wisb-Guardian-Express

JAY HARTLOVE: Hello, I am Jay Hartlove, author of The Chosen, a supernatural thriller published by Damnation Books and winner of Best Thriller by the Independent eBook Awards 2012.  Today I have here in the studio a special guest from The Chosen. I would like to welcome to the show, Joseph de Alvarado. Welcome Mr. de Alvarado. Thank you for joining us.

JOSEPH DE ALVERADO:  It’s de Alverado, with an ‘e.’

JAY:   Pardon me? Oh, sorry. Yes, I see here, it is an ‘e.’ My mistake.

JOSEPH:   Names matter. They have meanings.

JAY:   Okay. I believe you adopted this name from Silas Alverado, the man who brought you into this plane of existence. Is that right?

JOSEPH:   Yes. His name means, ‘Bringer of the Truth’.

JAY:   Interesting. Now, I know you are a very private person so I appreciate your agreeing to chat today.

JOSEPH:   You’re welcome. If by private you mean I don’t seek publicity, then you’re right. I rather think of myself as too busy for a lot of conversation.

JAY:   Too busy with your work, yes? Are you still the captain of the Purgatory?

JOSEPH:   Yes, among other things.

JAY:   You were an executive assistant to Silas Alverado.

JOSEPH:   I still am his Executive Officer.

JAY:   Didn’t that job end rather abruptly when he went missing?

JOSEPH:   No, in fact my responsibilities grew upon his departure. I am continuing his research work, and I am still searching for him.

JAY:   Do you mean you’re searching for a way to bring him back?

JOSEPH:   Yes. I am a reflection of the Opener of the Ways. If anyone can find a way, it should be me.

JAY:   You and I have chatted about this previously, but let me ask you a few questions about that for our listeners. As I understand it, you are an archangel of Ptah given physical form on Earth by
Mr. Alverado. So how does that work? Magic doesn’t really function here on Earth, so how can you manifest your abilities as a supernatural being?

JOSEPH:   It’s not that magic doesn’t work here, it just needs to be converted. What you think of as magic breaks the laws of physics that are part of this plane, getting something for nothing, which you cannot do. To create the desired effect, you have to know how to use the laws of physics.

JAY:   So you had to learn quantum physics to perform your magic?

JOSEPH:   No, the synthesis comes naturally to me. I come from a plane where physical laws are much more malleable. I already know what the effect looks like. A human magician needs to learn the physical laws and then how to bend them to his will. My Master spent his life learning both the scientific and the arcane, because they have to be worked together to create change in this world. This is why most human magicians can’t accomplish any physical result. They have only learned the arcane techniques and not how to use them together with Physics.

JAY:   I imagine modern physicists would love to learn the secrets that, as you say, come naturally to you.

JOSEPH:   Well, that’s what My Master was attempting back in 2001. The Tablets of Aeth allow humans to understand the true nature of your physical laws, which allows humans to see how they can be molded to your will. They are literally the keys to your universe. Without these keys, I could not explain what I do to a human physicist in terms that would allow you to duplicate what I do. I don’t know how to show these secrets to you. No creature in history has been able to do so, except one.

JAY:   That would be the Demon Prince of Liars.

JOSEPH:   Correct. He alone had the audacity and the cunning to reduce these godly secrets to a form that humans can grasp. Of course, he only presented these images as part of his ruse to destroy Pharaoh.

JAY:   That was in the story of Exodus?

JOSEPH:   Yes.

JAY:   Were you there when that happened?

JOSEPH:   No. I was indisposed during that time.

JAY:   Were you in fact in prison?

JOSEPH:   Yes, I had been falsely convicted by my fellow angels of using names that can only be used by evil ones.

JAY:   You mean demons?

JOSEPH:   Yes.

JAY:   I believe Sanantha Mauwad and Charles Redmond thought you were a demon back in 2001.

JOSEPH:   They too were mistaken.

JAY:   Now Doctor Mauwad and Mr. Redmond believe in Voodoo, so how did you fit into their beliefs?

JOSEPH:   They worship my pantheon without realizing it. The gods of ancient Egypt were adopted by the peoples of West Africa and given new names when Egypt was conquered by the Romans. When those peoples were kidnapped and forced into slavery in the Americas, the Egyptian religion was blended with the Christian dogma of the slave masters to become Voodoo. The gods they worship are the gods of Egypt, just with different names. Doctor Mauwad identified that in her religion, I am a manifestation of Guede L’Orage.

JAY:   That’s very interesting how history and religion play hand in hand. I guess that means the Haitians were keeping your gods alive into the modern era.

JOSEPH:   Indeed. I found Haiti a very welcoming place.

JAY:   Let’s get back to your personal history. Some 3200 years ago you were unjustly cast out as a demon, then Mr. Alverado figured out you are in fact an angel, and set you free here on Earth. I guess you owe him a lot.

JOSEPH:   Nothing less than my eternal loyalty.

JAY:   Mr. Alverado was there, though, correct, during Exodus?

JOSEPH:   Yes, his earlier incarnation was given the position of High Priest of Amun after his Master was unveiled to be a traitor.

JAY:   So he was the priest who had to pick up the pieces after the Egyptian defeat in Exodus. Did anyone know this traitor High Priest was in fact a demon?

JOSEPH:   No. the demon covered his tracks very well.

JAY:   Now wasn’t his relationship to his old Master at the heart of why you had the fight in 2001?

JOSEPH:   Yes, my Master had seen his Master use the Tablets of Aeth during Pharaoh’s conflict with Moses. So Mr. Alverado knew these images existed at one time in the physical world. His quest was to reincarnate from the Land of the Dead, come back and capture the demon, and wrest the Tablets from the demon so they could be used again here on Earth.

JAY:   And he nearly pulled it off?

JOSEPH:   Yes. Nearly.

JAY:   I notice you are full of pride when you talk about Mr. Alverado, but just now you seemed a little taken aback. Was there something about how the 2001 fight went down that still bothers you?

JOSEPH:   I replay the episode in my head all the time, trying to see if there could have been something else I could do that would have given us a better outcome. But there isn’t.

JAY:   So you wish you could have done more. Sounds like the sort of thing you could discuss with a psychiatrist. You know a good one.

JOSEPH:   Yes, but I can’t see myself hiring Doctor Mauwad to help me sort through my feelings of failure.

JAY:   She is probably the only shrink in the world you could talk to, since she knows who you are and what you went through.

JOSEPH:   By the end of that conflict, I also considered her a friend. I would never burden her with reliving what was a very traumatic time for her.

JAY:   I believe she has since moved to Malaysia.

JOSEPH:   Yes, she seems happy there with her former colleague Doctor Herrera.

JAY:   So you keep tabs on her?

JOSEPH:   I keep  tabs  on a lot of things.

JAY:   Okay. That kind of brings me to something I wanted to ask you. With Mr. Alverado no longer in a position to exercise his control over you, you’ve been a free agent for the last eleven years. The last time you walked the Earth was thousands of years ago. How do you like our modern world?

JOSEPH:   You didn’t plan for how many of you there are now. This planet is a nearly unique paradise in all the universe, and you are feeding on it with the abandon of mold consuming a loaf of bread.

JAY:   I think we are becoming aware that we need to take a more proactive stand on the environment. You obviously have a strong feeling about this. Do you think we are doing too little too late?

JOSEPH:   It’s not a matter of how I feel. It’s what I see.

JAY:   Oh, that’s right. You have the ability to see the truth. Can you tell us about that?

JOSEPH:   My god Ptah brought order out of chaos with his eyes. Most of what you consider my magic comes from my eyes. I can indeed see the true nature of what I look at.

JAY:   You can do other things with your eyes too, like throw lightning. You also teleport. How does that use your eyes?

JOSEPH:   I have to see the destination in my mind’s eye.

JAY:   That’s great. So are we doomed?

JOSEPH:   You need to do a lot more than you are now. Things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better. But no, you are not doomed. If you were on a path to break the planet, the gods would intervene.

JAY:   Really? Okay then. Well, let me ask you this. What intrigues you about what we have built? What do you find good in the modern world?

JOSEPH:   The Internet shows a longer planning, forward thinking that I find admirable. For most of history people have hoarded information for its value. Now people give information away and raise the playing field for all players.

JAY:   How do you mean?

JOSEPH:   Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, Wikileaks, all have put information at your fingertips, so that knowing how to do something is no longer among the limited resources you have to marshal for an enterprise. People are freed to try more things, invent more things, be more helpful to the world.

JAY:   I am really surprised to hear you say that. You come from a rigidly hierarchical society where everyone has his place and knows where he fits in. This free flow of information promotes a mobility that I would think you’d find offensive.

JOSEPH:   I did at first. My first reaction was to ask, ‘Where are the gods? Why have they failed to maintain order? Where are the institutions of control?’ I found your society shockingly disorganized. So I went back and learned your history, and realized your civilization has been moving toward mobility all along. Our old order, with a place for everyone and everyone in his place, gave comfort to the individual and predictability and manageability to those in higher castes. As you pointed out, 3200 years is a long time.

If you are going to let people rise and fall on their own merits, then fairness matters. I have come to accept that my sense of order may be out of place, but as a guardian at heart, injustice is something I cannot tolerate. Over the last eleven years I have come to see the Internet as a means of assuring justice. It is harder to cheat someone who can instantly fact check. I am still amused by some of the quirks that have grown up around how it is used. The Internet was so clearly built by humans. It is steeped in your idiosyncrasies.

JAY:   Can you give me an example?

JOSEPH:   On Facebook, when a user dies, often his friends continue to maintain the deceased’s profile page so there is a place people can come and pay their respects. Except people then leave messages for the departed as if they were actually talking to the deceased. This shows me that people have not changed in thousands of years. This is exactly why the Egyptians built false doors in the sides of their tombs. People would come and talk to the departed, looking at the door as if it might open and the deceased’s spirit would appear and talk back to them. I am not criticizing the practice. I am just amused that for all the changes you have made to your world, people really haven’t changed at all.

JAY:   You heard it here, folks, and from a being who can see the truth. That’s all the time we have today. I thank you for accepting my invitation. I have thoroughly enjoyed sharing this time with you.

JOSEPH:   You’re welcome.

About the Author:

Jay Hartlove has been writing professionally for 30 years. His writing has been published in games, newspapers, magazines, legal white papers and online articles. His hobby is religious scholarship, and he blogs on spirituality.

Jay exhaustively researches the facts before he inserts his fantastical explanations. He sees the world as already filled with scary coincidences waiting to be discovered.

He describes his writing as, “Dark connections revealed.” You can read about the research that goes into his books at jaywrites.com.

About the Book:
Running from his dark past, former Duvalier hit man Charles Redmond is forced to take sides in a battle that has been raging since Exodus, between a power mad magician named Silas Alverado and Sammael, the Demon Prince of Liars. When Charles' beloved Voodoo is threatened with extinction, he must wager his life between pure evil and the man who could destroy the world. Charles' psychiatrist Sanantha Mauwad steps into this maelstrom of nightmares, violence and insanity to help Charles find his strength. She tries to save Charles' mind but can she save his soul?

Hi everyone! It is really great to see you all on Day 5 of my virtual book blog tour. I truly appreciate your support! A huge thank you goes to Shaun for hosting me today!

I am CJ Bolyne, a first time author. I have wanted to write for a very long time, but like I am sure many other first time authors felt, I was always afraid about what others would think of my writing. Finally, four years ago, I started my first book and thought that, if nothing else, at least I did this for myself!

I was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. After a few years, my family moved about an hour south of Winnipeg, to a little town called Sarto, Manitoba. Yep, one blink, and you miss it. The remainder of my childhood was spent in the country. Yes I am a country girl at heart.

I must admit, I did not read a lot as a child. I read only if I had too and that was usually for school purposes. How I hated the boring books in school!

When I was much younger, I felt that my idea of the type of stories I wanted to write were not considered mainstream. When I expressed them to close friends, my ideas were considered too weird. Some said that I had a demented mind. (teehee – what author doesn’t, right?) I laughed about that. I knew that I did not always think the same as many around me. So, okay, my ideas were not considered popular. However, I’m happy to see that in the last decade, the fantasy, SciFi, etc. genres have made a real impact and I am so happy that there are many out there that thought the way I did! This, in part, has inspired me to give it a shot.

So many books have influenced me, such as, Cradle and All by James Patterson, City of Bones, part of Cassandra Clare’s The Mortal Instruments series, Dracula by Anne Rice, The Twilight Series by Stephanie Meyer, and of course, the Harry Potter series by JK Rowling. Yes, I am a Harry Potter fan!

However, of them all, James Patterson has to be my favourite author. I have always admired his imagination and his ability to write the books he wanted to write. Although, I also admire JK Rowling. In fact, it was after I saw a biography on JK Rowling that I really pushed myself to give writing a real attempt.

The book I am reading now is The Magician’s Apprentice by Trudi Canavan.

When I write, I write as though I am telling a story aloud, as I hear it in my head.

My first serious attempt at writing started four years ago. That is when I started writing Trinity. Due to some personal obligations however, I had to take a break from writing and it was only after I gave my then unfinished book to someone who’s honest opinion, I valued. Her encouragement gave me the courage to finish. Now I can’t wait to write many more as I have so many more stories to tell.

What I learned from writing this book is, it is not that easy. You may have the idea, know how you will begin and end the story, but it’s filling in the rest and making it a good and interesting read – now that’s the tough part!

About CJ Bolyne:
CJ Bolyne is a first time author and Trinity is her first book.  Born and raised in Southeastern Manitoba, Canada, CJ was an avid reader dreaming of the day she would write her own fantasy / sci-fi book.  When she’s not writing, CJ spends her time on her farm with her husband and multiple pets. She runs a full-time pet grooming business.  Her first book, Trinity, is the first in the series.  Bolyne is also on Facebook.
About Trinity:
Payton thought she had a normal, everyday life. When a mysterious man suddenly appears, he shatters her world telling her that her entire life has been a lie. She is a god with the Guardians having lived for 1000's of years. The Anords know where she is and he needs to protect her at all costs. Payton holds the key to saving humanity. However, a mysteriously familiar woman complicates everything.

Trinity is available on Smashwords, Lulu, and Amazon.

(This post is part of CJ Bolyne's Trinity Blog Tour.  You can find other guest posts here.)
The Giveaway:

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I'm amused.  I didn't ask for them, but Oxford University Press sent me two books on critical theory and interpreting literature.  They are:

1. How to Interpret Literature:  Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies by Robert Dale Parker
   (A fairly small book containing sections exploring the major fields of criticism -- structuralism, postcolonialism, deconstruction, etc.)
2. Critical Theory:  A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies by Robert Dale Parker
   (A much larger book providing actual readings from the major fields of criticism -- Fanon, Marx, Foucault, Derrida, White, Propp, and so on and so forth.)

Now, I suspect these are meant to be texts assigned together, since they are by the same author and serve drastically different functions for learning goals.  Unfortunately, I don't teach critical theory on its own...yet.  I might one day.  I do, however, teach literature courses, which I find are benefited by intense discussion of literary theory, for which the first, smaller book might prove useful.  I'm currently using a book called Texts and Contexts:  Writing and Literature and Critical Theory by Steve J. Lynn from Pearson; I quite like it, but have run into the awful problem of students not reading the assigned readings.

Parker's smaller book, however, might prove more beneficial to me in the future, as its sections are broken down into smaller pieces (Lynn's book couples together all the schools of cultural and historical criticism into one chapter, whereas Parker splits them out).  Likewise, it seems to get into the particulars of these discourses in a way Lynn's book does not, though this is from a very limited, cursory glance which might prove false in the future.

This does not mean I'm going to suddenly drop Lynn for Parker; rather, it means I have some thinking to do for future courses.  Either way, I am excited to have these books, even if I can't justify teaching the monstrous tome containing some amazing selections from important figures in critical theory.  Now I really want to teach such a class...desperately... I wonder if OUP would let me create a book that crams together parts of each book.  That would be amazing.

Anywhoodles!

(Originally posted on Google+ in a slightly different form.

I'm currently enjoying Enterprise, one of the least-liked of the various Star Trek incarnations.  I won't say that Enterprise is the worst of the lot; in many ways, it has the great adventure and anthological introspection commonly found in everything from Star Trek to The Next Generation to Voyager (and, I suppose, DS9 -- my least favorite).  Yet despite that, I think the problem with Enterprise is precisely that it maintains the format Star Trek fans have become familiar with in every single previous incarnation available.  It's an anthology show.  Every episode offers some new idea, which has to be explored and resolved, more or less, in 45 minutes.  What little overarching plot the show offered was pretty much irrelevant, except at random junctures the creators decided would serve as "connectors" to the series premiere.

Think about it.  The original Star Trek set the stage.  Captain Kirk and his crew set off to explore the universe, discovering new species, different cultures, and so on and so forth.  The Next
Generation:  same basic idea.  Voyager tried to mix things up by having the ship get lost way out in the middle of nowhere, but that plot point didn't change the basic format of the show.  And neither did Enterprise.  It gave us the same format, the same basic concepts, and so on and so forth.  It was a repetition, like everything else before it.

What Star Trek desperately needs is to break format -- or, as I like to say, it needs to have its BSG moment.  If we are to enjoy another series, that show has to be more than just "humans and a couple of aliens running around in the galaxy finding shit."  It certainly needs to be more than the same cliche character types too.  What we need is a story set in the Star Trek universe which explores the intense personal relationships formed on spacecraft or even the traumas of space flight.  It might even be an interesting idea to jump into the future of ST's established timeline and show the trials and tribulations of characters fighting a major war.  It doesn't much matter how a set of writers gets to the deeper relationships; what matters is that they avoid the weak gestures we so often see in anthology-based TV series and actually explore who these characters are.

That, in my mind, is what Star Trek needs.  Not flashy new movies.  Not new series following the same old format.  But a new show which crosses the boundaries of its familiar community and gives us a show we have to watch every week just to know what happens next.  Next.  As in the continuation of a single, overarching plot, in which each episode contributes to the whole.  In which each episode shows us a little more about the characters we love, or hate, or love to hate.

That's what I'd like to see anyway.  What about you?

"What is misery tourism?" you might ask.  At its most basic, "misery tourism" refers to the ways peoples from wealthy, usually Western nations "tour" the "developing" or "undeveloped" world in order to "learn" something.  The process is almost always attached to an assumption of superiority, whether directly acknowledged or buried in the subconscious.  To partake in misery tourism is to justify the superior position of your culture by intentionally subjecting yourself to "lesser" cultures (as a means of justifying the bias embedded in the notion of "lesser" cultures).  To put it another way, misery tourism is what (mostly white) Westerners do to make themselves feel better about their own circumstances.

I bring this up because of the following, which is taken from Bryan Thomas Schmidt's blog post entitled "Broadening the Toolbox Through Cross-Cultural Encounters:  On Resnick, Africa, and Opportunity":

When I spent time volunteering in prisons, I came away telling people that everyone should go and experience that for themselves because “the inmates are a lot more like us than you’d imagine.” For me, it was a scary and yet sobering reminder that human beings no matter their backgrounds, etc. have more in common than different. The same held true of my experiences in other cultures. I tell everyone to visit a developing world country at least once. See for yourselves what you’ve only imagined from the pages of National Geographic or TV specials about starvation, etc. Go there and experience it and be forever changed. If you’re not changed, you’re doing something wrong. I don’t see how you couldn’t be. Don’t fear this kind of change. It’s the good kind–the kind that makes you smarter, wiser, more aware and more appreciative. It’s the kind that makes you a better person and inspires you to write better stories and live better lives. That kind of change can’t be a bad thing, can it?

This appears after Schmidt reminds us how important it is not to fall into the trap of stereotyping other peoples and cultures (by way of getting into their heads to push our boundaries).

Schmidt, unfortunately, falls prey to a number of common intellectual traps when it comes to the subject of the African continent.  For example, rather than trying to explore a particular African culture, he reduces them all to "Africans," as if talking about "Africans" actually means something.  He might have identified specific nations (Nigeria, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa, Mali, Chad, Sudan, etc.) or specific peoples (Igbo, Sua, Kikuyu, Tutsi, Oromo, Afrikaner, Egyptian, Bemba, Xhosa, Zulu, Swazi, Fulani, Yoruba, etc.), having spent so much time in Africa (says he).  But instead, he makes them all one.  They are Africans -- not in the sense that they are all "from Africa," but in the sense that they are all more or less the same, like Americans (except we're not all the same either).  Doing so allows him to make grand assumptions about what they are all like (they are communal and find joy in little things).  There are other traps, too, but this is, I think, the most obvious and most damaging.

What shocks me most about these statements is that Schmidt wants us to believe he has learned something both from his experiences as a traveler and from reading genre fiction written by people who are non-white, mostly non-Christian, and mostly non-American.  Yet in essentializing the plethora of African cultures, as so many people do, he exposes his own narrow view of the continent.  I suspect he does not believe this of himself, but most Westerners don't want to believe that their privilege blinds them to the narratives of neo-imperialism which control the discourse surrounding the African continent.  In fact, Schmidt obviously means well, and makes many valid points.  But this doesn't excuse the central problem, which Binyavanga Wainaina perhaps best explores in "How to Write About Africa."  His humorous-but-not-really "story" exposes many of the myths peddled about the African continent. Two quotes of relevance here include:

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

And:

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering.

That pretty much sums it up.  Becoming better writers is simply a justification for misery tourism.  Its only purpose is to validate ethnocentric views of the world and the perpetuation of stereotypes and myths still held by so many Westerners today.  I'm not sure there's a way to combat this behavior, as we're all guilty of it to a certain degree.  One would think education about the history of the various now-countries of the African continent would do it, but that requires people to take the wax out of their ears and actually listen.  In other words, so long as you see the African continent as little more than a monolithic culture of inferior peoples, you cannot possibly challenge the ethnocentric assumptions that pepper our cultural perceptions of the world.

That's not to say genre fiction is hopeless.  Far from it.  But it's not enough to say "look, there are some brown people talking about different stuff over there" or "look, I went to Africa and learned stuff, which makes me culturally enlightened."  True respect of other cultures would look beyond the superficial; such a task may be difficult, however, once you realize that the linguistic, cultural, and political toolbox we have all been given in the West participates as much in the colonial project as colonialism in its most visible forms.  Perhaps this is why I have trouble finding Western aid, missionary work, and so on anything but suspicious.  These acts, like everything else, cannot be disentangled from the colonial project.  Just like language, ideology, and misery tourism.

In an attempt to bring some of what I do as a teacher (and, in other posts, as an academic) to this blog, I've decided to start these little "Adventures in Teaching Literature" posts to explore my class experiences.  Some of these will focus on what I take from a text (or tried to teach my students to take from it) and others will deal with their responses, which will vary from profound to odd to incorrect-but-still-quite-interesting (I'm not sold on the use of "incorrect" here, though).

I can't say that I've thought long and hard about this question before.  This seems somewhat strange to me, since it is a question I would be naturally inclined to think about anyway, both as a giddy supporter of expanding human exploration of space and as a science fiction writer.  That's the way things go, I guess.

In any case, I'd like to take the opportunity here to explore, however briefly, how the proven existence of aliens would affect me.  And then I'd like to know how you would respond to the same question!  Leave a comment.

Those that know me well enough (or pay attention to my online existence) will also know a few things about me which are relevant to this discussion:

1. I am an Atheist
2. I believe in the existence of aliens
3. I believe it is more than simply "a cool thing to do" to focus more of our attention on space exploration and its related technologies.  In fact, I think it is a moral/ethical imperative.