Seven angels, four kids, one family

A new publication! Over at New Christian Voices, my humor piece Bread And Beauty is posted. It’s a short essay I wrote in response to a corporate magazine touting how I could save time by giving them gobs of money for convenience foods, and which also contained tidbits such as “dry skin is the worst problem of the winter.”

So all you folks who are struggling with heating bills, dealing with ice on the road — heck with that, all the homeless who have nowhere to stay when it snows? Your problems pale in comparison to dry skin. Really. The magazine said so.

This piece kept changing shape and size but I like the form it’s in now, and I’ve learned two things about humor based on its travels through the magazines:

1) keep a very tight focus when writing humor; one idea is enough

2) rant like crazy

Once I rewrote it with those two objectives in mind, it sold immediately. Please go over there and tell them in the comments how much you love it read it. Thanks!

A new award! I found out yesterday that my novel Seven Archangels: Annihilation placed fifth for SFF novel in the Preditors and Editors Readers Choice Awards!  That means I get a nifty little award graphic, and a nice attagirl. “They like me! They really like me!”

A third thing: I got mentioned in Our Sunday Visitor! No kidding! Author Mary Lou Rosien wrote me to let me know she loved my book and that she’d mentioned it in her catechesis column! She said that Mary’s “praying with cookies,” (ie, by making her baking prayerful) was a good example of active prayer. I’m thrilled. Really. I need to write back to her and thank her.

There is no fourth thing. Count your blessings. I’m having a good time writing ♥My New Book♥ and haven’t been submitting anything else. I’ve tried following up on some old ones, but no response there. It’s okay. Three good things are enough for today.

In my writing life, either everything happens at once, or nothing happens at all. We’ve had a bit of nothing for a while.

Yesterday, Cricket asked me if my Ichthys piece was online, and it’s not, but while I was scanning the Door archives, I found that another one was.

Yep, here it is: Executive Summary for Downsizing and Outsourcing Movement of Chosen People for Maximum Return on Covenant Investment which has got to be the longest title anyone has ever appended to one of my pieces. I think I called it “Management Proposal For Chosen People” or something similar. This was one of those things I wrote after being just fed up with the universe around me, and of course, they gave me a borderline-offensive image to illustrate the piece.

Apparently I also won sixth place in their “March Indulgence Awards” which gets me out of having to brew coffee for several years in Purgatory. I wish they’d given me time off from having to clean out the Archangel Gabriel’s basement for a hundred years due to what I did to him in my novel.  **shudder** And speaking of the novel…

TitleTrakk gave us a nice review of Seven Archangels: Annihilation and said it was imaginative, fun and fast-paced, but apparently they didn’t find it logical. The bonding made the reviewer a little uncomfortable, but there was no objection to Mary appearing in the book.

The logic part is owing the the reviewer not liking the ideas of angels potentially not being eternal or angels acting imperfectly, or emotionally. I’m not going to get into a debate here, but the Bible does indicate angels have emotions and are imperfect (only God is perfect) meaning I guess I didn’t establish that well enough in the book itself.

So, a hat tip for the review, and if you’re new to this weblog, please go check it out and visit the book’s website or read some of the chapters over at Mindflights.com (accessible right from their front page under “serial fiction”.)

Thanks!

The final two chapters of Seven Archangels: Annihilation have posted over at Mindflights Magazine. Next week will be the epilogue, and after that, well, you can read the whole thing all at once if you want. Or just go buy it over at amazon. (The link is in my sidebar.) There will be spoilers in the rest of this post.

Chapter 24 begins with Asmodeus and Belior doing what demons do best (backstabbing) and I’d like to point out for everyone that if Satan had simply taken the advice of Beelzebub (“Tie Asmodeus together with Israfel and leave them at the gates”) that the entire chapter wouldn’t have had to take place. But he didn’t, and we get to have some fun.

I committed a writing “bad” in this chapter, but it’s a well-controlled one: the POV shifts three or four times. It’s pretty seamless, though, and it creates a sense of the chaos as Hell erupts in war.

Pretty much everyone who’s read this loves Peter’s line at the end. But my favorite line is this:

A moment later, Raphael’s urgent voice: God says “Remember your strength.”

Gabriel shored up Israfel, slipped out of Satan’s hold again, and then had to brace Israfel once more.

Quit being cryptic, he prayed. I’ve got a lot going on here.

Yes, he’s shot that line at God Almighty. I love him.

Chapter 25 has a number of sweet “wrap up” type moments. There’s the care of the Cherubim for Israfel, their common loss in the knowledge they can no longer have (and the Seraphim’s detachment from the same knowledge) and then the moment where Gabriel and Raphael lose a bet. My father and Patient Husband both commented about the end of the chapter, “That blowed up good!” 

(For the record, my father says God likes big explosions too, based on how the universe began. But that’s debatable.)

This has been a fun run. Next week when the epilogue runs, I’ll wrap up the commentary, and then we can start a letter-writing campaign to make Bill contract me for the other two Seven Archangels books.

Chapter 22 of Annihilation is one of the fun chapters. Chapter 23 has one laugh-out-loud moment, but really it’s notable because it’s from Satan’s POV, and he’s an intriguing character to write.

As usual, there may be spoilers below, so if you’re reading along with the free chapters at MindFlights, don’t read this until you’ve read the chapter.

The bit with the trumpet is fun, when you have three different angels playing the same instrument three different ways. Also, the banter about being fanatical makes me laugh (“That’s obsessive-compulsive with a hyphen.”) But what makes this chapter fun is the scene at the gate.

The Maskim have all assembled, and they want Camael back. Satan does two things in this scene that make me laugh lout loud. The first is his sheer broken-recordness. “I want my lieutenant.” No matter how the angels try to engage him, he keeps going back to that.

And the other is something that happens every time Satan and Michael meet on official business during the entire run of this series: Satan looks right past him and says, “Is anyone in charge here?” I’m not sure whether he’s doing that to call attention to Michael’s lower nature (he’s only an Archangel, from the 8th order) or whether he simply doesn’t recognize Michael’s authority. Regardless, it’s funny.

In this chapter, you also see Satan caught off-guard by Michael’s request to see the room where Gabriel died. He’s so unsentimental about using people that whenever someone loses an opportunity for self-advancement for emotional reasons (as we saw when Mephistopheles was so despondent) it surprises him. Michael could have asked for anything, but instead he asks for something Satan considers useless.

Satan also considers Cherub/Seraph bonds to be nothing but irritating, as we see in chapter 23. He’s openly disgusted by being able to feel Mephistopheles and Beelzebub interacting through their bond, and as an outsider, most readers find his revulsion kind of funny. Overall, though, it’s just another aspect of how he feels about anything that could weaken him. The same way he tried to burn off any of Gabriel’s spiritual residue from himself, he wouldn’t want to be emotionally hitched to a Cherub, or to anyone, really. It makes him strong and weak at the same time.

Why God liked to do things in pairs Lucifer would never understand. Angels functioned perfectly fine alone, but these inexorable pairings simultaneously increased and decreased their usefulness. Split Irin, depressed Cherubim, defensive Seraphim…it was too bad he hadn’t convinced any Thrones to join him. They were reclusive, and if he could have brought onboard even one of them, he could have fired the rest of the Maskim.

The pairing he doesn’t mention here is a guardian/charge pairing, but you haven’t seen much of that in this book.

And if you have read it already, one of the moments I love most is when you realize what Remiel told Camael to do.

Overall, these two chapters are pretty demon-intensive, but they’ve got a certain spark to them that makes it interesting without glamorizing evil. They were fun to write, and a good wind-up for the showdown to come in the final chapters.