The Veil War

I ran into Tim Miller on the Twitter, and saw that he was a writer. Sweet, I thought. Then I saw that his book was titled, “The Hand of God.” Sweeter. Johnny Cash’s God’s Gonna Cut You Down started playing in my head. I looked closer, and saw that there could be no song more appropriate to the matter of the book. Check it out.

PS., I am such an asshole to have this sitting in my drafts folder for so long without publishing it. My apologies to Tim, you the dear reader, all the small gods of propriety and the universe at large.

The Birth of the Hand of God

The idea for this story came from a combination of a several things.  I was at a time in my life, almost exactly one year ago, when things were going incredibly bad for me.  I had just had a business fail, we’d lost our house, cars and had to move across the country to find work.  Shortly after that our marriage totally fell apart and we’d separated.  During that mess, my ex decided to take our daughter and move to another state with her without telling me or allowing me to see her (that’s all been worked out now), so needless to say, I was in a very bad place at the time.  I was broke, lonely and quite angry.

During this time, I had begun watching Dexter.  Everyone knows who Dexter is, for those who don’t, he’s the serial killer who works by day as a forensic analyst for the Miami police department.  Well, I found the show highly intriguing and it made me think.  As I was thinking, I reflected on my up until now, useless college degree in Bible and religious studies.  I remembered when I was involved in ministry how many people in churches and even preachers would do bizarre, and often horrible things to others and say it was because God told them to.  They felt “led”, “guided” or “convicted” by the holy spirit to do whatever crazy off the wall thing it was, which in their minds got them off the hook.

So with those ideas, Pastor Charlie was born.  I thought, what if there was a preacher who thought God was telling him to kill sinners in a brutal and ritualistic way?  So I began writing it, but not from a cop or someone’s point of view trying to stop him, but from Charlie’s own point of view.  I thought it would be fun to take the reader inside of his twisted mind and see how he justifies what he does.  Things get more interesting in the book, when another preacher comes along with a few of his own tricks up his sleeve and the story continues to evolve from there.

Some of the biggest issues I had in the book was how grounded did I want the book to be in reality.  Did I want it to be totally realistic?  Or did I want to put a supernatural twist on it?  I struggled with this off and on a lot, but in the end supernatural won.  I figured you can’t have a book dealing with religion from such an angle without some supernatural activity.  I think in the end it made the book much more interesting and raised the stakes considerably. There is an underlying message all throughout the book that things are never what they seem, or what we might expect them to be.

The Hand of God was a lot of fun to write.  I’m currently working on a second book in the Pastor Charlie series.  The biggest challenge with any of these stories is getting him into these jams, and then figuring out how I’m going to get him out.  Especially with as powerful his enemies are.  Either way, I hope everyone enjoys reading it and maybe even learn a few things as well. I learned a lot while writing it.  Thank you to Stephen for having me here.  Feel free to contact me!

Buy The Hand of God: amazon

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I found Russell on the Twitter, locked in eternal combat with his mortal enemies, the clowns. Supported only by the love of his followers, alcohol, and a few brave Lithuanian sex workers; he guards us all from the evil machinations of the kōlobathristēs. Hatred of clowns may seem a slender reed upon which to build a relationship, but it has been a fruitful one. Russell typically writes adrenaline-fueled thrillers. And this book is no different. However, there is a bit of idea lurking in there, and I’ll let Russell explain it:

The Voynich Cipher

My latest book, The Voynich Cypher, is an action/adventure novel that uses the Voynich Manuscript as the basis of the underlying conspiracy/treasure hunt. I first became familiar with the Voynich years ago, when a friend of mine who is really into cryptography told me about it. It’s 240 or so pages of “quires” (chapters) with fantastical illustrations, written entirely in an unknown language, believed by most of the best cryptologists of the last century to be a cypher. It’s never been cracked, in spite of being a lifelong fascination for many notables in the code-breaking field. Controversy has surrounded the document almost since it was rediscovered in the early 20th Century, when it was bought by rare book dealer Wilfrid Voynich in 1912, from amongst the possessions of a recently deceased Jesuit general. It has remained enigmatic and inscrutable ever since, and has baffled and confounded generations of experts. Numerous theories have been advanced on the script, none of them correct, or at least not correct enough to decipher it. From time to time it’s been theorized that it was written in a hoax language, but those notions were debunked by rigorous study of the nuance of the text, which is far more sophisticated than any hoax would have required, or than would have been possible to create in the 1400s.

Authorship is a hotly debated aspect of the manuscript. Speculations have abounded – everything from 13th century father of modern science Roger Bacon, to Shakespeare (Francis Bacon), to flim-flam men, con artists and rogues. The truth is that nobody knows. The vellum was recently carbon dated to the mid 1400s, so it is in fact what it appears to be: a medieval document of unknown origin apparently written entirely in code or some unknown language, which chronicles medical, astronomical and botanical knowledge, if the illustrations are any indication. The Voynich Manuscript is truly one of the world’s most inscrutable mysteries, and is the most viewed document at the Beinecke Library at Yale University, where it has resided since the 1960s.

When I decided to try something different than the conspiracy thrillers I’m known for, I started looking around for a mystery. I wanted something that was genuine and verifiable that I could twist and mold into an entirely plausible story. The Voynich occurred to me almost completely by accident – I was reviewing candidate possibilities, and one of them was mentioned alongside the Voynich. That triggered my recollection of long discussions with my buddy, and I was on the road.

I wanted to create an enduring modern fable, something that was both social commentary and adventure, and that was completely non-disprovable. That’s a tall order, and became taller still when I began researching all the aspects of the saga I wanted to include. Months went into everything from Roman geography and arcana, to the Voynich itself, to numerous cryptography tomes, to the various authorship theories (I read several books that made logical, but ultimately incorrect arguments), to the history of the Catholic Church, to the Rosicrucians and Templars, to medieval secret societies, to Masonic lore. I put the book aside several times to write others, but always returned to it, drawn by what I felt is a compelling tale.

The Voynich Cypher is a special novel for me, because it represents my desire to spread my wings and attempt something I’ve always wanted to do, but never felt I had the chops for until recently – to write a Foucault’s Pendulum sort of book that a modern audience could relate to easily, but that didn’t pander. That type of book is hard – it’s difficult to move a plot along at breakneck pace and keep things unexpected at every turn, while imparting a tremendous amount of detail, and writing it was a challenge I’m glad I stepped up to. My hope is that readers who enjoy Dan Brown or Cussler’s work will enjoy Voynich, and that it will be compared favorably to their efforts.

Buy The Voynich Cypher: amazon

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