Spero

‘Spero’ (Hope) is one of those Latin words that you sort of know, even if you were lucky enough to attend a school which didn’t obstinately prioritise fluency in dead languages.  It is incorporated in quite a few modern English words, most obviously ‘desperate’, or ‘de – sperate’, meaning literally ‘without hope’.  Fortunately, although the times that AR Horvath is writing about may indeed be desperate, the quality of the writing itself is far from it.

Spero elaborates on the events described in ‘Fidelis’, but starts and ends in different places.  This may sound like an odd way to tell a story (book two of a series traditionally picks up where book one finished, after all), but it proves to be a refreshing and clever way to – almost literally – weave a narrative, with a different thread of the future history that Horvath is constructing being plucked out of the tapestry of the whole and examined. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are encountering the Birth Pangs series for the first time you may be wondering if you needed to start at the beginning, with Fidelis, in order to understand Spero.

Actually, the way that I’ve written the books they can each be read independently. You can read either or both and in any order.  This will be true for the remaining of the series, too.

Why?

The series is not linear.

In other words, Spero doesn’t start where Fidelis leads off.  For a number of reasons, I am writing the series with each book (except book 7) reflecting the perspective of a different character in the series.  The time frames covered by all of the books is roughly the same and where the characters of the different books interact, the same scene is present in each book, seen from that character’s unique perspective.  Where the characters depart from each other, the story branches off.  You might say that each book overlaps the others.

This approach allows me to lay ever deeper layers of meaning to the events in the books. One character will think nothing of an event in one book but in another book, another character will perceive the event as a turning point or startling development.

In short, you’ll be able to read any of the first six books in any order that you please.  Each is stand alone, but none are the whole story.

The seventh book will start, chronologically, where the first six books end, and proceed to tie up all the loose ends, weaving the six story lines into a single rope.

There are a number of reasons for why I took this approach.  One of them is that I perceive that our entire lives are like this.  Each of us is a character in a book.  There are some 10 billion books in the ’series,’ with many of our ’stories’ overlapping the stories of others. Taken together, our individual stories constitute one grand story.  This grand story contains elements that are astonishing, but in my view, missed if you take the stories of our lives one at a time.  At the same time, one cannot overlook our individual lives, for pieces of them are what make the grand story, the Mosaic, we’ll call it, what it is.

My seven book series is a very faint shadow of what I perceive is reality.  It begs the question:  if the Birth Pangs series are a mosaic of my authorship, who is the Author of the series of our lives?  Is there really no Author?  Really?  I don’t think so.  If you think that way, one of my aims is to persuade you otherwise.

I noticed that I am selling my books for less than Amazon.com so I thought I would look around to see what other prices are.

To my surprise, BarnesandNoble is offering the best prices hands down- even beating me- especially on the hard cover.

Here are current prices:

Amazon.com

Jean Heimann has posted a review of Spero on her blog.  She also had reviewed Fidelis.  Check out her Spero review! (The link to her review of Fidelis is posted on that same page)

This is a continuation of an interview done originally by audio. That audio is lost, so I am responding in text. This is question 9:

It is clear in your writing that you go to great lengths to develop masculine men and feminine women, yet you go to great pains to make your masculine men not macho, and your feminine women not submissive or needy in the least, while remaining very feminine. What draws you to explore these issues of masculinity and femininity?

I suppose there are two aspects of this question.  What draws me to explore these issues and how did this get reflected in the presentation of men and women?

The ‘draw’ is easy enough.  In my own life I felt that there were a missing components of ‘masculinity’ in my own life, like I was meant for something quite different- as a man- but for one reason or another I was not acting like a full man.  If there is a ‘masculine ideal’ I wasn’t measuring up.  There seemed to be others who felt the same way, even if their conclusions were different.  The extraordinary success of Elridge’s “Wild at Heart” I think illustrates this.  I don’t think that only men feel this disconnect, either.

At any rate, it seemed to me as I tried to find a way to resolve this issue that the very structure of our lives de-masculinizes and de-feminizes us. Read the rest of this entry »