystopian"

I promised a second post on my new release, Godspeed, Carry My Bullet. There was some explaining I needed to do for why I reversed my long-held stance that I would never self-publish. So here are my excuses.

I understand there's a stigma with self-publishing, though less so these days with the advent of the eBook. The ease by which an unknown writer can get his or her work in front of readers has never been easier. This is great for those authors whose work is legitimate but may not fit the mold of whatever the print industry says is the "next big thing." The downside is that anybody can publish whatever tripe they want, which has flooded the market with less than stellar prose.

The thought that I might fall into the latter category troubled me. I was adamant that I needed to be vetted by an agent and/or publisher. That would be proof positive that I wasn't a hack. I could honestly say I'd been published.

After releasing three novellas through an independent publisher (Untreed Reads), I felt legitimized in that sense, and was looking forward to my next release.

Then I wrote a book that (in my opinion) was the best thing I'd written, the most accessible thing I'd written, and the most relevant/timely thing I'd written. I thought for sure I'd have an easier time getting it published since this book was way more conventional than my novellas. However, I couldn't find a home for it.

Given our current political climate, I felt strongly that this book should be out there. Many people are disenchanted with politics whereas others still think they should be slinging mud. And even though I usually loathe anything that's politically charged (books, music, etc.), I wanted to make my point about it using the only soapbox I have: my writing.

I rationalized that I had proved myself three times over. I could write well enough to get published, and everything after that was subjective on the part of the editor/publisher. So my qualms about writing garbage were lessened.

There was also something to be said about my motivation for writing the book in the first place. If you remember from the first post, the genesis of the story was found in a joke among co-workers. The plot details, of course, are all me, but the premise wasn't something that I considered "official Ian Lewis canon." I wrote this for fun. So why not release it for fun?

The tipping point was my discovery of pronoun.com. The site is clean, modern, and easy to use. Pronoun gets you on all of the major eBook vendors including Amazon (no KDP program), provides sales analytics, aggregates your payments through PayPal on a monthly basis, and is FREE. They don't get a cut of anything. By taking the grunt work out of file conversion, obtaining an ISBN number, coordinating with different vendors, etc., Pronoun removed any excuses I had left.

With the election season upon us, I buckled down and worked on a second round of revisions. And a third. And a fourth. In the end, I cut out approximately four thousand words, tightened the narrative, and caught what I hope were the last few mechanical issues.

Now "Godspeed, Carry My Bullet" is in the world. I consider this a "semi-professional" release, but it's my strongest effort to date. I hope you as the reader enjoy every page of it.

I'm excited to announce the release of my latest novel, And I Will Lead the Revolt. This is the second and final installment in the Split series, which features a quasi-dystopian alternate history where the recession of 2008 precedes the collapse of the U.S. government. However, that's not the interesting part; that's simply the backdrop.

The meat and potatoes are the characters who are stuck in this world where the republic has split into two separate governments: the Directorate in the East and the Unites States Valiant in the West. The interconnection of their stories, their struggles and strife in spite of their environment, is what makes this so interesting.

I'll admit this series is quite different than the rest of my books. It's written with more of a mass-market style, but I tried to retain a vestige of legitimacy in a world of generic thriller drivel. I want you to care about the characters, which is why I spent much of the previous book (Godspeed, Carry My Bullet) character-building.

The series itself is also somewhat of an allegory, so while I took pains to reflect accuracy with respect to weapons, locations, climate, mechanics, and even in one case a Native American ritual, I ignored a lot or otherwise took liberties. For example, there isn't any consideration given to what's going on outside of the United States, no commentary on international relations at all. Or in other cases, I put characters into scenarios where they might not get much further than two steps without the coaxing hand of the author. I hope I've done so deftly enough that you forgive me that for the sake of the greater point, which as I said is allegory.

The whole enterprise is meant to be a commentary on the failure of partisan politics, sort of a plea for civility with respect to others who fall on the other side of the political aisle than you, because divisiveness isn't going to get us anywhere.

Or, you can ignore all of that! I myself don't care for politics, and would not have written a book like this without trying to tell a good yarn. There's a lot of page-turning material here. Since the characters from the first book are well established, the pacing of And I Will Lead the Revolt is faster. There's more at stake, and with the addition of only two new viewpoint characters, there's not much reason to dawdle.

Despite the title and cover, which some might find provocative or perhaps "not their cup of tea," I would encourage you to check it out anyway. Yes there is some action and violence, but it's never gratuitous. Nor is the story bogged down in political minutia. It's about the struggles of a single mother. It's a survivalist's tale. It's about two brothers who have to learn the nature of sacrifice. In several respects, it's a young man's striving to find his place in the world. It's also a young woman's decision to stand in the gap when no one else will. And it's about the universal desire to protect one's family.

Pick up an eBook from your favorite vendor today or a paperback from Amazon, and if you enjoy the read, please take the time to leave a rating or review.

Up next, part 2 with some spoilers.

The release of And I Will Lead the Revolt is finally here! Lots of late nights and writing on lunch breaks has hopefully paid off. This series went from an inside joke to an "I'll write this just for fun" type of thing to a narrative that outgrew either of those.

If you read any of the posts related to the release of Godspeed, Carry My Bullet, you'll know that the genesis of the story was rooted in a joke among co-workers. We envisioned ourselves as characters in this dystopian version of the U.S. I promised to write a story about it just for the heck of it. Well, once I plotted everything out, a new animal emerged which eclipsed the underpinnings. And it exceeded what could be considered one book.

All the same, I didn't see this as a series I wanted to take on for the long haul. There's certainly the potential to do so; there's so much terrain to explore, but it's not a universe that interests me as much as others, nor is a mass market thriller something that captivates me from a stylistic perspective. So it had to have an end.

Enter Seth Sloane. Whereas Godspeed is sort of Bobby's story, Revolt is Seth's story. Seth is a committed, capable member of the Military Police, and I was intrigued with the idea of seeing things from the other side. The Military Police are painted as this evil force in Godspeed, but then you see that Seth is just another guy trying to get by and provide for his family. I thought that antagonism mirrored a lot of what we see today with the left and right rhetoric. My theory is that if you took away all of the hot button issues and boiled things down to the bare essentials, we'd find we have a lot more in common than we think.

I try to press that point with a lot of parallels that I draw between these characters. Sometimes it's overt, like multiple characters going through the same experience such as being in prison or on their way to prison. In other cases, it's less obvious. Characters' beliefs are challenged, and they usually get pushed into situations that grate against their fabric. Even with the final chapters with armed revolt against the respective governments, there is always a common thread between what's happening.

And that leads into the outer plot. With Revolt being the end of the series, I had to steer everything toward some type of resolution. You leave off at the end of Godspeed with Bobby having perpetrated a terrible act of public murder, the Raider in a lurch with the shootout with MPs, and Bon having just gunned down two men in order to rescue the young Katie. So things were very much up in the air.

The most obvious thing was the restoration of constitutional government. The Sons of Washington reveal that's their goal in Godspeed, and whatever one might change about our current government, it seemed the most logical choice when faced with the Directorate and the Valiant. So I went with it, but that entailed some research on the Constitution itself. I didn't have time for this to be an all consuming thing, but found that Hillsdale College's free online Constitution 101 class to be super-helpful. It reinforced some things I already knew, taught me some things I didn't know or else had forgotten, and even reversed some things I thought I knew:

http://lp.hillsdale.edu/constitution-...

Two concepts came out of this research that really resonated with me: 1. Consent of the governed, and 2. Natural rights. The idea that people consent to a certain form of government, not due to some arbitrary reason or any right of one person over another, for the sole purpose of securing one's rights, was a powerful one. And it's not important whether one agrees with these concepts or the best way to apply them; I simply wanted to distill down the original philosophy and acknowledge this was where the founders' heads were at.

These concepts ultimately drove much of the plot. I had to think about a group like the Sons of Washington, and what would they believe and how might they go about achieving their ends, and these seemed like appropriate motivators. But as I said in the previous post, the story is truly carried along by the characters. The weaving of their sub plots is what will keep you turning the pages. And with their cross-section of world views (Christian, Agnostic, and Atheist), you get different perspectives as the events unfold.

There's so much more that could be said, but I'd rather let you get a copy of the book and draw your own conclusions. Thanks for reading.