Building a Character

In my last post, I discussed the use of psychedelic drugs in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD. A fascinating video featuring the late Dr. Richard Rockefeller, provides a great background on PTSD, how it affects those who have it and those around them, and how therapists treat the condition.

A key theme in the sequel to Revelation 11, tentatively entitled, Continuing Revelation, is the main character's reaction to the stress-inducing events described in Revelation 11. Dr. Rockefeller's description of PTSD gave me a roadmap for continuing to build the character of Ben "Trog" Davis.

Dr. Rockefeller noted that while many of us experience, post-traumatic stress, it only becomes a disorder when the brain fails to move the traumatic memory out of the amygdala, which largely processes current ongoing events, into the parts of the brain that store memories. He explained that PTSD sufferers continue to experience the trauma as an ongoing event. They literally see and experience the trauma again seeing the people and objects present at the original event as if it were occurring at that moment.

While virtually everyone experiences post-traumatic stress, not everyone develops PTSD. Dr. Rockefeller explained that those who had suppressed memories from childhood stress are more likely to develop PTSD as an adult. So soldiers who survive the same IED attack in battle may have very different reactions to the event based on their prior experiences.

To treat PTSD, therapists must get back to that underlying trauma and allow the individual to process it into memory. LSD, ecstasy, and other medications that break down the walls harboring these suppressed memories allow the PTSD sufferer to explore their painful past in a safe environment.

Of course, to a novelist safe is boring. Trog will not be safe. The drugs the therapists give him may reveal more truth than he can handle. The intervention he needs may come from agents of God, Satan, or humans. Trog will have to judge whether what he sees is real or not. He may suffer from supernaturally induced PTSD.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

I read obituaries. Specifically, I read the New York Times obituaries. These obituaries of famous people either remind me of long forgotten events or introduce me, posthumously, to fascinating people with whom I had been unfamiliar. Dr. Richard Rockefeller, sadly, fell into the latter category.

The famous name grabbed my attention, but his life’s story proved far more interesting than I would have guessed. Dr. Rockefeller was David Rockefeller’s son making him the great-grandson of the family scion John D. Rockefeller. Last week, Dr. Rockefeller took off in his single-engine Piper Meridian in dense fog and crashed into trees not far beyond the Westchester County, New York Airport runway.

In his 65 years, Dr. Rockefeller advised and oversaw many of his family’s philanthropic efforts and was one of the guiding forces behind Doctors Without Borders. Almost as a footnote, the obituary mentioned he spent his later years working on treatments for those suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder or PTSD.

A day later I was researching the sequel to Revelation 11. I plan to put Ben “Trog” Davis, the protagonist, through some serious trauma, as if a running gun battle, false imprisonment, and two concussions in Revelation 11 weren’t enough. In particular, I was researching the use of ‘psychedelic’ drugs to treat PTSD.

In the 1950s, Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, claimed that LSD could provide the “ego reduction [that] makes the influx of God’s grace possible”. British psychotherapist, Ronald Sandison coined the term psycholitic therapy, which is the use of low to medium doses of psychedelic drugs, repeatedly at intervals of 1–2 weeks. Psycholitic, Sandison claimed, meant “soul dissolving”. For a novel where the protagonist must determine whether or not his troubles result from human conflict or spiritual warfare, these references were invaluable.

The final piece of the puzzle occurred when I went on the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies website and found a video featuring Dr. Richard Rockefeller discussing the use of MDMA or “ecstasy” for treating PTSD. “Trog” doesn’t know it yet, but he is about to have his consciousness expanded. If any of you are friends with Ben on Facebook , don’t let him know what the future holds. He is blissfully unaware of what God and Satan have in store for him.

Haunted by Kennedy

I was five years-old when President Kennedy was assassinated. Even at that young age, I knew something fundamental had changed. The memories remain very real.

Experts tell us that memories are not really archived in our brains, but rather rebuilt each time we reach for them. We overlay them with other detail enhancing some details, deleting others and ultimately placing the memories in context. So memories from childhood have been reconstructed countless times. I can only wonder how different my current recollections are from their originals.

One such memory of an event occurring just weeks after the assassination served as the basis for a chapter in my upcoming novel, Revelation 11. On a cold December day I played outside on our swing set. Looking up, I saw what looked like a black figure standing on a cloud looking down at me. What began as curiosity, turned to fear as I watched this strange apparition for several minutes. Ultimately, I ran inside, but never told my parents or my brother about the event until years later. To this day, I don't know why.

The event's fictional version appears below to give you a foretaste of the novel. It will be published in time for Easter 2014.

December 1963

Epiphany

“Who is the president now, mommy?” Ben Davis asked.

“President Johnson.” She replied.

He had asked the same question each day for two weeks as if changing presidents could now be a daily occurrence. The five-year-old had come in from playing for lunch two Fridays before to see his mother crying in front of the television. He remembered looking at the screen and seeing a large room filled with people moving back and forth in confusion. The announcer had said the room was the luncheon that President Kennedy was going to address, but he had been assassinated.

“What does assassinated mean, mommy?”

“It’s when someone important is killed.”

A large, black man crossed the screen in a white server’s coat. The tears streamed down his face. Ben had never seen a grown man cry like that.

Over the next days, images of death flooded the TV screen-the President’s body in state, the funeral cortege, the burial at Arlington.

In the gray days that followed, angst fed the nation’s subconscious. Even children like Ben knew something was different as a pall fell over the nation with the first days of winter. He heard stories that psychics had predicted the assassination, that a family received a message on Ouija board reading, “Thank you for praying for me while I was in purgatory.”

“What’s purgatory, mommy?”

“It’s something Catholics believe in. You don’t need to worry about it.”

“Was President Kennedy a Catholic?”

“Yes, he was.”

“So he has to worry about purgatory, right?”

Even at this age, he could tell when his mother was uncomfortable with a question. “That’s hard to say. Why don’t you go out and play on the swings until dinner?”

Ben bundled up against the cold, gray day. Dark, low clouds floated by against the lighter gray matte above them. He swung on the swings, watched the sky begin to succumb to the winter evening’s gloom. A small dark spot near one of the low, gray clouds caught his eye for a moment, then disappeared behind in the swirling vapor.

He continued to swing and look around the neighborhood to see if any of his friends were out playing. But this was the Cumberland Valley's appointed dinner hour and they were all crowded into the identical postwar crackerbox rancher eat-in kitchens.

His mother always saw the local custom of eating dinner precisely at five o’clock as peculiar. As a point of pride, and to accommodate his father, Jeff Sr.’s habit of having a few drinks before coming home, Ben’s family ate at 6—6:30, whenever, but never at five. Most likely, it would get dark before dinner and his mother would call him in.

He could just barely make out the sun’s position over the western mountains through the gray. He stood up to push off and swing as high as possible, pointing his toes and throwing his head back to look at the sky above him. The dark spot hovered above him in the clouds. Planting his feet to stop the swing, he stared up. More clearly defined now, the spot had a distinctive shape; a head, shoulders, and body apparently standing on the cloud. Long flowing hair crowned the robed figure. The fading light glinted off the suggestion of an eyebrow. Its face appeared to be looking down directly at him. To Ben, the figure looked like the silhouette of Jesus, the face subsumed in shadow.

The dark Christ moved as the cloud moved. What Ben imagined to be the face continued to gaze at him. He looked around his neighborhood. No one was out. All the dutiful diners safely huddled in their homes.
The more Ben identified the form’s distinct features, the more curiosity gave way to fear. He wanted to tell someone, anyone …or at least not be alone. But the five o’clock suburban dinner communion trumped all, even a heavenly figure standing on a cloud. Ben took one last look across the haunted landscape, saw no one, and ran inside to the light and warmth of home.

The End is Near

Wow! Has it really been since March that I posted something? Well, time flies when you're busy.

Revelation 11, my first novel, is complete and is off to the editor. I would describe it as Deliverance meets the The Da Vinci Code. I've tried to capture the concept of a man who views himself as civilized being thrust into a primitive world and forced to make difficult choices. Deliverance is essentially a retelling of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. The main character in Revelation 11 is Trog Davis, a hard-living Harrisburg reporter, who is assigned to cover a gruesome murder in isolated Shade Gap, Pennsylvania. So rather than the navigating Cahulawassee or Congo rivers, Davis traverses the Pennsylvania mountains via the PA turnpike's tunnels, each moving him farther from civilization.

Davis soon discovers that the dead minister was a childhood friend of his who had told him years before that he was one of the two witnesses identified in Chapter 11 of the Book of Revelation. Before he even arrives in Shade Gap, he learns that the minister's megachurch also believes he is one of the witnesses and will rise from the dead in three and a half-days.

Trog tries to sift through Biblical prophecy and present day murder clues to find the truth. But the truth can be elusive, especially when Trog looks inward.

Work, Work, Work

Here is an update on various writing projects I have on tap. A revised version of In the Shadow of Midnight: Daedalus-a tale of Savannah will be released in early April. It will include photographs and some of the blog postings I've done explaining the backstory. Around the same time, my first novel, Revelation 11 will be published by Valhalla Press. It will be in Kindle format to start and others will be added later. FYI, Kindle formats work on all PCs and MACs. You can download and read even if you do not have a Kindle reader.

I plan to begin work on a second novel almost immediately entitled SNUF. It is more of a science fiction dystopian story of a man whose job it is to permanently delete files from computers around the world. SNUF stands for Specially Noted Unrecoverable File-the code his corporate bosses use to identify those bits of information targeted for destruction.

I also plan to get significant work in on a story called Militia's Mischief, which is also the name of an online video game favored by right-wing extremists in the novel. They use the game to launder money and illegally move weapons to trouble spots around the world. The protagonist is a novelist who starts out investigating the game, makes a few outrageous posts and then finds himself the target of several different government investigations. Despite the fact that he is quite liberal, the right-wing media adopts him as a hero. The complications ensue.

This should keep me busy the rest of the year.

Musings on Death

It is winter and I am thinking of death. The Northeastern winter is a punishment to be endured. No longer the magical season of snow, it has been globally warmed and weather channeled into slush storms and wind chills. Beauteous snowstorms and winter wonderlands belong to the past, having escaped to the north ahead of onrushing greenhouse gases.

This year, the season’s first snowman has thawed and refrozen into a dirty, hardened gray ice pile in the brown grass. We’ve plucked the hat from the corpse and thrown out its carrot nose lest the decay metaphor take on a nasty olfactory component.

Two winters ago, my mother died. She had asked for a funeral at a defunct chapel to be performed by a now retired minister. As the arrangements were made as best as they could, the weeks dragged on. We grieved in suspended animation until time could be pried from everyone’s schedule to meet, grieve and remember.

The experience made me decide two things. First, I always thought I would be cremated, but you don’t get off that easy. I’m going into the ground with whatever I have left and you better bury me before I start to stink. Secondly, I’m going to have an old fashioned Irish wake. The drinks are on me, or more precisely my life insurance proceeds. So if I mean anything to you, drop whatever you’re doing, get to my wake, and attend my funeral. I’m working on an efficient way to let everyone know I’ve died. I think Facebook should create some way to simply change your status to dead.

Regardless of how you are informed, here’s my point, if you can’t make it on three or four days notice, I wasn’t that important to you and I don’t want you drinking my booze even if I’m dead at the time.

I may sound bitter, but I’m doing this for all of you. Come party, drink, reminisce, laugh, cry, and then get back to living.

Twisted Metal, Altered Perspectives

I recently visited Savannah…again. One of the trip’s purposes was to take pictures of various sites mentioned in my story In the Shadow of Midnight: Daedalus-a tale of Savannah. The pictures will be included as bonus material in an upcoming second edition.

In early October, I drove to Savannah’s beautiful Bonaventure Cemetery to find Robert, Tina and Wahl Stoddard’s graves. Stopping at the administrative building, I entered their names in the automated search kiosk, which then printed a map showing the graves’ location.

I’d been to Bonaventure several times before, but mainly visited the more tourist centric graves. Johnny Mercer is buried next to his wife and mother. Each marker is inscribed with one of his song lyrics.

Pulitzer winning poet, Conrad Aiken’s grave is a bench. During his many trips to his parents’ grave at Bonaventure, he would drink martinis while looking at their markers, each with the same day of death—the day at age nine when he responded to two gunshots in the family living room. His father had shot his mother and then himself. Aiken went to live in Massachusetts with family members. From there he went to Harvard where he and classmate T.S. Eliot compared and clashed over each other’s couplets.

The moss-draped trees filter the sunlight falling on the sand and pebble lanes. Low granite blocks border the six-grave family plots. Following the map, I follow the path toward the Wilmington River. Reading each family name until I find the Wahl plot that belonged to Tina’s family. Bob and Tina’s joint gravestone with Wahl’s marker just in front of it were all decorated. My trip was shortly after both death anniversaries—Bob and Tina in late September and Wahl’s just a few days before in October.

Decorative pebbles anchored the flowers on both stones, but Wahl’s grave also had a rusted piece of curved metal artistically arranged as a border for the flower display. As I speculated on its significance (a symbol of the car he died in or even a piece of it? Did he like metal music?), I began to think that more people than just the Stoddards and their friends may have perspectives on their tragic story.

What about the two friends Wahl picked up that tragic day, Carolyn Alexander and David Womack? Once in the car with Wahl, they were doomed by the love of speed he inherited from his father. As sad as Wahl’s death and the subsequent disintegration of Bob and Tina’s lives were, surely the pain in those families would have been bitter as well.

As I said, I’ve been to Bonaventure before. It is an incredibly beautiful place. The sounds of singing birds, the light, and the salt breeze have always left me with a sense of peace before—not this time. Ultimately, what makes a story is conflict. Conflicts leave winners and losers in their wake. This story had no winners, save the reader who heeds the cautionary tale’s lessons and the writer who learns to look for different perspectives.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location. -Flannery O'Connor