Balancing time is of extreme importance, but it's not always easy. When we first moved into our new house and I finally had my new office space I was overjoyed. I thought I would have more time to spend pursuing my literary endeavors and surfing the Internet. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case. I think I'm actually spending less time on my computer. My responsibilities make it difficult if not impossible to get time in my office until after the entire household is asleep. Only then can I have uninterrupted time to write, and sometimes that isn't until after 11 o'clock at night.

I am however getting ready for NaNoWriMo. I'm changing genres this year. Mysteries have always been my passion my passion, but for the past three year I have written supernatural thrillers. When things would slow down I would just throw in a confrontation with Mephistopheles and his hounds of Hell to keep the story moving. A mystery is very different. It has more to do with the cerebral workings of the detective than with physical battles. I'm a little nervous, but I'm anxious to begin.
 

I just finished reading a true crime book that was more than a little disturbing because its so close to home and I would like to believe that stuff like that doesn't happen.

The year was 1989 and I was fresh out of high school and just starting college in the Spring. I was born in Deep South Texas so stories of curanderos weren't new to me. Some even set up shop in my home town, but up until that year I had never heard of santeria or palo mayombe, and voodoo was one of those religions practiced in remote areas of the Caribbean or New Orleans. Mark Kilroy, a twenty-one year old pre-med student, was snatched from the streets of Matamoros while down on Spring Break and in the months following his abduction a search for answers led to the Rancho Santa Elena and a grisly tale unfolded. The stuff of nightmares occurred not forty miles from my home.

I bought the true crime book Cauldron of Blood: The Matamoros Cult Killings by Jim Schultze twenty years ago and it has sat on my bookshelf unread until now. Perhaps it was because the horror was so close to home that I waited until now to read the horrifying tale of drug-smuggling, the occult and ritual cannibalism.

The monster in this tale of terror Adolfo De Jesus Constanzo, a practitionaer of dark arts, inspired his disciples with a charismatic power and led them to commit unspeakable acts of torture, mutilation and murder. Sara Maria Aldrete, an honor student and cheerleader at Texas Southmost College in Brownsville was his High Priestess, living a bizarre secret life involving blood sacrifice. Elio Hernandez Rivera was the head of a powerful drug-dealing family and believed that drinking human blood would make him invincible.

Jim Schutze may have written the book, but he wasn't here when all this was going on. The setting for the story stretches from matamoros to Brownsville and South Padre Island all the way to the Miller International Airport in McAllen. The book mentions places I know too well. I have stayed in the Holiday Inn in Brownsville where Constanzo often stayed. I have been to the Miller International Airport in McAllen countless times.

A passage from the book illustrates the fear that was circulating at that time:

And the word raced across the Valley, in both Mexico and the United States. According to the rumor, the narcosatanistos, as they already were being called in a freshly minted Mexican media word, had been cannibalizing small children and had vowed to take more in retribution for the arrests. Parents rushed into the streets of Matamoros and clutched up their children. Outside the public schools in Brownsville, cars were lined up and drivers were angrily honking their horns, fighting to get up to the door and rush in to take their children home. There was heart-stopping panic in the land. A rumor spread that a certain rural church had been used by such people: it was burned within an hour of the first spread of the rumor.

The panic wasn't only in Matamoros and Brownsville. It struck my home town. People were terrified for their children. And the place where that rural church once stood is only a few miles from where I sit and write. I had to escort my brother to baseball practice and keep a close watchful eye on him. It was in the air. People were scared.

Now that I have read the book I find myself not wanting to believe that such evil can exist in the world today, but it can't be denied that something terrible and horrifying beyond belief happened at the Rancho Santa Elena in the Spring of 1989 and a curandero was called in to perform an exorcism before torching the shack that had been Constanzo's temple.
 

Absolute Fear by Lisa Jackson was one of those books that can make a reader stop and say, “I didn’t see that coming.” Agatha Christie mastered the twist endings that immortalized her books. Move over, Ms. Christie, you have some competition. With all its plot twists Absolute Fear is a page turner that won’t let you put it down until the final thrilling end and an epilogue that leaves the lives of the characters open for a sequel.

Lisa Jackson breathed life into her characters by giving them such intriguing back stories that a reader of her novels wants to go back and read more, hoping that each of the character’s lives warranted their own novels.

The gothic setting of Our Lady of Virtues Hospital and the eerie past it holds is enough to make chills run up your spine with the feeling that it’s no place I would want to be alone, especially with a murderer on the loose who kills in ritual fashion tattooing his victims with cryptic numbers. Our Lady of Virtues also plays into the back story. This is not the only serial killer associated with the mental hospital.

The unstable murderer is obsessed with palindromes and his focus is on Eve Renner who throughout the course of the novel digs up some dark secrets from her past. But the true identity of the manipulative killer was entirely unexpected.

Absolute Fear was a delightfully chilling read from beginning to end and leaves a reader wanting more of Lisa Jackson’s work. It is no wonder she is labeled as a #1 New York Times Bestselling Author.

 

It seems like an eternity since I last made an entry in my blog. I've been trying to get my novel published for almost two years, and I know I have written articles about overcoming discouragement, but that doesn't mean I don't get discouraged myself sometimes.

Before the summer I queried another agent who requested my entire manuscript. You can imagine how excited I got that she expressed an interest in reading the whole thing and not just a few chapters. I emailed the manuscript and waited an entire month without hearing anything back. I wrote her again to inquire as to the status of my novel. She wrote back and said that she hadn't read it yet, but would get back with me the next day. The next day came with a rejection letter. It hit me harder than any other I have had in the past. I was left hanging for a month only to get a rejection. It took me a long time to get over the discouragement, and I'm still battling it.

Today I took another route. I'm aiming for one of the smaller presses and queried an editor directly. I have my fingers crossed.
 

I have been writing for a long time and what many readers - and future readers - of my novel Eyes of the Nephilim may find interesting is that Vandershaw Manor, the ancestral home of Salem Vandershaw, has a secret, and I'm not talking about the ancient evil that slumbers deep in the caverns beneath it. Vandershaw Manor is much older than the novel as is the character of Salem Vandershaw, who is not the main protagonist of the novel but shestill plays a primary role. She is actually much older than my protagonist Josiah Cade. I have tweaked them a bit, but they were actually born/created in a novella I wrote a decade before I even published my first piece when publishing my work was one of the furthest things from my mind. I wrote simply for the joy of creation.
The house that would become Vandershaw Manor was originally in a novella entitled The Curse of Cold Willow. It was a weathered edifice with tall grass and weeds surrounding an aging statue of a woman beckoning visitors to come. Also around the house were dozens of weeping willow trees which gave the house the name Cold Willow. It was a house with an age old curse on it and Salem Vandershaw was returning home from college to stay with her uncle, a prominent Bainbridge attorney. The story was never published, and I don't know what happened to the original manuscript, but the town, the house, and the characters survived.
In Eyes of the Nephilim it isn't poltergeists that haunt the house, but something older and far more evil, and Salem Vandershaw is still in high-school. Her uncle is not an attorney but a college professor and it's not a ghostly mist that comes to claim him, but something he will face while searching for Salem in the ancestral home.
It is my hope that Eyes of the Nephilim will soon find a home. Meanwhile I'm still busy writing and once Eyes of the Nephilim is published Sons of the Fallen will soon follow.
 

I used to be so active online from Writing.com to MySpace. So what happened? Did I fall off the edge of the earth? Not exactly.

I often tell young writers to never give up and always believe in your dreams. I tried to never let rejections get me down, but I'm afraid they did.

I've spent the past year trying to find a literary agent who will represent my work only to get smacked down with one rejection after another... and after so many rejections a writer tends to feel discouraged. And discouragement leads to crankiness.

But all that is behind me now. I got a positive response to my agent query last week and she asked to see the entire manuscript of Eyes of the Nephilim. Does that mean I've finally hooked an agent. Not exactly. I haven't heard back from her yet, but I'm hopeful.
 

As I sit down at my desk to write tension is simmering in the air just south of here. It has been nearly a decade since I crossed the bridge into Mexico, even longer since I worked as a substitute teacher in Hidaldgo where my brother teaches now at the high-school, a stones throw away from Reynosa. They are requiring passports now, and I have never needed to carry a passport in my life. When the Mexican military came to the border to fight corruption and the war on drugs it was reported on the news for awhile, but the stories became less and less until they weren't mentioned anymore. The story that took its place was the border wall and its affect on the communities of the Rio Grande Valley. Now what is going on in Mexico has come to the forefront of the news again.

A few weeks ago I stood on the Roma bluffs and walked down to walk along the river. I looked directly across the river to a park in Mexico where children were playing and a horse was grazing. One could be oblivious to the instability and the violence just by gazing across on a peaceful day when the Rio Grande River is meandering along. Last week I climbed to the top of the observation tower at Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge and looked south toward Reynosa oblivious to the tensions brewing.

The march in Reynosa was reported last week when people blocked the international bridge from Hidalgo to Reynosa protesting the military presence. Two days ago violence exploded in the plaza not far from the bridge. The arrested the leader of the Gulf Cartel in his home in Reynosa. The local newspaper has described the Zetas as the paramilitary enforcers of the Gulf Cartel and they fought back. There was a gun battle in the plaza where I used to go shopping with my family and within earshot of the orphanage where I used to work with the orphans. It blows the mind when I consider how close that is. Before the passport requirement I used to walk across the international bridge to have lunch in one of the cafes or to shop in the very plaza. My brother was teaching a class in Hidalgo at the time and was unaware of what was happening just a few miles away. The news just reported that life is getting back to normal again and the damage to shops in the plaza is getting cleaned up so they can open for business. But there is still tension in the air.
 

My cable was shut off for a few weeks during National Novel Writing Month. I couldn't register my word count by the day like I have done for the past three years. I got to 35,000 words and then stopped short of my 50,000 word goal. It normally would have caused a little bit of stress, but I didn't let it get me down. It was a blessing in disguise. There was an unforeseen benefit. Without the TV and telephone to cause distraction, and without the Internet connection for the temptation of surfing the web, I had nothing to do but sit down at my computer and write. I completed my novel Sons of the Fallen on November 29th and registered it on the 30th.

Sons of the Fallen ties my last two novels together. Mandie, the little girl from Eyes of the Nephilim, has been sent to stay with her Uncle Jack and Aunt Iris in Tennessee. She was a troubled teen back in Bainbridge. She saw things that no one else could see and knew things that she couldn't possibly have known. She was labeled as strange by her classmates. She was desperate for friendship and fell in with the wrong kind of friends. Her grades dropped, she got into fights, and eventually got in trouble with the police. Her parents want to get her away from the bad influences so she could get a fresh start. But she doesn't go alone. She still sees angels, and the Nephilim return for her for that reason. They want to use her to create a weapon against their enemies, and they aren't the only ones.

Tristan Fell, the Fallen Angel introduced in See No Evil, lives under a curse. He was expelled from Heaven and he turned his back on Hell. He is also in my published poem "An Angel and A Demon Fell in Love". He was one of the worst. After the Fall that separated him from the one he loved he was angry and bitter, leading barbaric hordes into bloody battles, destroying villages, slaughtering innocents. Mortals and demons trembled at his name. He was sent to stir the crowd into a frenzy at Christ's crucifixion, but he saw another face in the crowd that he did not expect. Ariel, the love he left behind, was there and gave him a look of sadness and disappointment that pierced his blackened heart. During the three days between Christ's Crucifixion and Resurrection Tristan was to lead another barbaric raid to obliterate a village of women, children and elderly, but at the last moment he turned on his brethren and the barbaric hordes they commanded, defending the village against the slaughter. The Destroyer became the Defender of humanity.For that he was cursed and has walked the earth for two thousand years standing against the tide of evil when it threatens to consume innocent lives. Occasionally he takes a charge to watch over. He has watched over Mandie since she was a little girl just as he watched over her mother before her. He didn't appear in Eyes of the Nephilim because he was a prisoner of the demon Mephistopheles who wants to either draw him back into darkness or to lock him up in a cell in the lowest reaches of Hell to be tormented forever. Mephistopheles sees the benefit of what the Nephilim are planning and enters the book to assist them and to lay a trap for Tristan Fell. The character of Tristan Fell intrigues me and may become a recurring character in future books. (Much like Anne Rice did in her Vampire Chronicles.)

 

I haven’t been able to spend a lot of time online because I’m working on another novel while trying to find a literary agent for Eyes of the Nephilim and performing in a play produced by my friend Tom Fuschetto.

The first week of NaNoWriMo can be one of the hardest. You come up with a cast of interesting characters, giving them backgrounds and breathing life into them. But what ties them together. Where and how will there storylines converge?

The cast for Sons of the Fallen:

1. Mandie Cade, the little girl with psychic powers from my first novel Eyes of the Nephilim, has grown up. The trauma of her childhood abduction are a suppressed memory. She is a troubled teen who was sent to live with her uncle to escape the persecution of her neighbors and classmates who got her into legal troubles.

2. Jack Ferrara, Novelist/Farmer and Mandie’s uncle. He left Boston after defending his sister’s honor and accidentally hospitalizing a man who later died. He has tried to forget his painful past, but it returns to haunt him.

3. Tristan Fell, the fallen angel seeking redemption who was introduced in my second novel See No Evil. After the Fall from Heaven he was the Devil’s fiercest warrior, leading bloody barbaric hordes into battle, preying on the lives of innocents, destroying whole villages. He was angry. He was bitter. He was present at the Crucifixion of God’s Son and in the crowd he saw his angel love Ariel weeping. She gazed at him with eyes of disappointment that pierced his wicked heart and changed his course. Cast out of Heaven and rejected by Hell, he is trying to win his redemption and regain the favor of Ariel and has been fighting to protect mankind from the forces of evil, often standing alone against them, for two thousand years. His weapon is the sword Demon’s Bane, the only weapon that can slay immortals. He has watched over Mandie her entire life except during the first novel when he was held prisoner by Mephistopheles. He has returned to watch over Mandie and to hunt down and destroy the Nephilim to protect humanity.

4. Crazy Luke, a former preacher who has distanced himself from society and lives in the woods. He lives like a hermit in communion with nature. He knows what’s going on in the woods and people think he’s crazy because he sees things that are beyond belief.

5. Carrie Handy, becomes Mandie’s first and best friend, making her feel welcome. She knows the mountain and is fond of Crazy Luke. She has to take responsibility for her brother Finn who is always running off.

6. Finn and Sam, the Tom and Huck of the Cumberland Plateau.

7. Bobby Nivens, a hen-pecked husband. He knows something is going on in the woods. He has encounters, but his wife accuses him of having drunken hallucinations.

8. Teresa Masefield, FBI, determined to prove herself. She and her partner tracked a political assassin to an abandoned New York warehouse and her partner was killed. She is supposed to be “on-leave” from work, but she is seeking her partner’s killer to bring him to justice. The assassin’s name was Tristan Fell.

I am starting to see the individual storylines and they will eventually converge.

Write on! Write on! Write on!

 

It's almost time for NaNoWriMo, and for the past few weeks I have had a couple of novel ideas bumping around in my head, anxious to get out - about two or three different novels. The action/adventure novel has to cook a little longer since I need to do more research on Mongolia and Genghis Khan. I was considering a fantasy novel, but I didn't have a solid enough idea. So I will continue with my Nephilim series of novels and bring some recurring characters in from the past two novels. I have taken some notes and fleshed out some of the characters with my New Novelist software, but when it comes to the actual writing I will stick to MicroSoft Word.

Some questions remain to come out in the writing such as:

Why have the Nephilim returned?

Why are they focused on Mandie Cade? She did play a role in their defeat when she was a little girl in the first novel, Eyes of the Nephilim, but vengence doesn't seem a strong enough reason for their interest in her.

Tristan Fell, the Fallen angel who has been seeking redemption for the past two thousand years has been secretly protecting her since her childhood? Why? And where was he in the first novel?

These and other questions will be pondered and answered sometime within the next couple of weeks.

National Novel Writing Month begins Saturday. Are you ready for the challenge?