How a Vacation led to Writing Revelation: A Guest Post by Brian Matthews

When I sat down to write Revelation, I faced a significant problem. Forever Man had just been released. People in the industry were telling me how much they liked it. To my friends and family, I had achieved the status of a minor celebrity. Even Publisher’s Weekly gave it a positive review. After two years of work, it seemed I had written a decent book.



Here was my problem: Forever Man was the first book I had written—ever.



And now I had to do it again.



Oh, boy.



That I wanted to write a better book was a given—what professional worth his salt would strive to do less—but the question remained: could I once again catch lightning in a bottle? Was it possible to write a second book that could outmuscle its older, bigger brother? I felt like Sisyphus pushing his boulder. The enormity of the undertaking was staggering, at least to me.



Before beginning Revelation, though, I had to go on a family vacation, a cruise through the Mediterranean that had been planned for two years. Points of interest (ports of interest, I suppose you could say) included Florence, Rome, Venice, Athens, and Istanbul—the heart of the ancient world. Now, I love history. To me, it holds a fascination akin to magic; the peoples and places and events seemed to exist in another world, where gods and heroes walked the earth, changing the courses of civilizations. I could barely contain my excitement. I was going to explore the ruins of the Parthenon, where Zeus ruled with lightning bolts and vanity; sail the canals of Venice, where Titan’s focus on color and light finally broke Michelangelo’s choke hold on Renaissance artistic style; and stand in the Duomo, the marble-sheathed cathedral in Florence, whose construction had to be postponed because of the Black Plague.

Duomo

It would be a trip of a lifetime. Little did I know that it would provided the genesis for what would become Revelation.



Throughout the trip, as I flew to Barcelona and sailed from port to port, in the back of my mind, I thought about the “next book.” I had already decided it would be a Forever Man novel. I would return to the world of Bartholomew Owens and expand on his history, while at the same time giving readers a new story to enjoy, one unrelated to the first. The format for Forever Man was simple: a small setting—the whole story takes place in the fictional town of Kinsey in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula—with a large cast of characters to give it depth and realism. I didn’t want to return to the same formula. I wanted to stretch, to push the boundaries, and show that Bart Owens operated on a much larger stage, which suggested multiple settings. And to strike a balance, the book would have a smaller cast.



Okay, that sounded good. Now all I needed was a story.



The vacation proceeded. I visited the splendor of Monte Carlo, the bone-white tower in Pisa (which, I learned, will one day fall over), and the classical beauty of Florence. Next came Rome. The day was blisteringly hot, almost one hundred degrees, and the heat was getting to me. As I stood in St. Peter’s square, feeling slightly dizzy, I stared at the massive basilica looming before me and thought, “This is the largest, most ornate church I’ve ever seen. I mean, it’s huge.” Then, almost as an afterthought, “I wonder what Bart would think of it.”

St. Peter's Square

What would Bart think…?



My eyes widened, and I smiled.



I suddenly had a location for the book, and with it, an inkling of a story—the power of religion. Knowing I wanted a smaller cast, the story would focus on two individuals: one, a skeptic intent on disproving the existence of God, and the other, a fanatic obsessed with his crusade to eliminate the world’s “heathen” religions. Eventually, the skeptic became Miles Knight, and the fanatic, Reverend Destiny.



Now that I had an idea for the scope of the book—international locations and the intrigue that comes with them—I let the vacation provide my research. Part of the Rome trip included a visit to the necropolis under the Vatican, where I saw the tomb of St. Peter. That made its way into the novel. During the stop in Istanbul, I visited the Blue Mosque and Hagia Sophia (also known as the Sancta Sophia) and fell in love with the Byzantine culture. One structure I found particularly amazing was the obelisk of Theodosius, which stood in the square once occupied by Constantinople’s Hippodrome. Constructed in Egypt in the 14th century B.C., Emperor Constantius II moved it from the Temple of Karnak to Alexandria in 357 A.D, and Emperor Theodosius moved it to Constantinople some thirty years later. To stand before something over three thousand years old was humbling. Those places also made it into the novel.

sancta sophia

For plot reasons, I needed four other exotic locations, the Habib Bourguiba International Airport in Monastir, Tunisia, and the Reform Club in London, both requiring old-fashioned research (Internet searches and lots of reading), and two short sequences in Iraq and Afghanistan, the locations of which are entirely made up.



Domestically, the story takes place in St. Louis, Missouri, and Castle Pines, Colorado, both of which required more old-fashioned research, and Dearborn, Michigan. I live near Dearborn, so I have ample experience with the area. The mosque where Revelation reaches its climax exists. It is a beautiful structure, and, sadly, does draw its fair share of fanatics who try to do what Reverend Destiny does in the book, though to a much smaller scale.



I want to avoid talking about Bartholomew’s flashback sequences, which expands on his backstory, because doing so would be a huge spoiler. Trust me, considerable research went into those sequences.



So, unlike Forever Man, where I created the setting completely from imagination, Revelation got its inspiration from locations I have visited, which I hope lends more realism to the novel.