New release! Part 2: A few 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.
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.
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