This post is not about how, in the 60s and 70s and 80s, I came up with the characters as a gang, and then as a band. This post is about how I developed the final plot involving good vs. evil spirits and entities using the prodigal band for good or evil purposes, how I was inspired this way and how I managed to write the three novels, the final one (The Prodigal Band) twenty years after the second one (The Prophesied Band). How I turned just an entertaining piece about the foibles of rock stardom into a spiritual plot using the Parable of the Prodigal Son of the Gospel of Luke Chapter 15 as a guide. Finally, it is about actually creating the novels using various software including ClarisWorks (for Mac) and Corel WordPerfect, Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat conversions for PDFs on both Mac and PC desktops and laptops. I reviewed the “why” in the previous post; now is the “how.”
As I’ve stated in the previous post, in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, my mind made up the band and female main characters for the manuscript that I had no idea would become this trilogy. Then in the early 90s, I looked up at the stars and was then inspired to begin the writing journey—out here in rural mountain far west Texas, the stars are everywhere in the night sky on a clear night, unlike in urban and suburban areas. But what would be the main plot?
I started putting notes together with bound notebook and pen or pencil beginning with angels called the Tooters “prophesying” that a band would come about and be subjected to a tug of war between good and evil spirit characters as the band succeeded through the 90s and would eventually side with good over evil. Sometime in 1992 and 1993, using an old Atari XE computer which used a floppy disk “operating system” as a “hard drive” and where, once the disk set up the system, you take out the system disk and put in another floppy which holds the file one is working on (and where the new floppy holds about 48 kilobytes of space for the files)… In other words, only one or two chapters could be placed on each floppy disk, and, yes, they were indeed floppy! So using about five disks I typed in the first version of the book I titled “Rock Band” since I really had no idea what else to call the book. After completing this, I printed out a copy from each disk; I have no idea what printer I used. The plot was, in my opinion, weak as well—now why would angels call on a rock band to carry out a good agenda over evil when all the rock band members wanted to do was make millions and party and partake in sex orgies and get smashed on cocaine-like drugs? And then wind up in serious tribulations with seemingly no way out? So, in spring of 1994, I hit an impasse.
In fall of 1994, I took a HS math teaching job in El Paso at a “gang land” high school and a few students there would tell me about various rock bands of the time, most of which were ‘grunge’ or alternative types, such as Nirvana and Nine Inch Nails and Green Day (I actually liked Green Day, would you believe it…weird!) In other words, this wasn’t the typical 60s-80s “classic rock” that had influenced my earlier plotline. The 80s-type rock my fictional band played was no longer in vogue so I had to change that aspect, as well as the stage-performance antics, considering the activities within ‘the mosh pit.’ Then when I found out Kurt Cobain had died earlier in 1994, that also helped to change the script, from one or more band characters merely having health issues from drug or booze overdose to an actual near-death experience, where the ‘good spirits’ would overcome the evil ones to ‘save’ the lives of the band members in the hospital from heart attacks (because for one thing a hit song of theirs was called ‘Heart Attack.’) So that, after work and dinner and the bit of home schooling I did with my two children aged six and two, among other things, I would go into my closet for a bit and ‘edit’ the previous printed ‘Rock Band’ manuscript. Yet it was still not quite right. I had the good side down pat, but I needed to enhance the evil side—what would the evil side true agenda be?
And then the Oklahoma City bombing happened, in April, 1995, around the time I realized working at a gangland high school simply wasn’t my cup of tea if you know what I mean. And I missed back home in the rural remote POA, ‘God’s country’ atmosphere. A year or so after the Branch Davidian cult destruction in Waco, Texas, by various government agencies whereby a cult compound was burned as were many children and cult members in what I considered government overreach and overkill, some “anti-government terrorists” destroyed the Murrah Building housing a day care center and other businesses which led to a series of manhunts for Timothy McVay among others, some tied to a right-wing ‘Christian militia’ called Elohim City. And what were these ‘right wing militia’ types warring against? What they called ‘the Illuminati’ and ‘the New World Order’ elites, globalists. In my own research I discovered that these globalists had secret societies, had occultist links to satanic cults including groups inspired by Aleister Crowley (who inspired Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page among others), and tended to be led by bankers and oligarchs. It was also during this time I found out about a ‘messianic’ new age cult leader called ‘Maitreya’ that was sponsored by Benjamine Crème’s Share International. Maitreya was the inspiration for the Church of the Circle of Unity cult leader Swami Negran, and the bankster-oligarchs leading ‘the Illuminati’ were the inspiration for Baron Torquay-Lambourgeau, the Duke of Effingchester, and Mssrs. X and Y, who led what I called “the Novordo Club” and “Hellyons.” Not that the novel was going to turn political or ideological, but at least I began to understand exactly what the band characters were up against—true minions of evil. And, as with the reality within the music and entertainment industries, it was these evil folks and their evil nihilist and anti-Christ agendas that drove the final edit’s narrative to overcome the evil, step-by-step. Finally, it was then that I realized it would take more than one novel to expose these truths and set the band and their women on the righteous pathway.
In Part Two, I explain how this conclusion led to finishing the first novel, Battle of the Band, and how two other events in my life led to the second novel, The Prophesied Band. Using different computers, both manuscripts were finalized on an Apple Macintosh LC475, using OS 7.5 and much smaller floppy discs that really weren’t ‘floppy.’
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The Prodigal Band Trilogy © 2019 by Deborah Lagarde, Battle of the Band © 1996 by Deborah Lagarde, The Prophesied Band © 1998 by Deborah Lagarde and The Prodigal Band © 2018 by Deborah Lagarde. Permission needed to copy any materials off this page.
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