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How I Wrote The Prodigal Band Trilogy, Parts One Through Three (Repost)

Part One

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.”

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Random Trilogy Snippets, Part Four: The Biggest Battle is Spiritual (Part Four)

Welcome to the fourth The Prodigal Band Trilogy snippet post dealing with spiritual battles between the forces of good vs. evil, and between good or evil forces and the characters, notably the band members. This post isn’t really a spiritual ‘battle,’ though this action, where the Tooters, angels of ‘the Almighty,’ speak directly to each member of the prodigal band Sound Unltd—simultaneously—brings about a battle of sorts later! And what these angels speak is each band member’s ‘mission of God’ that the ‘witch’ of the Hovels, at the behest of the Tooters, informed the band about at a recent meeting, which took place across from the Tooters statue in Victoria Park in the band’s home city of Walltown, early June, 2000.

For she had already instructed the band leader Jack as well as drummer Tom that the band must perform at the upcoming Walltown Music and Trade Festival that would take place July 15-16, as headliners. In other words, the band had roughly six weeks to get the festival set-ups ready for hundreds of thousands of festival goers, including setting up bleachers on either side of the park as well as large video screens and television and recording crews—and the band would pay the entire costs of the festival, and would perform for free!

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How I Wrote The Prodigal Band Trilogy, Part Three

At the end of Part Two, I said that an actual spiritual incident I witnessed, which caused me to commit to Christ as Lord and Savior, inspired me to figure out a way to complete the ‘prodigal band’ story (using the Parable of the Prodigal Son as a guide) so as to create a novel trilogy that could spread ‘the message’ of redemption and salvation that anyone could accept freely, of their own free will. This incident certainly helped me to write The Prophesied Band, which ends with the prodigal band Sound Unltd being given ‘mission of God’ by the spiritual forces of Good. But would the prodigal band, having no idea about how to complete these missions, as well as being either atheist or agnostic toward Christianity and religion in general, be able to truly accept the missions and complete them?

In 1998, The Prophesied Band was published and printed (by a different outfit from the one that printed Battle of the Band), but this time I had far fewer copies printed—a wise decision! During that summer I sold roughly one-third of the number of printed copies at local festivals and writer conferences and made enough money to actually cover the cost of printing. By the following summer, I had sold about half of the book copies, and more than half by the fall of 2000. By then I had another Mac desktop and Corel WordPerfect software knowing that likely the next desktop computer would be using a Windows operating system (for one thing, a new Mac computer is almost double the cost of a Windows computer, and hubby and my kids wanted me to get one with Windows, likely with Windows 98).

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How I Wrote The Prodigal Band Trilogy, Part Two

Sorry this post is late, but last week I was entirely with loved ones from east Texas and at a local spring-fed swimming pool full of catfish, snap turtles and other fish, some of which are endangered, among other activities.

For me, if any plot is going to have some kind of impact encouraging the reading of the novel as well as book sales, the spiritual or ‘good vs. evil’ scenario makes the most sense and is the one I could best handle. Growing up, the genre of horror movies full of good vs. evil scenes and characters made the most impact and were the most entertaining—monster movies, vampires like Dracula, men-turned-monsters like Frankenstein or the Wolf Man or zombies such as in ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and more. Without or without the science fiction aspects, I watched just about every horror movie out there in the 50s and 60s. And every one of them had a good vs. evil theme.

Then came rock music, which isn’t exactly horror (even the movie “Rocky Horror Picture Show” filled with rock music wasn’t really horror!). So this rock band I created wouldn’t exactly fit into some horror scenario. But it could certainly fit into a ‘good vs. evil’ scenario, especially when so many folks, especially Christians, thought all rock stars ‘sold their souls to the devil.’ And it was this ‘sell souls to the devil’ notion that, while it made sense—the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ and Jimmy Page’s following of Aleister Crowley and the Beatles following a new age cultist called Maharishi Yogi and more—I realized this to be not quite true for most rockers, in the 60s and 70s and 80s, anyway. I needed proof, and what better way to ‘prove’ this was true or not than to have an excuse to do the research? Just because some preachers said this was true didn’t actually mean this way really true. What I found was that yes, some rockers were avowed ‘devil worshipers’ (Marilyn Manson being the most avowed as a member of ‘the Church of Satan’), and while very few were even somewhat Christian (as time went on a few would make that choice, such as Megadeath’s Dave Mustain and one or two others), it seemed to me that most were not devil worshipers but did ‘sell their souls’ for fame and fortune whether they wanted to or not. They wanted the rock star lifestyle, not devil worship. However, this did lead some into occult practices. Yet their choices often led to dire outcomes, such as drug or alcohol addiction, which my novel band characters engaged in handsomely.

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The Foreword to The Prodigal Band, Self-Published by OmegaBooks in 2018, the Original Version of the Third Novel of The Prodigal Band Trilogy

Below is the original Foreword to the original, copyright 2018 by Deborah Lagarde, version of the third novel of The Prodigal Band Trilogy, The Prodigal Band, which is available as a FREE PDF download at the link in the menu above. It turns out, however, that calling this a ‘Foreword’ was a mistake since I wrote it; Forewords are usually written by another person; a Publisher, an Editor, or a Beta Reader. It should have been called an ‘Introduction.’

Further, Foreword or Introduction, the words below do state the ultimate purpose of the novel and the trilogy as a whole. Cheers!

A new post will arrive next week.

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My Interview Hosted by Esther Rabbit

Several months ago when the Corona Virus event began I had posted in a Goodreads comment on the Author-Reader Forum regarding ways authors could advertise their books for free, saying to post links to your book site on websites that would attract possible readers of the novels the author writes. Esther Rabbit, who is an author, mentor to indie authors, interviews authors of all kinds of novels and non-fiction books, and promotes indie author books on her Esther Rabbit site, asked me to choose seven interview questions from her site and answer the questions for an online-interview.

Here is the link to the interview. Enjoy!

Questions include how I came up with the books in the Prodigal Band Trilogy, the publishing history, the inspiration, as well as (to use author-speak) the ‘plotter vs. pantser’ issue…I am both, especially pantser. So that makes me a ‘plantser’!

When you go to the site you’ll see that funny-looking ‘old lady’ at the beginning…that’s me. I sent in a portion of a picture taken on my son’s cell phone. I do not have a cell phone and do not want one. I do not like being tracked and traced if you know what I mean–I am a very private person. And because I have no cell phone I have very few photos of myself, and I am 67 years old, that’s the best of the most recent photos I had access to. Believe me, I was not prepared for my son’s decision to take that photo! Hopefully that goofy looking lady in the picture does not discourage folks from reading the interview!

Thanks, Esther! Blessings!

Note: Esther also has a YouTube author-mentor channel and Goodreads channel as well.

Snippets of The Prodigal Band Trilogy: Tragedy

Since this “snippet” series began with the genre category of Comedy, it is fitting that it ends with the category of Tragedy. Both are the hallmarks of theater that began in ancient Greece and are historically headlined by the immortal William Shakespeare.

When it comes to plays, NOBODY rivals Shakespeare! Tragedies IMHO are his magnum opus (especially MacBeth and Hamlet) but my favorite comedy character, theatrical or otherwise, is the ‘buffoon’ known as Falstaff, who appears in several of Shakespeare’s plays about various kings named Richard. Then there is Romeo and Juliet, which has inspired any number of spinoffs, one of my favorites being Adam Sandler’s You Don’t Mess with the Zohan, where an Israeli special ops agent takes on his main rival, The Phantom, a Palestinian “terrorist” leader with Hezbollah ties. But Zohan gets tired of that job and wants to be a hair-dresser. So he secretly moves to the US (after failing to take down Phantom) and becomes a hair-dresser. At a salon owned by Palestinian Dahlia, who turns out to be sister to the Phantom! They fall in love and marry–the Israeli-Palestinian “Romeo and Juliet”!

The greatest tragedy? When Hamlet ponders his existence using the immortal line, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” And then the rest of the soliloquy.

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Just in CASE! Beware of Copyright Trolls

Well, the House of Representatives by a huge majority passed the CASE Act which sets up a separate court system to hear cases of copyright infringement. As an author I am staunchly opposed to copyright infringement! That is one reason I post the copyright on this site and on my ‘Snippets of The Prodigal Band Trilogy‘ posts. That is the reason I made my Prodigal Band Trilogy cover from a photo I took in 2009 at SeaWorld in San Antonio on July 4. The bursts in the background are firecrackers.

That is also why my Prodigal Band cover is a copyright-free and royalty-free photo downloaded from pexels.com.

But what if a copyright troll can falsely claim that photo is his or hers, and will sue me for using ‘their’ photo? Because that is what copyright trolls do–take a photo (or steal a photo), send it to pexels.com and claim no copyright, then, when there is moolah to be made, claim the copyright!

And with this CASE Act, there is lots and lots of moolah to be made–up to $30,000!

And, just in case some copyright troll ‘finds’ a photo he or she ‘took’ and has a ‘copyright claim’ to it but still uploaded to a copyright-free site like pexels.com, I have taken down the three or four pexels photos I had used. If necessary, I will change the cover for The Prodigal Band as well. Because I don’t have $30,000 to throw away!

Snippets of The Prodigal Band Trilogy: Satire

The Prodigal Band Trilogy, being about the trials, tribulations, and triumphs of a fictitious and big time rock and roll band, is full of celebrities. That makes the trilogy and the books within it ripe for satire among other genres. Though the three-books-in-one trilogy leaves out much of the satire originally published in the original three books, there is still enough to regale the reader here, with two snippets posted. One involves celebrity attention-seeking behavior, and the other involves their hypocrisy, especially when it comes to their so-called ‘environmental activism,’ which, in my opinion, is just more attention-seeking behavior but often strictly for tax-write-off purposes.

Note: while it would be nice to be a best-selling author, one thing I absolutely do not want is to be a celebrity! I value my privacy as much as I could have what with having to market my books, but if I became a celebrity I would have no privacy!

Being a celebrity is a double-edged sword. Yes, they have fortunes and fabulous homes and cars and whatever, but while it takes attention-seeking to maintain celebrity, at some point the celebrity wants privacy and to go about with their lives devoid of constant media-tabloid-hounds chasing after them. And at some point, someone will come up with some nonsense about them that is not true and turns their lives inside out and backwards. Yet, whose fault is that? Theirs! They’re the ones who sought the attention, right?

Fortunately, for me and my characters, I realized these books were not going to be essays on satire. Yet I believe if your characters are celebrities some satire is necessary.

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Snippets of The Prodigal Band Trilogy: Occult, Part 1

Along with snippets relating to the fiction genre known as horror within The Prodigal Band Trilogy are snippets of horror’s ‘sidekick,’ the occult. I have only witnessed the ‘milder’ side of occultism–Ouija Boards, Tarot Cards, mock séances with fake ‘mediums,’ and in all instances these tools were not being used by actual ‘witches’ or wiccans. Just ‘playing’ at it during parties or whatever. Yet one evening at a friend’s house more than a mile from my own house two friends and I did get a good look at what true witchcraft would look like without realizing it, and the event scared the crap out of me to the point where the two friends had to walk me home around 11 p.m.! After that, I eschewed any and all of these practices! But I did get to witness actual occult practices, and, while writing the trilogy, was glad I did partake in the occult, a little bit, knowing I would never do such things again. Any other knowledge of occult rituals came from horror movies or fiction novels.

All three novels that make up The Prodigal Band Trilogy have occult aspects. Part 1 of this snippet-occult series shows the mockery side of the occult as well as the witnessing of pure occultist evil that took place inside of a separate room within what is called an ‘Ashram,’ which is a Hindu religious retreat that could also be used in any eastern-type religion (which is what Swami Negran’s ‘Church of the Circle of Unity’ is derived from, using Hindu/Sikh systems for a New Age cult. Negran is a prominent fictional evil character within the trilogy. His successor, fake ‘healer’ Cole Blessing, is featured in the second snippet.)

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