Leaping From the Lion's Mouth

A lot of you probably didn't know I'm a musician, yeah? Hell, a lot of you probably don't know I'm a writer, but I'm working on clearing up that little omission too, so might as well give you a bit more of my own backstory.

I've always loved music, and by the time I was in high school I was writing (really terrible) songs. The songs got better as I started experiencing the world, and through my 20s I seriously entertained the idea of being a musician full time, in one capacity or another. I worked in a recording studio, played shows with friends, and eventually recorded a couple of albums, even. About the time I was in the studio on the second album (Obsidian Bridges), I started looking at solo shows. I played piano, did a lot of drumming with other bands, but on the rare occasion I tried to do my own thing. One evening I was out with some friends and, on a lark, hopped up on stage for an open mic night. They had a lovely black grand piano and I just couldn't stop myself. I played two songs - the first was one of the first songs I'd ever written, an instrumental called "Between the Mountains and the Sea". It was a song I played so many times I could do it in my sleep. I opened with that, and, buoyed by the reception from the audience, jumped into a song I'd been working on all week in the studio, called "Shades of Grey."

It's a nice and contemplative piece I'd written about love and the struggles to find a balance between certainty and doubt, and it was one of my favorite vocal pieces on the album. So I launched into it, and got to the end of the first chorus...and forgot the words.

Now, I've done this before, you know? Anyone who's been on a stage even a single time has had that moment where you forget what you were gonna say. But this time... I completely choked. Like, stopped right there in the middle of the song and froze. That's never happened to me before, and.... man, it was one of the most potently horrible two seconds in my life. I managed to finish the song - don't ask me how - abandoning the verse and cutting it back to only one chorus, got off the stage and hid in my seat. I think there was a smattering of applause, but I could barely hear anything over the pounding in my ears.

I felt like I was drowning.

I never got back up on stage to play in front of people again. It's been, I think twenty years, and I don't even play for people privately much anymore. We have a piano - it needs to be tuned and repaired - but every time I look at Amelia, I remember choking. Ugh.

Failure sucks. It really does. It haunts you. And I know, I know, when you fall off the horse, you have to get back up. Yeah yeah yeah, blah blah blah. It's easy to say phrases like that. It's easy to read advice off like that. But when you're the one who took the punch (even a self-sustained one), only you know is the suffocation.

So, I stopped performing, and eventually I stopped recording as well - though for different reasons - and I drifted into several years of unartistic life. I frequently thought about performing again. Or writing. But each time it would enter my thoughts, I would feel the frigid grip of failure squeezing the life out of me.

Fast forward. The options to be a full time musician - studio or otherwise - feel long since abandoned, but I still feel the yearning to create something. And suddenly, my old friend storytelling drops in, and, I'm hooked all over again. Short stories, novellas, novels, I can't write fast enough. I self publish. I submit to agents. I self publish more. I get signed, and, now, here we are, on the dawn of a new book.

And out of nowhere... the chilled bus of remembered failure turns the corner and draws a bead on me. What if the book sucks? What if nobody likes it? What if...?

It takes me the better part of a whole conversation with a couple friend of mine before I realize that this whole feeling isn't a new feeling at all, but an old one. A very old one. The glossy keys of the grand piano swim past my eyes, and I feel the familiar chill in my chest. The pounding in my ears. Well, s**t.

So there it is. Turns out choking in one arena can be choking in another. I hadn't actually known that they were compatible forms of stage terror. Lucky me.

But you know what? My obsession with pop culture references may help me. One of my favorite films, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the third AND FINAL installment in the Indiana Jones TRILOGY), contains a scene near the end of the film where Indiana must face three challenges of faith in order to proceed: the breath of god, the name of god and the path of god. Humility, Discipline and Trust.

Now, setting aside any religious connotations to those points, where it kind of applies here is that whenever we set about to perform some new task, these are pretty wonderful qualities to aspire to - but they're each difficult to really nail down well. And for me, I'm really wrestling with that twenty year stare down into the abyss. Logic doesn't work. There's no negotiation. There's no reasoning things out, beating them up, paying them off... it's just me and that moment of truth, where I have to step out into the nothingness and trust that something's gonna catch me.

We all have those moments, after all. It's something we haven't done, we haven't completed them, or something that we've tried and didn't succeed at. And now, that lingering shadow is burned into our optimism, and it's all we can see.

But at this point, the way I see it, we only have two options - to do nothing or to do something. And I've been doing nothing for twenty years, and that hasn't really worked out so well for me.

It's out of my hands now, anyway. I'm stepping off, into the void.

Let's see what happens.

Science as Faith

Several years ago, my wife and I took our daughter to the Pacific Science Center's exhibit on "Lucy", the current missing link for prehistoric human evolution. One of the last rooms had a mural which encircled the room, displaying an artist's rendering of what is suspected Lucy and her contemporaries looked like. Jillie asked me why all the people looked like apes and monkeys and not so much like people, so I explained that this is what some scientists believe they looked like - that some people believe that humans evolved from the same beings as apes did, which is why we resemble each other. We talked quietly, since it was a museum, after all, but I imagine in that relatively small chamber our voices carried.

A woman we did not know crossed the room towards us and interrupted our conversation to ask me: "Excuse me, but did I just hear you tell your daughter that some people 'believe' in evolution?"

Now, before I continue this conversation, let me confess a few things. First of all, I was raised pretty strictly on a couple principles which apply here. I was raised to believe in God and the Bible, and that God created the Earth and man in a "relative" six days (the exact time frame being irrelevant, more as a metaphor for the organizational process), and that man was created in the image or likeness of God. I was also raised to be respectful of other people's faith - to claim the right to believe as I feel is proper and to allow everyone else that same respect.

It's also important to note that I put a great deal of stock in science. I think science has done an amazing job of putting the facts together in a very logical and reasonable understanding of the history of our universe - where faith often relies upon metaphor to provide us meaning and context for our place in the world, science lays out the specifics of what happened, when and how. So my answer to my daughter was to help lay out a broader understanding of belief in general - for it is permissible to say that one may have faith in facts - to imply that any fact may not be subject to interpretation and context is as foolish as to suggest that one should believe in a Supreme Being without acknowledging that there is no way to prove such a belief.

So, back to the conversation.

I told her that, yes, she was correct.

She replied, "well, don't you think that's irresponsible?"

I won't lie. I really wanted to demand she explain how she dared to walk up to a complete stranger and try to tell him how to talk to his child RIGHT IN FRONT OF HIS CHILD, but it was a public place and it was, I told myself, a good opportunity to also show my daughter how to behave oneself. So I explained that I was pointing out to my daughter that many people across the world and throughout time have held beliefs as to the nature and origins of life, and though science has given us many answers, we continue to gain understanding - and we were teaching our daughter to understand how to find and trust her own appreciation for truth. I pointed out that as she grew up she was going to be confronted by weirdos who wanted to try to tell her how she was "supposed" to believe, and that I wanted her to be able to filter out the bullcrap from the material of substance.

I think she tried to say other things at some point, but the more I spoke, the more emphatic I felt. I pointed out that one day she was going to have to stand on her own when completely stupid strangers might, say, confront her in the middle of a museum in an effort to judge or condemn her views which they in fact knew nothing about, and I'd have to trust that I had sufficiently taught her how to understand her own views on the world, but while she'd need to keep an open mind, she'd also need to know how to ground herself against the potential for being carried away by the random object of philosophical insanity.

I added a few other choice words and then suggested to the woman the single factoid which most filled my thoughts - that walking up to a person she did not know in an effort to shame him in front of his child was perhaps the most mindlessly reckless thing a person could do.

I've had a lot of time to reflect over that entire conversation. I mean, I can understand her concern. Taking just one or two sentences out of context to the conversation my daughter and I were having, perhaps she was coming to the conclusion that I equated science with nothing more than an inkling of belief - that I was putting scientific research and theory (as many people do) side by side with supposition and myth; sort of a "well, we guess so" kind of hypothesis.

But I recognize that hypothesis does not mean merely "hypothetical." I understand that though scientific theories may change with new information, it does not suggest that it's simply a guess. Theories are reasoned understandings based upon hard facts and research. Evidence. It is "knowing" in a very real sense.

And yet, to a certain degree, faith is required as well. We can see the existence of black holes and dark matter, we can verify planets which could potentially sustain life, but until we are there, witnessing them in the flesh, they do necessitate a small degree in faith that no greater scientific laws which we have yet to discover might not prove us wrong.

This does not undermine the validity of science, it simply confirms the one undeniable facet of both science and religion share: the search for truth.

So at this point - assuming you've read along this far - you may be asking, "that's all well and good, Ren, but why are you talking about this today?"

Well, if you've read my novels, you already know, but assuming you haven't (and you won't hurt my feelings, though please - - I'd really appreciate if you picked one of them up because I'm quite fond of them), this is part of what inspired me to reverse the expectations on Science in my Tales of the Dead Man series. 

In the Steel Cities, Science is more than just a series of facts and theories - it is an expression of their faith. It is their religion. It is the foundation of their society. Build. Engineer. Design. Create. Let no ethereal and invisible bonds go undefined or unexplained. All reverence to the Hammer and the Wheel. It is their church, their structure, and their path. The Way of Steel and Steam. At its core, though, I wanted to explore how people believe. Faith is such an interesting human experience, both in the heart of an individual and in the congregation. I wanted to offer a metaphor of my own to describe how we approach new data; how new facts, new beliefs, challenge our cognition.

And of course, once we come face to face with new ideas... how do we move forward?

Overall, I wanted to craft this story to offer up these questions without telling people how they personally had to react - but offer the question itself and, with hope, give readers a chance to ask themselves that question and enjoy the experience in their own minds.

And I won't lie: I hope someday my museum friend will happen upon the books and find different ways to engage strangers on the subject of science. Yeah, probably not gonna happen, but I can't help but believe it's possible.

Aerthos: A World Divided

Where did Aerthos come from? Besides adding a syllable and flipping the A and the E, it was always meant to be a little bit like Earth. A bit of the Victorian, a bit of Blade Runner, it was always meant to be kind of familiar. How people gather here, how they grow, develop and evolve - at the individual level all the way up to a civilization, I wanted to build out the "what if they had....this?" into a sensible path that those of us here on Earth could read and imagine with little effort. But of course, that was where it started; things got a little weird on the way to the forum.

The temptation was to have placed these elements within Earth's own history. I'll admit that, it was one of the original concepts I played with when I was building out the world of Aerthos, prior to even the first YA books (The Chronicles of Aesirium) I wrote which now exist as a prequel series to the Tales of the Dead Man.

Way back in the beginning, it started out as a story about an 11-year-old girl named Romany, who was chosen as a monster-hunter - an angel of death who had little choice but to accept the mantle of protector for her small barely industrial town. A vampire killer, but with a notable twist in that she herself hovered between the realms of life and death, escorting those who were not allowed to linger there. I drew on the inspirations of my own childhood - anime, Japanese video games (Final Fantasy was chief among them), Star Wars, the Sandman comics by Neil Gaiman, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and so forth. But really, I just wanted to write a book for my daughter. She was looking at the world with fresh eyes, wondering about all those intangibles like life and death, love and hate, sense and insensibility. Order, chaos, entropy. 

She loved to ask questions.

In the years since I began these books, her questions have become broader, and the answers are increasingly more elaborate, more difficult to pin a definite response to. The world, as one grows into it, takes on nuanced philosophical challenges, and I wrestle with these concepts both as a father and a human being. And sometimes - okay, more than sometimes - these wrestling matches end up on the page.

In "Tales of the Dead Man", I've tried to move beyond a simple matter of right and wrong, more than to be brave or not, more than to define oneself in the face of difficulty. This make-believe world of Aerthos has problems which may feel familiar to readers. The people in the world are a divided people - split by philosophy, by geography, and by the color of their skin.

The Sky People - those who follow the ethereal path of the magical arts, a life more finely attuned to what they understand as the natural energy of the world, have, over the centuries become mostly of a darker pigmentation than those of their neighbors to the north, the technologically-centered inhabitants of the Steel Cities.

Although the world has visibly marked these two cultures as distinct, it is due to the stark contrast of their worldviews that has called them into conflict. The history of this division has followed them to their continents over thousands of years, and haunts all their interactions.

And it is into this great philosophical chasm which I throw my characters: the quest to save the world by stealing a dead man's body out from under the watchful gaze of the militant scientists.

Here's something that I've been thinking about a lot lately, though. Right now, in our actual real world, we've been experiencing divisions in so many deep and potent ways - and I worried a lot about romanticizing that in any manner. Division for the sake of division is not healthy or productive. And in the end, we generally tend to have more things in common than those things which divide us. So I worked very hard to prevent either of these groups - neither the Sky People or the Steel Cities - from being cast as the villains. I see it more like the simplified interpretation of the Yin/Yang - that within both halves the opposing energies can be found.

Adding to that is the sense that to every character, they often see themselves as the hero to their own story - and to that I'd add that a simple mustache-twirling, monologuing supervillain just never had a lot of appeal to me in this kind of story. Do a character's actions define them as an angel or devil, or do their motives condemn or elevate them?

These are the kinds of questions I love to explore; these are the metaphors I have woven into the threads of "Tales of the Dead Man". Over the next few weeks, I'm going to talk about some of these elements, as well as doing a bit more of an introduction to some of the main characters, the settings and offer a few insights into the world of Aerthos.

Please let me know what you think - or what questions you have. I'm excited to share these books, the three volumes of the Tales of the Dead Man. Come along, my friends. Let's walk the worlds and sing their songs. It's going to be a marvelous journey!

Pre-Order Bonus Offer!

Pre-orders are leading up to the launch date on June 23rd - - and I thought I'd sweeten the pot.

So, for the first 100 pre-sales of "Steel & Sky"  (including those of you who've already ordered it), I'm going to include a free copy of my album, "Obsidian Bridges" on CD.

Thjs will just count for the pre-sales, though, just for those purchases made before June 23rd.

Thank you and talk to you soon!

Pre Orders are Live!

Steel & Sky: Tales of the Dead Man, book one - is now available for pre-order! Swing on by THIS LINK to order a copy in either paperback or hardcover. Printing and shipping dates begin Friday, June 23rd - but you can order as soon as you like in order to get this novel in your hot little hands! After that, you should be able to either find it (or order it) in all bookstores, either online or brick and mortar. Also, I'm going to be starting to make in-store appearances, too - details to come as they lock these dates in - so I'll be there to sign copies or just chat about whatever happens to be on your mind. 

And if, going forward, you don't see your local town on the list, please let me know and I'll look into what our options might be for heading out your way. 

This is an exciting new step in my novels, so I'm really happy to share this! I hope you enjoy this new adventure with all the airships, pirates, angels of death, sandmen and giant robots I was legally allowed to cram into a single book!

(Spoiler alert: book two has EVEN MORE - but more on that soon!)

Special thanks to Marti and the wonderful folks at Doce Blant publishing, the extremely talented Fiona Jayde and KH Koehler, who brought this book up into the lovely form in which it now resides. 

More to come - things are starting to happen almost too quickly for me to keep up! 

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward...?

I'm horrible. Terrible. Just a wretch, right? 

Okay. So. I made a promise to myself several years ago that I would do everything in my power to keep things like politics and philosophy and so forth tucked away over there, out of sight, and let my stories entertain, offer a few philosophical soundbytes but otherwise remain as completely unpreachy as humanly possible. 

Now, I need you to understand that I'm TERRIBLE at that. 

But I've behaved. Mostly. And you're welcome. 

So meanwhile, you might be wondering, "Well, fine, Mister Ren, if you're gonna be so good at mostly keeping your damn crazy mouth shut, what HAVE you been doing?"

Well, here's my answer. Several months ago, I was signed by the wonderful folks at Doce Blant Publishing - and so if you've been noticing a few of my things have been vanishing from Amazon and other online sites, its because we've been going back and re-editing, redesigning and republishing the Tales of the Dead Man series. And so, with probably still a little bit more ado and a gentle flourish....

It will be hitting bookstores (online and brick and mortar) in June 2017. And, to launch this book in style, I'm going to be putting in an appearance at Rusty Scupper's Pirate Daze - oh yeah, that's right. I'm gonna party it up with some spectacular pirates (and belly dancers!) and you are invited too! Come on down and hang out!

We're setting up additional appearances as well, so watch this space (or, you know, follow me on Twitter, Facebook or over on the Doce Blant page, too. 

Meanwhile, work proceeds apace on "Automata", as well as "Sun & Stone: Tales of the Dead Man, book two". 2017 and 2018 are going to be fun and busy years. Hop in the time machine, my friends - it's gonna be a breathtaking journey!