On the Road Again (2022 edition)

Back in October, 2021 I had a wedding to go to in Texas. I arrived a few weeks early so I could visit my friends in the area.

In 2022, I did the same thing. That time, Moira Greyland got married. If you don’t know who she is, she’s the daughter of Marion Zimmer Bradley. 

If you don’t know who that is… You don’t want to know. If you want to know anyway, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Luckily, unlike last time, none of the people I came to see died on me. Yay! 

Anyway, the last time I did this, people wanted my thoughts on the matter of traveling all over. Since I neglected to write that up, I decided to get onto it now while I was on the road.

General observation: by and large, everyone is friendly out in America. Everyone’s strangely polite, up to and including “How are you doing?” asked of total strangers. So that’s interesting.

There was also a general distain for Joe Biden. Even in 2022. Start a chant at any gas station of “Let’s go Brandon,” you will universally get the rest of the line in almost automatic refrain. And that was just in New Jersey. You can imagine what the rest of the path from New York to Texas was like.

Back then, I thought moving to Texas was impossible. I had plans for New York City if things went wrong.

Did I ever mention my family has a background in chemistry?

Moving right along…

Everyone was downright pleasant. Though I will admit, the few malicious drivers I came across all drove very nice, fancy cars, proving that BMW will only sell cars to outright bastards, no matter the state.

Arkansas: It’s… empty. It’s very empty. There’s Little Rock, but… yikes. The rusty looking bridges are disconcerting. There’s also “West Memphis,” which apparently grew out of Memphis Tennessee.

Tennessee is nice enough. Nashville looks like a bloody tourist trap, and the hotels are priced appropriately. Beautiful country though. And they’re as happy with Alvin York as Texas is with Audie Murphy.

And Texas. Ah, Texas, where the heat is near blistering, but who cares? There isn’t any humidity! Yes, the car can bake if you do it wrong, but aside from that, the temperature is fine… especially since air conditioning is everywhere. The homes are nice, the new construction is beautiful, the old construction isn’t bad either. The roads are interesting—Dallas has similar concrete spaghetti highways to LA, only Dallas doesn’t seem to have any of the traffic snarls. Though I note that when the sun goes down, the drivers become aggressive.

Since we like discovering new stuff, my wife and I looked at local stores. The Walmart superstores are impressive, and I haven’t seen a single example of “The People of Walmart.” The grocery section is as big as my local grocery, and there’s the other 3/4s of the store.

I discovered a place called H-E-B. It’s very nice, and I walked away with about five pounds of coffee from there, as well as other things. I have discovered pork rinds, and they go well with my keto diet. Yay! Now all they need to come in flavors other than BBQ. Sour Cream and Onion, perhaps.

Kroger is … interesting. Their overstuffed shelves have great variety, but the prices could have been better. It could have just been me. My wife tried to buy some spices unique to the region, but they hassled her about not being a member, and she gave up. That’s odd, I don’t recall it being member’s only like CostCo.

Speaking of members only, I’ve finally been to a Sam’s Club… it’s a CostCo. I don’t know how much of the differences in content is regional and how much is a difference between Sam’s Club and CostCo. But it was nice.

The food was good. While I will never join the cult of Whattaburger, it’s probably the best burger I’ve ever had produced by a chain.

Now, I will admit that there is something strange about Texas. There seems to be little south of DFW. Everything seems to be up north. The gun shops south of DFW seemed a little sketchy. North, they had some reasonable places and reasonable prices.

One of the things my wife and I wanted to see was called Bucc-ee’s (pronounced Bucky’s). It’s a “convenience store” the size of my local grocery.

And it was nice to go to a church with no masks, and access to holy water … and a good sermon … and a mass in Latin. It’s called Mater Dei, in Irving.

Oh, yes, my wife ended up making a massive rosary for the wedding.

This is the cross for it.

The day of the wedding… well, I was told to wear blue.

I wore blue.

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Coven: Upping the Ante

One of the fun things about writing Coven was an idea that Hans Schantz suggested. He probably doesn't even recognize his original idea, given what I'd done to it. 

The idea? Take away Tommy's charisms.

Granted, by this point in the series, I’d given Tommy Nolan two other major weapons that increased his chances of survival. Some people think there’s no way I can threaten Tommy anymore.

Challenge accepted. 

Time to bring out a bigger hammer.

Yeah, I know. How can I bring out a bigger hammer after the end of #6, Deus Vult?

What? You didn't think Tommy would be allowed to KEEP that particular weapon, did you? Heh heh heh.

Not to mention, by the end of Deus Vult, Tommy is well and truly battered, beaten, and knocked around. Every tool in his arsenal had been pushed to the limit, drained, damaged, and broken.

For Coven, I was going to bring him back home.

Then I was going to hurt him.

For those who haven't read my previous novels, I get interesting results when I hurt my characters. Usually, more stuff blows up.

Okay. How to do that? First, we must threaten his support system. Let's knock around his partner. Yeah. Alex has been a little TOO lucky. In every novel, Tommy has thrown himself on every threat that could have killed Alex — and not because Tommy thinks he's going to survive, but he thinks he has a better chance of surviving than his older partner.

And, as you can see in the description of the book, we're going to target Tommy's children. Because that will not create ANY problems for the poor dumb SOB who thinks that's a good idea.

See, there are always multiple ways to juggle threats. Previous novels have mostly used one massive threat, compiled of multiple layers and parts.

Another option is simply taking “smaller” threats and throwing them at our hero, and where he's weakest. I get to explore more sides to our hero, and develop the people around him better.

Granted, given everything that his family has been through, calling them "the weak spot" might be misleading.

And of course, the ultimate threat for Coven is ... well, it's a little bit of Jim Butcher, and a little bit of J. Michael Straczynski.

[Yes, I know that JMS has gone a little bit off the rails, letting politics into his brain like a poison. Apparently, he broke up with his wife ("By any means necessary" script writer Kathryn Drennen) and shacked up with Patricia Tallman, an ultra-lefty. Apparently, banging a redhead with that level of dementia turns politics into an STD. This doesn't mean his previous writing advice sucks]

From Butcher, I stole the idea that, well, when in doubt, just increase the threat level.

From JMS, I took his Amazing Spider Man concept that supervillains are mirrors of our hero: black mirrors, false mirrors, want to be mirrors. That sort of thing. (Red Skull is a false patriot, caring nothing for country, but only himself. Iron Man is a capitalist, his enemies are commies. Spider-Man's enemies were largely other animal themes. Et al.)

So, what do I do to Tommy? Who's his Moriarty? What’s his black mirror?

Well, dang. That was book 6's villain. That’s out of the way.

Well, if you’ve knocked out Moriarty, we need a Colonel Sebastian Moran—someone who can match Tommy in the street.

We needed another true believer. Only he believes something very different. And very darker.

Heh heh heh.

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St Tommy Abroad: Writing City of Shadows

 To my knowledge, the NYPD is the only city police force that has its own international intelligence operators. It's getting to the point where the NYPD operates like the Texas Rangers — their jurisdiction is wherever they are.

So, when Infernal Affairs ended the way it did, it was obvious that Tommy Nolan had to get the Hell out of town, it was easy enough to transfer .... elsewhere.

Anywhere else.

But why London? In large part because it's one of the places I know best. 

Sadly, I still needed to use a lot of Google maps, since I was last there 20 years ago.

But one of the nice things with getting Tommy abroad is isolating him. He loses his friends, his family. I get to give him a new partner. He gets a total stranger. I get to grind him down and tear out his soul.

And if you're going to nail someone who gets power from God, you're going to have to grind him down and sever his connection.

Me?

Sadistic?

I'm a writer.

That part is redundant. You can tell when even Jim Butcher enjoys talking about how much he tortures Harry Dresden.

But then again, a large part of the fun in fiction is watching our heroes get the ever loving stuffing beaten out of them and still come back for more, and stop them if you can.

And if you can't tell that I like the results I get from beating up Tommy, you should remember everything I did to him in Hell Spawn.... and remember that he still has scars from all of that.

If you think that's bad, you should see what I do to him in City of Shadows.

But isolating him works on multiple levels. You may remember in the first trilogy, Tommy called in backup on multiple occasions — when he could.

But now, he’s a New York Cop in the middle of Europe. The nice thing about Europe in particular is that it's slowly becoming the wild west. Acid attacks. Rape gangs. London itself is so scared and so timid, they're banning kitchen knives and recording who buys a shovel or an ax. The next step is to ban spoons. Just wait until they learn what the average convict can weaponize....

Oh, I should note that it's still legal to carry acid around in the middle of London. Because I can't make this crap up. I really can't.

But yeah, it's a nice setup for a rough and tumble world in “civilization.”

Oh, and of course, we can't forget — our hero isn't allowed to carry his own damn gun. Because Europe.

So Tommy has no friends. He has one uncertain ally. The cops are antagonistic. The civilians aren't much better. The criminals wouldn't help him on a bet. He's got no one to back him up except for a total stranger and God Himself.

So there's a lot of fun elements to taking Nolan out of his element and dropping him straight into the fire.

It worked in Hell Spawn, Death Cult and Infernal Affairs.

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Building a Saint

I've gone through a lot of old posts lately as I cut them up and turn them into Twitter threads. It's had some success, and there are people who have never read them before. I might get around to rewriting them here as well. Because there are a lot of things that have changed lately, and some notes I need to stress.

But I noticed I put in a LOT of thought into creating Marco and Amanda for Honor at Stake, et al. How do I make them polar opposites, yet very similar? How does each one work within the world I've made for them? That sort of thing.

I've never done that for Tommy Nolan.

It's odd. Because I tend to put in a TON of thought into character and biography. Probably too much. My original thought of character creation was to make a character, build a whole biography, wind them up, drop them in a situation, then let them wander. 

Every book prior to Hell Spawn was a seat of the pants affair.

Then along came Saint Tommy. And I haven't needed to do anything for him on that scale.

Sure, I do have more background on him in my head, but that's only come up within the last few books. And I don't even mean the books that are published yet. Book #8, Hussar, is where I have the germ of an idea for more of Tommy's background.

When I wrote Hell Spawn, all I knew about Tommy was that he was married with a kid, he was homeschooled, and more or less educated via the Opus Dei. I mentioned that he and his wife had “family out of state.” When I needed someplace to stash Mariel and the kids during Saint Tommy abroad (City of Shadows, Crusader, and Deus Vult), I invented family in Tennessee.

Why Tennesse? They have guns.

That was the extent of my knowledge of Tommy's background.

Yes, there are little bits and pieces of Tommy Nolan scattered throughout my books. A character of the same name has appeared in other books, but they are officially not the same person. When Silver Empire was around, it wanted separate IPs. There's nothing that forbade reader headcanon.

Though now that they’re gone… heh heh heh. I have plans.

But even if you included Nolan’s appearances in other books as the same person, there was nothing that really added to the character. 

Now, in part, this was done in order to keep down the cast of characters. Hell Spawn was written after some reviewers were confused by “too many characters” in other books.

Obviously, if I haven’t designed Tommy's parents, I can’t have him call them for help or advice, or have subplots with them. The same with grandparents or in-laws.

Obviously, this hasn't worked in the long run. I tried to downplay the existence of everyone else in Hell Spawn as much as was reasonable. Wouldn't want people to get confused, after all.

Then again, it was a first person point of view, how confused could people get? After reading some of the dumber one star reviews, pretty confused. But those were 100% pure moron, so I don't feel so bad.

But they weren't confused about characters. So, win!

And yes, after a while, the cast has spiraled. Like everything else in my writing. 

• The ME, Doctor Sinead Holland
• Father Richard Freeman, PhD
• Father Michael Pearson
• Bokor Baracus (after a fashion)
• Alex Packard
• Jeremy
• Lena
• Mariel 
• Grace
• William Carlton
• Texas Ranger Lloyd Lermon
• Pope Pius XIII
• Aux Bishop Xavier "XO" O'Brian

Now, all 13 of these people have not yet shown up on the page at the same time, or even in the same book. Thankfully.

Yet. We’ll wait for the last two books, Dark Web and Blue Saint. Heh heh heh.

I will note that I've had no reviews or comments asking about Tommy's background. No one. No one cares. In fact, the only person asking for it is my wife, when I mentioned a character idea I was going to use in Hussar, but I postponed for Dark Web.

Part of how I’ve done all this has been influenced by the Pulp crew I deal with online.

In part because, well, we don't have anything about the Shadow's background, do we? Do we know his full biography? His parents names? Exactly where he grew up? No. He now kills really bad guys with dual wielding forty-fives.

There’s more than a few other influences about the Shadow as well.

 But then, I have more than a few characters who can say yes to “Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” Tommy, technically, isn't one of them.

All I've really needed from Tommy for his character has been is his acts and his works, as well as his faith. His social life is his family and his church--gun club, soup kitchen, prayer rallies, etc. In Infernal Affairs, his wife is pregnant, so they do get some alone time.

The one thing I've had to put work into --and I've put work into it--was giving him a flaw. Well, a few flaws. He has a temper. He gets angry. He rarely gives into it, so everyone looks at him like he has three heads when he mentions it.

His confessions are like the following.

“Bless me father for I have sinned, it's been a week since my last confession.”

“Tommy, honestly, what could you have done in a week?”

“I cuffed a child molester. I wanted to hit him upside the head.”

“Did you?”

“No. But I was probably a little rough with the cuffs.”

“…Tommy? Take a breath.”

Over time, I do have things that get to him. And his anger is where demons get at him... because the only anger Tommy feels is safe is anger at himself. You can see where that can go wrong. 

The solution to these little dark nights is reason and rationality. There was a guilt trip an editor wanted me to inflict on Tommy in book one. My solution? Directly address it as completely irrational from his perspective, because that would have required him to be omniscient.

But hitting him where it hurts means he feels first, and thinks later. Heh heh heh.

It's odd. I wrote Hell Spawn in late 2017 for release in late 2018, and now I've finished book 10, and I'm having trouble thinking back to what everything was like writing book one. I guess it’s good I'm thinking about it while I can.

If you haven't read Hell Spawn or any of the others yet, now's a good time to start, because the series is coming to a head.

Or should I say that all Hell is about to break loose?

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Writing Death Cult

 Death Cult, as a sequel to Hell Spawn, needed to go faster. We didn't need five pages of introduction.

Heck, with the current rerelease, everyone can read every book one right after the other.

But when I first wrote it, I had to up the ante. I even had to go back and rewrite part of the end to Hell Spawn so I could best segue into it. This is a rewrite I don't even think anyone else knew about, because I had Death Cult coming to me as I wrapped up Hell Spawn.

This is in part because there are two ways demons go trolling around the world.

One: someone is open to being possessed by … vulnerable. When your brain becomes an open house, you never know what will wander in. The original case upon which the Exorcist was based had someone playing with Oujia boards and such. Leading to my line in Demons are Forever: you don't play with demonic crap, demonic crap does not play with you.

The second way? Summon demon. Deliberately. Hilarity ensues.

While the killer in Hell Spawn is certainly the type for #1, it had been suggested by my wife that book #2 should have a cult involved.

Well now, wouldn't it just be easy to tie the two together?

Which led to book 3 being tied in with all of them, based off of a suggestion by yet another friend. 

I didn't quite mean to make it a trilogy where everything was tied together, but it happened.

And, frankly, it's awesome.

Yes, I will grant you, Death Cult, like Hell Spawn, were not much in the way of a mystery. They were horror novels with a police procedural thrown in. And I made certain to have a lot of dead ends, but even the dead ends fit together at the end of the day. If not in Hell Spawn  or Death Cult, then in Infernal Affairs.

City of Shadows is book four, and that's a completely different story… but everything was all eventually tied together. Even the last six books could be seen as fallout from the first six.

But still, Death Cult this wasn't much in a way of a mystery, but I have been reliably informed by my editor (and later, early readers from the kickstarter) that not only are these things awesome and bad ass, but also "creepy as f**k."

So, yeah, I was happy with this one.

One of the major problems was developing a villain after the demon of Hell Spawn. How do you top a demon-driven serial killer? Any villain we get is going to be fairly limp in comparison...

That's an easy step one: make it more than one villain. Make it a group.

... No, that's not a spoiler, just look at the title.

Ooooh, how about we make it people who raised the demon? Wouldn't that be fun? (No, that's not a spoiler, it has no impact on Hell Spawn, and if you've read it already, you know it happened)

Of course, there are plenty of suspects already before the book even begins. Hell Spawn saw our hero piss off many many people. He wasn't even trying. He was just doing his job. And when Tommy Nolan says he does his job without fear or favor, he means that he doesn't fear anybody except God, and if he knows you're guilty, he's not doing you a favor.

This will lead to pissing off plenty of people if you get too close to the entitled elite.

And this is New York City, anyone who makes more than seven figures feels entitled. Probably comes from paying so much in taxes (or paying the accountants to hide the cash).  Either way, there are plenty of people who want Nolan's guts for garters.

It's strange making a character who's hated because he's good, and not because he's a weapon of mass destruction…

Though frankly I think my biggest accomplishment was getting Nolan to be a good man without being obnoxious.

Or worse, too “Hallmark special.”

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Writing MS-13 as villain

 When I first started writing Hell Spawn, I figured that I wasn't using any controversial bad guys when I threw in MS-13 as a throwaway character. 

I had heard of them back when I was taking a course on Organized Crime in 2003, and I then tripped over them in Vince Flynn's Consent to Kill.

I mean, these were bad guys that were one step away from being on a terrorist watch list in 2003. They’re a street gang that owns rocket propelled grenades. They had freaking military training. Their motto was "rape, control, kill."

Frankly, they’re wonderful, made to order minions for an action-adventure film -- you know, one of the faceless thugs that Ahhhnuld mowed down in droves.

And when I put in MS-13 … they were just going to be a random encounter. There would be no follow up from them. At all. They were one random encounter in the outline.

During my writing, I felt I needed another random encounter. The one in the outline was several chapters away, and there was a ton of exposition in this book.

Hey, let's have a small little encounter on the street...Hey, maybe that little encounter leads to the big encounter in a few chapters! That would be solid.

And, suddenly, MS-13 became a running subthreat and mini-boss in Hell Spawn.

Dang. That spiraled. The story of my writing life.

Anyway, a month after I finished the book, MS-13 had murdered several people not rock-throwing distance away from me.

I thought, "Hey, I'm ahead of the curve by a little." More often than not, someone does something that mirrors my books far too close for my comfort. If MS-13 were an emerging threat in real life, maybe they would be in the media by the time Hell Spawn released in September. That would be really, really lucky.

I finished writing Hell Spawn in November of 2017.

The state of the union in January 2018 featured MS-13, and Trump even had the parents of their New York victims at the State of the Union.....

So maybe they would make national headlines a little sooner than I thought.

But hey, they were already there. And they're MS-13. They've been bad guys for 15 years. Even CSI: Miami had their own, thinly veiled knockoff of MS-13.

Apparently, they're slightly more controversial than that now. One idiot accused me of being a “white nationslist” for having MS-13 as a villain. Obviously, I didn’t let him get to me, since he’s a glaring illiterate.

But overall, MS-13 become surprisingly large in the story thread. They're no where near main bad guy status, but boy, do they provide good shootouts.

And just wait until you see what they do in Death Cult. Heh heh heh.

Updates and Cover Reveals

If you follow my substack, you already know this. If you've wondered where I've been the last two years, some updates.

I lost my publisher Silver Empire.

In the meantime, I’ve picked up others. Maybe three.

Let’s go around the books.

First things first: Saint Tommy, NYPD is going to be through Tuscany Bay Press. You may remember them as the publisher of my White Ops space opera.

Including

• #1-#8: Rereleased in May.

• #9: Destiny

• #10: Lightbringer

• #11: Dark Web

• #12: Blue Saint

Oh yeah, I even have a cover.

And there’s already a cover for #10, brought to you by Michael Gallagher. You can find him at his website, or on Twitter under the handle BasedPapist, and DM him for details.

And then there’s #12, Blue Saint

This cover was created by NR LaPoint, author of the author novel Chalk, among others I haven’t gotten to yet. His website is here.

Cover #11 is en route.

So, whew. Things are getting back to normal there. Yay.

Main Street D.O.A.

Due to ... blogger ... I have not posted on this blog for some time. I am making up for it now, however. If you want to see some of these original posts, go to my Substack. You can't miss it. It's Declan Finn's Substack. :)

Yup, I’ve been busy.

Book three releases all over the place.

I had… some fun here.

Heh heh heh.

Sean Patrick Ryan's White Ops team has survived two wars, pirates, a cannibalistic alien horde from another galaxy, space jihadis, and political maneuvering. Their boss thinks they deserve a break and sends them to the "happiest place in the galaxy."

Luckily for Sean, terrorists take over the amusement planet before he can lose his mind.

To stop the terrorists, White Ops will have to battle a weaponized planet, including cloned dinosaurs, giant sharks, animatronic amusements and a doomsday device that will destroy the planet.

And when the deadliest assassin alive joins the fray, whose side will he be on?

I had so much fun with this one.

Let’s just say that the entertainment planet, the “Happiest Place in the Galaxy” had a different name in the draft copy.

I think it’s now called Yesdin.

Or was it Yisden?

Either way, crossword enthusiasts will be amused cracking that particularly unimaginative cypher. 

You can see just how crafty and wily I am.

That and an ACME box of Earthquake pills, I'll get that roadrunner any day now.

Anyhow, what you’re going to read was originally a 35 page short story. During the rewrite, I took one look at that and said, “Nah. I can have WAY more fun with this.” I took the original short and ballooned it. No, I didn’t pad it in any way. There are some threads that will be pulled, and pulled hard, in book 5. Just like there are threads in book 2 that culminate also in book 5.

Hell, who am I kidding? There are some threads in book 1 and 2 that get wrapped up in Main Street DOA.

Oh, and yes, I have a book 5 coming. Probably a book 12, if the outline holds up that long, and people keep reading it.

Speaking of people reading, if you’ve read White Ops and / or Politics Kills, please remember to review it/them.

And Main Street, DOA is available here.

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The Great #BlackFriday / #CyberMondayBook Sale

 I’m sending this one out a little early, mainly because everyone is busy on Thursday with cooking, and Friday with shopping. Hopefully, this one will register just a little.

So, my friend Hans Schantz is hosting a book sale over at his website.

CLICK HERE FOR FREE BOOKS

Yes, that’s right, free books. Also, $0.99 books.

The list of authors here is… absurd. And it includes

These are some of the top offerings from previous book sales including science fiction grandmasters, established mainstream authors and emerging indie talent. Authors include James Alderdice, Tony Andarian, J.M. Anjewierden, Leigh Brackett, Jonathan P. Brazee, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Rachel Fulton Brown, Carlos Carrasco, Kit Sun Cheah, Paul Clayton, Alexandru Constantin, Travis J.I. Corcoran, J.D. Cowan, Lucca DeJardins, Jon Del Arroz, Declan Finn, Amanda Fleet, Milo James Fowler, Erin Furby, Adam Furman, Michael Gallagher, Charles E. Gannon, Peter Grant, Fiona Grey, Paul Hair, Harry Harrison, Frederick Gero Heimbach, Alexander Hellene, Daniel Humphreys, C.S. Johnson, Steven G. Johnson, Joseph L. Kellogg, Tom Kratman, L. Jagi Lamplighter, Christopher Lansdown, N.R. LaPoint, Frank B. Luke, Loretta Malakie, T. J. Marquis, Russell May, Michael McCloskey, Paul McKesley, Yakov Merkin, Bradley J. Mitzelfelt, Jonathan Moeller, Alexander Nader, Morgon Newquist, Brian Niemeier, Andre Norton, Christopher G. Nuttall, Deidre J. Owen, Richard Paolinelli, Iris Paustian, Francis Porretto, Matthew W. Quinn, John Ringo, Timothy Scott Roach, Justin Robinson, David Roome, C.A. Sabol, Denton Salle, Cedar Sanderson, Hans G. Schantz, Richard Sezov, Jonathan Shuerger, David Skinner, Benjamin A. Sorensen, Emily Martha Sorensen, Kevin Steverson, David V. Stewart, John Taloni, Kevin Trainor, Jr., Kalkin Trivedi, Bev Vincent, Henry Vogel, Patrick Walts, Mark Wandery, David Weber, H.G. Wells, David J. West, Barry Scott Will, Michael Z. Williamson, Ryan Williamson, Fenton Wood, John C. Wright, and Timothy Zahn.

And those are just the highlights.

So, enjoy.

And happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Creating an Alien: Designing Renar

 The funniest part about my life is that I have a history degree that I have used almost as much for fiction as for nonfiction.

Sure, everyone (by now) has heard me talk about The Pius Trilogy having been born from a graduate paper gone amok.

Then I used it to design an alien race in the White Ops series. In book one, you might remember that I had the Soivan and the Touri as two empires who expanded into each other and just didn’t stop since. Well, I took the “two empires expanding into each other” from the Zulus and the British, and I just let it ramp up for five hundred years, because why not? Also, I wanted two political entities that truly and deeply hated each other.

Then there are the Renar.

In designing the Renar, there were several elements I wanted to throw in.

The look

First, the Renar were going to be similar to humans, but I wanted them to stand out, something the demarks them as nonhuman.

I put an external bone on the skull, because I hadn’t seen that since Babylon 5. However, unlike neat the bone crest of Babylon 5’s Minbari, it’s more like a helmet that covers the sides of the head, wraps around the back, and goes from the nape of the neck to either the hairline of a human, or just above the eyes. There are no eyebrow muscles, or ears—the “ears” are a thin part of the bone, with slight, almost invisible divots to channel sound better. Their eyes are two-toned: the iris and the pupil are two different colors.

Oh yes, and the skin tone is the color of metal. Variable metals, but metal.

So yeah, metal / high gloss skin, two tone eyes, full bone helmet like a stone. It was going to look DIFFERENT, damn it.

The Culture

This is where the history was going to come in.

The culture was going to circle around, four castes, like the medieval period. I know what you’re thinking: weren’t there three castes? Nope. By the late medieval period, there was an entirely new social class that had emerged: the merchants.

So this world was going to have four castes: The Ansolas are the peasants / workers. There will be the soldier caste, the Zahal. Then there’s the Religious and Merchants.

With the Religious, there’s going to be an overlap in philosophy. Natural philosophy is a thing. It works no matter where you are. Unless something is decidedly off, it works wherever you are. They believed in a deity, because cause and effect is a thing: the big bang (for which we currently have evidence via telecommunications satellite—they hear the echo). They know there’s a starting point, so they reasoned to a First Cause, and if Something could create the universe, then it’s not going to be the cartoon cutouts they have in most mythologies—there will be no Zeus that has sex with everything.

The Clothes

This is going to be a culture that uses a lot of robes. I’m thinking designs and colors that are more like kimonos. This stems from part of their culture which will come up on the

The religious will wear brighter colors, because they need them for their various professions—like medics. Both Ansolas and the Zahal will prefer darker colors, as they hide blood and dirt better. The merchants will be more of a wine-dark royal purple, because don’t they always?

The Language

I am not a linguist. I’m not Tolkien. I’m not even going to try.

However, I have an eclectic collection of words floating around in my head.

So, I steal from everything.

White Ops is part of a group called the Toten’tanz, they who dance with death. Or death dancers. In context, it’s “sentinels against death.”

Meanwhile, on Earth, you may have noticed that the word is German and I just threw in an apostrophe. I was going to make it “toten’shok” (death + hydrashok hollowpoints) but it looked too close to another SF.

The toten’shok are based in Muskva… which is how the Russians pronounce “Moscow.” I just changed a vowel.

“Ansolas” means “worker”… in Gaelic.

The Zahal… is a mistake on my part. Because the Zahal is another Earth word. It’s Hebrew, and it’s what they call the Israeli Defense Force.

I stole Renar cursing from a Dublin phone book when I was there in 1998. But maybe 6,000 people on the entire planet read Gaelic, so what are the odds?

Applications

Putting all of this together, I have

Turak: a Zahal turned religious. Obsidian bone crest / helmet, with silver skin, silver eyes and blue pupils. A wiry sucker, he has to make some hard choices if he’s going to stay in the toten’tanz.

Lakonn: Ansolas. A design engineer. His skin is gunmetal blue. His bone crest looks like granite and almost a battering ram. His eyes are the color of molten metal—a bright yellow in the middle, and a brighter red in the iris. He’s built like an Italian garage mechanic, and he has to design a new weapon system. Preferably before everyone gets eaten.

Furlann: Religious, a medic. She’s almost an albino. Her skin is pale, almost stark white. Her bone helmet is almost smooth, and a pale green, so pale it almost looks like the rest of her skin. The most striking part of her body is her bright violet pupils.

So yeah, I had fun here.

By the way, White Ops #2, Politics Kills, is out. Enjoy.