Fiction Writing – OmegaBooks

An Introduction to “Talent for a Mission—A Guide for Christian Authors”

Back in early January 2022, I put up a post here, mentioning a ‘New Years Resolution’ Christian authors might consider, especially authors of fiction, about using the writing talent God gave them to help ‘make disciples of all nations,’ a task Christ Himself assigned to His disciples upon their witnessing that He had risen from the dead (Matthew 28:19). The ‘guide’ is pretty much completed and will likely be uploaded to this site later this year as a FREE PDF for download. Hopefully, it will inspire Christian authors to follow that task! Below is a snippet of the first couple of pages, though I left out a few paragraphs relating to peoples who likely have not ‘heard the Word’ yet, but will at some point, as prophesy claims that before ‘the end’ comes, all peoples will be given the opportunity to accept Christ as Lord and Savior. Below is the snippet:

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Update On When Snippets Become Spin-offs: The Murder Rule (Part Two)

Within the previous post I had posted just this past Monday was this snippet line from the new novel manuscript I plan to publish:

“A hooded man has forced poison up my nose, not skuz. Pray for my soul. Denny.”

Jimi Hendrix was murdered in a somewhat similar fashion (but through the trachea, not the nose), as I state in this post from last year.

Hendrix, whose father was connected to the military as with Jim Morrison—another ’27 Club’ member who died under suspect circumstances—was politically tied to the Black Panthers and was being surveilled by a CoIntelPro CIA operation….and maybe that handler involved with this was his manager, Michael Jeffrey. Jeffrey had ‘intelligence ties and Mafia connections.’ Those intelligence ties include MI-6. But the likely reason Jeffrey could be implicated in Hendrix’s “suicide” was that he stole lots of money from Hendrix, who then sued Jeffrey—who just happened to have a 2 million dollar life insurance policy holding on Hendrix’s life as beneficiary! Right before the lawsuit trial, Hendrix “committed suicide.” While the media claimed “he choked on his own vomit” due to drug OD, evidence noted in the video states he had wine in his lungs, likely forced into his trachea while being held down forcefully…in other words, he drowned in wine. According to the video, Jeffrey “confessed” to a friend in the business that he was part of the murder.

By the way, I wrote that part about Denny’s murder before I learned about how Hendrix was murdered!

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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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Why I Wrote The Prodigal Band Trilogy

Three years ago I wrote a set of posts titled The Prodigal Band Trilogy: The Why in five parts. If you scroll down most of the way on this Home Page or go to my blog and scroll through pages you will find these posts—but to make it easier to understand why I wrote these three novels, I am reprising these posts into one long post here, beginning with part one and ending with part five, plus an additional post reprise as well. Note: A few small changes were made from the original posts. Enjoy!

Part One

As I have said in previous posts both here and the blog site, I began my journey as a writer of fiction around the age of 8 or 9. I was returning home, on Long Island, New York, with my parents and older brother in a car from a visit to my grandparents (mother’s side) who lived in Mount Dora, Florida (about 20 miles from what was then Orlando). It was the summer of 1962; thus, I was 9 at the time. And I just happened to bring some non-lined notebook-sized paper and pencil with me. The paper was folded in half, width-wise, and looked like a “paperback book.”

Glad I brought the paper and pencil, because I was bored. I do not remember what my brother, in the back seat with me, was doing–he was 14 and likely listening to transistor radio up to near his ears (and folks, before the Beatles came along, pop music was very very boring, cutesy-wootsey “love songs” and other meaningless tripe about teenagers falling in love. From the time of the plane crash of Big Bopper, Ritchie Valens, and Buddy Holly in 1958 until the Beatles in 1964, “rock” music, if you could call it that, was IMHO, tripe. Dion and the Belmonts and Del Shannon and perhaps the Four Seasons were about as good as it got, and who the heck was Elvis? But anyway…) I had no idea what my parents were doing other than driving the car.

This was my first journey into the “deep south.” And the only thing I knew about the “deep south” related to the Civil War and the abominable institution known as slavery back then. There were times along Route 301 or even what was then I-95 when I would see what were called “negro shacks” along the way, plus we all visited some Civil War Confederacy monument somewhere, can’t remember. Now I was a “buff” so to speak of Civil War history. So I decided I was going to make up some story about this kid in the South during the Civil War who, along with his friend, a black kid who had been freed from slavery somehow and lived with the kid and his family, hated the south and slavery! So what he and his friend did was help the Union Army blow up a Confederate “ammunition dump.” And they did. I did not mention the state the kid lived in, or even the kid’s family name, but I called him “Johnny Reb” and the black kid was named Sammy. So, I named a kid who would blow up a Confederate ammo dump Johnny Reb? When my dad actually read the “book” (named “Johnny Reb” and was about 20 pages long in pencil) he brought up this irony! After all, weren’t the Confederates called “Rebels”?

Around that time I also had a diary–didn’t all young girls have diaries then? So, there I was in late 1963 just starting to have any interest in the watered-down “rock and roll” back then. When it rained outside, and in the Northeast US, home of “Nor’easters,” it almost always rained some in the fall and early winter, the public elementary school kept all the students in the gym after lunch, too wet to play outside. I was in sixth grade at the time and, not being popular so-to-speak, no boy wanted to dance with me. So all I did then was listen to whatever 45 RPM record discs were put onto the record player. Not being a ‘A-list’ or even ‘B-list’ (more like ‘D-list!’) that’s all I could do as most of my friends were dancing on the gym floor with boys whom had asked them to dance. Well, I had to try to ‘fit-in’ somehow so, even though I thought the music was boring tripe, I pretended to like it anyway. Thus, in my diary I would make up stuff about myself–in terms of a fiction character I can’t even remember the name–being popular and folks like Chubby Checker or Frankie Valli (spelling?) wanting to ‘dance’ with me (not knowing the actual hidden meaning of ‘dance’ at the time…’dance’ was code for a certain ‘f’ word if you know what I mean!) And of course I made up the boy characters as well. And named them the same names I have used for the original rock band characters in my books! (Note: the band concept came about in the latter 60s, and then I added two more band members, then deleted one of the originals in the 80s only to put him back in during the 90s). The reader is going to have to wait to find out the names of the characters for a bit.

Note: Here are the names of the band characters, including last names which I tend not to mention in my snippet posts: singer Erik Manning; guitarist-band leader Jack Lubin; bassist Keith Mullock; guitarist-producer Mick Pordengreau; keyboard synthist Bry McClellan; drummer Tom Cornsby. One of these days I will explain how I came up with the names.

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