Update: Thanks to Dana at First Street Journal, Patterico and Beldar for their kind links, not to mention lots of people on twitter. Of particular interest was Michelle Malkin’s mention on twitter, since, um... she’s kind of a character in the novel. So that is cool.
Update (II): Also thanks to Paulitifact for the linkage.
We now resume the original post as is.
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So it turns out that in my spare time I have written a novel. Go figure. It is published on Amazon as a self-published Kindle book. Here’s its cover image which I created myself:
Its full title is “Archangel: A Novel of Alternate, Recent History.” You can purchase it, here, or you might consider going over to some of your favorite sites and using the Amazon search box on the sidebar of blogs such as Patterico’s, Althouse or Instapundit and the respective sites’ owners will get a little money back for themselves. Right now it is coming up as the second item if you just search for “Aaron Worthing.”
I actually did the principal writing of it in 2006 and 2007, and since then I have been polishing it. And of course I think some “stage fright” kept me from releasing it. But I had begun to pitch the book to different publishers and I felt that the time to finally release it was now. This is in part because as time went on, certain parts of the novel started to get incredibly ironic. You will have a hard time believing that I wrote this before certain events in my life—except for the fact that it would have been physically impossible to have written it after those events.
What’s it about? Well, a few years back I was gripped with an idea. What if, on September 11, 2001, there was a superhero there, who had the ability to intervene and really make things better. Now very quickly I realized that it shouldn’t be a fairy tale where suddenly September 11 is not a disaster at all, but I had a vision of a gritty, realistic depiction of how a superhero would really look in our world, and how our world would respond to him.
So on one hand, you see the hero behave in a way that is much more realistic than you are used to. As I said to Dustin the other day, a real superhero would never get a cat out of a tree. He’d have much bigger fish to fry. For instance, here is a little dialogue from the novel. The speaker is FBI Agent Rini Miller who has been assigned as the hero’s liaison:
“I mean, okay, so you are a real life superhero, but who are the real life supervillians? Osama bin Laden, Yasir Arafat, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jung Il, and all the other murderous dictators and terrorists all over the world. Not some idiot in a silly costume.” She paused for effect, then added dryly, “well, I mean besides Gadhafi.”
And on the other hand you also see a realistic depiction of how the world would respond to him. We’re talking about the law, politics, international affairs, the media and society as a whole. But at the same time, I don’t let the plot get so bogged down on those details that we can’t have many action scenes.
One of the other things you will notice very quickly is that the fictional cast is mixed heavily with a large number of real and famous persons. For instance given what I told you about the plot so far, it shouldn’t surprise you that my character would interact with the mayor of New York City and rather than make up some kind of fictional mayor, the person he talks to is Giuliani himself. And when people turn on the news, it is Fox News, CNN, ABC News, etc. rather than any made-up stand in, like “Weasel News” or something lame like that. I do that to lend the story verisimilitude. Because if he meets with the President in 2001, and it’s President David Palmer instead of President Bush, it takes you out of the story for that moment. That being said, the depiction of all of those real-world persons, and entities (like CNN) is fictionalized and represents my opinions about them. You should not make the mistake of thinking this novel is anything but fiction.
You might also ask how much my moderately conservative world view affects it. In some sense it is unavoidable. If a liberal writes a story in which a character meets George W. Bush, you can expect things to go one way. Even if the liberal had no intention of “bashing” Bush, they hold certain beliefs about the man that they consider to be realistic that reflects their liberal world view and you would expect those beliefs to bleed into the story. And at the same time a moderately conservative guy like me would depict the same man very differently. I will also add that sometimes I made choices in my depictions in a deliberate attempt to make things more interesting. What I did not set out to do is to write some kind of propaganda.
Finally, it’s worth noting that Filipino Americans and people aware of Filipino culture will enjoy the fact that this hero is part of a large and loving Filipino American family. There are actual plot points that turn on their language and culture.
I suspect I have said more than I needed to. So please buy it and hopefully you will enjoy it
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By the way, let me take a moment to thank my editor, whom you all know as Dustin. He did a great job of finding my typos and just helped on style in general. All remaining errors are my fault.
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