That one was very bizarre. I think I found and corrected your error. You managed to put this typo in and the board closed it at the end. Code: [n] [/n]
I agree with Steerpike in that it sounds to me like it might better serve as a Prologue. If it's something the reader would be benefited by knowing before they dive in, they are more likely to read it as a Prologue. I think I very rarely read Author's Notes, and if I do, it's usually after I've read the novel.
I'm adding the AN and Chapter 1 as a spoiler below. Spoiler: Author's Note_Chapter 1 AUTHOR’S NOTE Individual sovereignty, the concept of self-ownership and ones commitment to individual rights, is not divisible. The individual is the alpha and omega absolute and affirms that he or she stands above government, alongside government, but never beneath government. The whole of sovereignty is not divisible and no part is divisible. Yet governments attempt to divide an individual’s sovereignty as they lay claim to the individual’s sweat, intellect, and empathy. Liberal governments attempt to break the individual apart and assign portioned and equitable control to other individuals, politicians, states, and nations -- stateism. All done in the name of equality or fairness. But this equality of fairness doesn’t apply to those who sacrifice, only to those who the sacrifice benefits. Stateism is a deadly illusion. It’s a cruel magician’s trick that acts as if it is possible to alienate the inalienable. One could no more divide an individual’s sovereignty than one could naturally breathe under water and any claim to the contrary is an illusion or worst yet, a delusion. The delusional captivated by the illusion disregard the magician’s other hand, and all the while, the slighted hand holds their head under water in a baptism of control. In that life-giving divide of air and liquid, the burden of the magician’s deceit is one sided and the delusional will sense the urgency of a drowning man. They’ll sense suffocation and it will bolt through every muscle in their body. It will jump from their lungs and leap into their throat as they thrash about grasping for firm ground on an illusionary plane, and then they will slowly, surely, sink. Then they will die. But it matters not. They died the moment they clapped for the magician and allowed their sweat, intellect, and empathy to be appropriated. They died the moment they believed the illusion. ― On the Statist Division of Individual Sovereignty, xxxxxxxxxx by the author xxxxxx CHAPTER 1 Yellow chalk in hand, I drew radiating rays of the sun onto the smooth concrete of the warehouse floor. A squiggly, daffodil colored line equated with another, and soon, the sun’s warmth glowed atop the stick figures of my surrogate father and mother. Mother tapped me on the shoulder and softly asked, “Arc, is the sun rising or setting?” I didn’t know. I hadn’t thought of the sun as moving and timidly offered, “It’s in the middle?” I went back to drawing the sun’s golden rays on the concrete canvas. I added myself to the idyllic scene, a small boy with straight lines for arms and legs. “I see,” Mother said and she added, “Things are always in motion, Arc.” She glanced toward father who was speaking at the front of the crowded warehouse. “Most feel safe in the middle. Does that make you feel safe?” “Yes.” “You’ll grow out of that.” “When I have bad dreams,” I said. “I feel safe in the middle of you and father.” “You’ll grow out of that, too.” Mother smiled but it was an uneasy smile, it lacked that spark that normally set her eyes afire. She took a deep drag off her cigarette and let the pale smoke swell over her lips into a thin stream that cut the cold air. Then, she brushed the long strands of white hair from my face. “Will my hair always be white?” I asked. “They didn’t say. Others like you have beautiful white hair, so, maybe. They say white hair is a sign of struggle.” “When did I struggle?” Mother sighed, little puffs of smoke barreled out of her pursed lips. “We’ve been struggling all along, Arc. The whole of lifetimes have glowed and dimmed. Thousands more have come and gone. And all, every single one of them, have found the Authority’s rule a struggle. Well,” she hesitated, “those like us have.” “Those like us?” “We’re miscarriages.” She answered. “Miscarriages?” I repeated, not sure of the meaning. “Strays. Lost souls searching for something. Searching for something we once had but now is missing.” I didn’t really understand. Too deep a concept for a nine year old. “Will your hair be white?” I asked. “Hopefully,” she answered. “Your wish for me should be that my hair turns white from old age and not struggle. Did you read today?” “Yes.” “Who?” “Rand, and a little of John Stuart Mill.” “Mill is your favorite I think. You read him often. Did you have trouble with any of the words?” “Yes. Father helped.” Mother nodded “Your father is a good man.” “A brave one, too.” I added. Mother smiled again. This time her cheeks glowed from that hidden place where admiration dwells but I loved her eyes. They would sparkle with a far-off flush of color and caught fire as her mind circled thoughts of father. She always had that look with father – I saw it as the spell that bound them. “Yes, a brave man, too.” She said. Earlier this morning father and mother had argued. He protested about mother’s idea for a stage, but mother insisted and usually got her way, “Josiah, people don’t look at you upon a stage, they. . . look up to you. This speech is important and you need a stage. The brothers and sisters need to see these words delivered from your mouth, not have them relayed through gossip.” Even then, father wouldn’t allow any type of stage to be built. He chose to stand on an empty, unsteady chair. “Miranda, if you want me on a stage, then none better than the chair that my brother once sat in.” “Fine.” Mother said, “Fine. You are a stubborn man sometimes, Josiah.” “Stubbornness starts and ends.” He had responded. “Mountains to valleys. Sky to sea. Each stubborn, each blind to the will of the other. You know what happens next?” “What?” She asked. “Mountains move, skies fall, seas rise, and the world changes.” Mother shook her head with cynicism, but lovingly kissed father on the cheek. “I guess we’ll start with the chair, then.” Father always spoke with great intensity to the strangers called friends, brothers, or sisters in this warehouse. Mother called these brothers and sisters revolutionaries and warned me to never repeat what she said. I did repeat it though, under my breath. When alone, I’d let the word escape the bondage of my tied-tongue and imagine each syllable as dueling whips and swords because father said revolution meant: a battle of words and ideas. If father was a revolutionary, then I wanted to be one, too. I had a sense that I was already one, a revolutionary. The small crowd in front of father roared as he stepped up and onto the chair. Mother clapped and lit another cigarette with the remaining glow of the old one. “Stop drawing for a moment and listen,” she said, “father is speaking and this part is important.” “There’s a place for government!” Father wailed and his tone startled me. His deep voice boomed in the open space of the warehouse. He sounded angry as if his friends had done something wrong but they, oddly, cheered him on. “A small, well lit place where government should be shackled and chained to a rock-solid foundation of consent. The moment the beast growls, the moment it endeavors to shroud itself from the cold or begins to shout out orders or tussles against its cuffs, it should be silenced. Government should be treated and guarded like the beast it is.” The brothers and sisters roared with approval. Then, the dim lights above us flickered and swayed. The once sentinel stature of the large warehouse door bellowed an unnatural, “BOOM!” The door was ripped from its frame in a spray of splinters and sent soaring across the room. The explosion happened in an instant and my father’s friends, brothers, and sisters were caught off guard. They were easy targets. But even if they were prepared, even if they had known about the Authority’s offensive, the outcome would have been the same. A squad of death had found them and a squad of death does but one thing. A Master Mason in flat black riot gear entered the hole where the door had been and yelled, “Clear the room!” A dozen, maybe more, Heradite sweepers filed in behind it in a blur of tempest black. I heard father shout, “Raid! Raid! Take cover!” I had been told what to do when those words were yelled – crouch and find mother – and I did just that. Mother was at my side but it was too late. The executions had begun and the assault was merciless and swift. It was far too easy for the Heradites and I immediately understood that in the battle between words and bullets, it’s impossible to dodge a flurry of lead. Heradites, as if to prove the point, tapped the triggers of their automatic rifles and the room’s air thickened with the scent and plumes of gun smoke. For the briefest of moments the smoke reminded of mother’s smoky cigarette breaths coiling toward the ceiling when she sat in the kitchen smoking and drinking coffee. The smells are different though. The shell’s smoke of combusted carbon chafed and itched the warm-fleshy inside of my nose. Mother’s smoke had become familiar, expected, and pungently sweet. I didn’t know it at the time, but later in life, I would become intimately familiar with the smell of burnt carbon. I would smell it each and every day and it would never get sweeter. The smell would only serve to rot the core of my sanity. Crouched, tight-jawed, I watched everything as the one-sided battle progressed. A Heradite sweeper’s spent shell tumbled nearby on the concrete. It was a NATO shell, 7.62x51mm, nearly the same size as an AA battery and in a matter of seconds, spent shells and the lifeless bodies of my surrogate family littered the warehouse floor. Another empty shell leapt from a Heradite’s rifle ejection port followed by another round of gunfire. I raised my head just enough to watch another body wilt, and then he dropped to the floor with an empty thud. I had, affectionately, called him skunk because of the gray stripe in his hair. His touch of white reminded me of my own. Now his eyes were forever fixed in a dead gaze. He seemed to look right through me as I stared into his eyes -- a chary reflection of his last twinkling. He had started life with a heartbeat. It ended with a deadly bang and a whimper. Even with my ears covered, I heard the muted ting of another brass casing as it bounced nearby. A curvy stream of dim colored smoke escaped the exploded neck of the shell and I wondered if the spent brass was hot to the touch. Bullets plowed through tombs of flesh to bore into the plaster covered walls of the warehouse. Tufts of plaster fell in slow motion like leaves from a wintered tree carried on a gentle breeze. The impacts, so forceful, that much of the plaster had turned into a white powdery dust that fogged the air and settled onto the blood that flowed from the bodies. It was a disturbing display, the starkness of the white gypsum dust floating atop the dark red dignity of blood. Only nine years old and my first sights of death were those of my surrogate father, mother, and their closest friends. My family’s battle for freedom didn’t last long. As soon as it started, it was over. I already had a sense that mankind was the only animal that could and, would, create something as efficient and deadly as a bullet. The harsher lesson was personal -- Only a despot like the Authority would authorize and commemorate its use on its own in the name of the greater good. All I could do was crouch and hold mother’s peaceful hand. Her lit cigarette lay near the corner of her opened mouth. It starved for drawn air to fuel its fire, but mother had none to give. A noticeable hush fell over my world. It was without hum, without laughter, without revolutionary cheers, motherly questions or a father’s coarse nudge. Wholly unpleasant in its ruin, a place of thick smoke where dreams went to die. This emptiness, took everyone I had known, and their dreams, with it. Most spiteful, it left me behind. “Clear!” A Heradite sweeper reported. Even out of formation, their footsteps tapped like a sharp bell as they moved in perfect unison. They mimicked one another. All Heradite’s do. Death and extermination, it seemed, moved in lockstep. “Captain! Count?” The Master Mason demanded. “Thirty-two down, Mason! That’s the last of them.” “Good. Good. Thirty-one was the count given by the informant.” The Mason raised the riot shield on its helmet and I saw the glow, what we called eyeshade, of its achromatic eyes with the telltale charcoal color on its lunar eyelid. “Plus one for good measure, I suppose.” The Mason spat over stunted teeth and gums onto the barrel of its rifle, the spittle danced and hissed from the residual heat. “The cultural leader among the count, Captain?” “Yes, Mason. Up front. Josiah Warren was the first to go. Easy target standing on a chair, a bullet right through the temple.” The Mason chuckled. “Fitting, his thoughts were twisted anyway. Very well, it is at an end and the Authority is, once again, victorious. Search for contraband and destroy any you find. Kill any breathers and leave the bodies for the waste techs.” Several more shots echoed off the warehouse walls to ensure those still wheezing or moving were dead. For some reason, the individual shots sounded worse than the mass of gunfire moments ago. Targeted, openly controlled hatred tunneled out of metal chambers to root out those last few gasps of a revolution and each tap of the trigger made me coil and cringe. A sweeper’s foot landed next to mine, its black militia boot had thick black laces that snaked through the brass eyelets all the way to its knees. It’s boot easily three to four times larger than my small bare foot. It snuffed mother’s last cigarette into the blood covered concrete with a twist of its ankle. Then it nudged her shoulder with the tip of its boot. “Surly, you must have known it would come to this?” It asked her corpse. I tightened even further into a ball and buried my head into my chest. My eyes watered, attracted the gypsum dust in the air, and collected into a creamy stream of a tear on my cheek. I gripped the chalk in my hand with such force that it snapped. I watched as the dust settled on mother’s hair. Mother’s hair did turn white with struggle after all and I thought there might be a blessing in that mother would struggle no more. I studied those around me as a still witnesses of death -- the innocence of a child’s drawing, the false security of gypsum walls, and the fatal cooling of red blood that pooled around spent gun shells. I didn’t know if it would come to this, but undoubtedly knew that it had. We were in the thick of it. We were in the middle of it and mother said most feel safe in the middle. I didn’t feel safe and stared at my toes. I backed away from an apathetic stream of blood that flowed on the concrete floor toward my feet. I had just finished mother’s white hair in the chalk drawing on the concrete. Tableaus in history as it were. Slowly, the drawing dulled under the gritty sludge of blood and white dust. Then the drawing, and my world, disappeared. I’m not sure what I felt back then. What do nine year olds feel? Rage? Anxiety? Fear? For the longest time I thought it was an unnatural feeling of loneliness or regret. Eventually, after many years, I thought of it as a simple evaluation on my part. The probability of survival is what I had worked out. I had prolonged my own life in some mathematical emotional craftiness from bygones ago that suggested I stay quiet and close my eyes. It suggested I lower my head while the bullets found their targets and the bodies fell. The simplicity of that feeling, it only whispered – ‘stay still - do not dare move.’ It’s an innate feeling, but I have no idea what to call it. I do remember the voice of the Heradite above me. I can replay it in my mind exactly as I had heard it. Its voice had a southern drawl. The syllables were syrupy-slow and as tooth rotting as warm caramel. “What do have we here?” It checked my elbow for a scar and when it saw the small incision, it ripped opened my shirt. It smiled, “A conjured? Mason, a conjured here!” It patted the battery inside my chest pouch and pulled me up by my hair as if I were a kitten lifted by the scruff of the neck. Another sweeper entered from the back room. “Books! Books, Mason, in the false floor and artwork in the back room. Sedition pamphlets and posters are all over the place! Nonconformist! Our punishment too merciful?” The Mason took me from the Heradite and tossed me over its shoulder. “I’ve changed my mind. Call off the waste techs and put the incendiaries in place. Pile the books, posters, pamphlets and douse them. We’ll burn the dead with their own ideals.” “Yes, Mason.” “Let mercy find no shelter here!” The Mason patted my back, a guiltless murderer stoking the smoldering fire of its last remaining victim. “Mercy only important to this boy.” I punched the Mason’s back. Desperate strikes on the hardness of riot gear that did nothing. The Mason exited the warehouse with me over its shoulder. Once outside, the Mason turned, and then ordered. “Set off the incendiaries, burn the whole thing down! Bodies and all. Ash-To-Ash. I’ll take the young boy, no sense letting a conjured go to waste.” “Yes, Mason!” Dark smoke bellowed into the air as I was taken away. Small fires turned into a fierce blaze that engulfed everything important in that warehouse. For the last time I smelled mother’s smoke, but it was nothing like I had smelled before. *** That last sedition, for me, happened in a flurry of seconds but the memory was laid so deep in my brain, and with such harrowing detail that time slowed. Everyone I had known was gone and, I think, it was that immediate disconnection from all I had known that honed my memory. It happened some twenty years ago but I can recall it as if it happened moments ago. My surrogate father, mother, and their clan were, historically speaking, one of the last groups of resistance. They were the last holdouts during the final days of the forced Census relocations. As someone once said, I believe it was T. S. Eliot, “The end is where we start from.” That was both the end and the rebirth of a nation. It was the end of my innocence, the birth of my slavery and like most births it was bloody, sacrificial, and painful. Like most rebirths of a nation, it left dead bodies to fuel mass fire heaps or fill mass graves. Those it didn’t kill found their skin pale from lack of breath while they joined a new caste of orphans, widows, and misery. It left something else, too. It left those like me. Those who knew something was wrong. Before I continue, before I tell you my story, I should share what mother once told me: “The most beautiful thing you’ll ever witness is the birth of your child.” It’s important that you know that going in because all beautiful things had been taken away. Beauty was killed by the beast and replaced by something that isn’t beautiful at all, management. The sweet connection between the heart and mind had been intercepted, and beauty, by its very definition, cannot be added to, taken away from, changed or managed without destroying it. It took years for me to make the connection that it’s the same for an individual’s sovereignty, especially my own sovereignty. Life’s beauty and sovereignty are one. They are the natural link of heart and mind that characterizes one’s spirit, one’s freedom. Beauty once existed. Heard the old describe it as individualized divine images, thoughts or feelings. The old say it was a newborn’s smell or a child’s laugh. They felt there was an innate beauty in music, art, poetry, food, creativity, a lover’s touch, family and so much more. Beauty in things old and new, I even had an understanding that it was as simple as a cool drink on a hot day. It’s all gone, replaced with dullness and rules. Beauty was scraped off the surface of mankind to reveal reason, to give rise to The Collective Solution. An individual’s beauty, sovereignty, freedom, whatever life was like many, many years ago. None of it must have been that important.
Yeah, I read anything like an introduction, foreward, notes, etc. after reading the novel, if I read them at all. I don't like them to color my reading of the story.
@AspiringNovelist that's short enough that you might just put it as a quote, an excerpt from the cited work, on a page of its own before the story starts. Don't label it author's note or anything else, just have it there as a piece of text. I've seen plenty of fantasy writers do that. Steven Erikson will start books with such fictional excerpts, for example, and he has a snippet of text from some made up source at the beginning of each chapter that tells something about the history of the world, or a people, or an anecdote, etc. Calling it Author's Note makes it seem to me like it isn't part of the story.
Yeah, I saw that. I tried to delete it three or four times by editing the post, but it came back by itself. Thanks for fixing it.
Sure. I should add that an exception has already come to mind. Steven Brust, who is an excellent fantasy writer, has a series of 'histories,' set earlier in his world than his main Vlad Taltos novels. Those are books like The Phoenix Guard and 500 Years After (allusions to Dumas). He is engaging a sort of metafiction, because the story is supposed to be a history written by a somewhat pompous fictional historian, and I think he includes notes and comments from the 'author,' but in his case it isn't coming from Brust, the true author of the work, but being attributed to his fictional narrator, the historian who is supposed to be telling the story.
Your note comes off as preaching. The story starts out with intrigue (I didn't read very far into it). I'd drop the author's note unless you have a very good reason to keep it.
That's an interesting take, possibly present the tale from an historian's perspective... I do recall that Max Brooks did this with World War Z.
I agree. I started to read it and within seconds found myself just lightly scanning through it to get to the beginning of the chapter. I can't get through it. Even now I tried to go back and re-read it and by the second paragraph I was scanning again. Some people might love a beginning with a chunk socio-political text, but my guess is that many will just want to get straight into the story. It sounds like the author is trying to push his/her political philosophies on the reader, which is the equivalent of meeting someone new and exciting and have that person greet you with a sermon. Maybe you could work it through the first few chapters as snippets. Like: Chapter One: "First Paragraph" - Citation Story begins. Chapter Two: "Second Paragraph" - Citation. Chapter begins. Does that make sense? It might make it easier to swallow than trying to tackle it as a whole. Or if you don't mind the disinterested skipping over it, it could work the way you have it.
Yes, your input, Gingers', and Steer have set me on a new path. I'm going to re-read World War Z to determine what made Brooks' successful. Then read some of the books Steer mentioned. Once I get a sense of the correct formatting, I'll move the story to Historical-Fiction. Of course, this requires a re-write from F_POV to 3_POV, but so be it. I figure, why do an AN that may alienate any reader or agent, if I can tackle this another way, thus avoiding all those pitfalls.
Here's an excellent article that explains what can go in to Author's notes. Hope it helps. http://www.writing-world.com/victoria/crafting36.shtml
Steerpike, Steven Brust has a ton of novels. Which one do you suggest for someone entertaining a 'historical-fiction' where the Historian is the narrator? Thanks.
The Phoenix Guards is the first of his "histories," and also a lot of fun. The narrator is funny and a bit pompous, but he doesn't intrude on the story.
The narrator of The Phoenix Guards is actually a character himself. He isn't part of the story, he's just telling it and what little you find out about him colors how you perceive much of the story itself. It was a brilliant move by Brust.
Yep. It's very often a mistake to assume that a pleasantly puzzled, curious reader who's motivated to read on to get his questions answered is a bad thing .
Hi, I'm going to have to agree with Ginger Coffee and Aspiring Novelist - I can't see what your author's note has to do with the story. It sounds like you're trying to make a philosophical argument about liberty and personal rights versus those of the state - but people like me don't read books of fiction to be "educated" about what an author believes. We want to be entertained by a good story. If this is indeed part of your plot I would suggest that you break it up into snippets and weave it into the story somewhere along the way. For inspiration I'd suggest Hemmingway for the view of rugged individualism that comes through in his writings, or Heinlein with something like Starship Troopers. They both manage to show these sorts of viewpoints into their works without having them as author's notes. You can include them as POV's of various characters or even dialogue. Last if you do instead want to push this as your personal philosophy and make it as an author's note - put it at the end of the book so it doesn't turn off readers. Cheers, Greg.
I'm an impatient fellow and my decision will ultimately depend of the length of the prologue / notes. A couple of pages in length and I'll skim read them. Anything longer and I skip straight to chapter one.
Yes, that's a good point. If I see a book with a prologue that is a page or two long, it's not likely to put me off. If I see a twenty page prologue, it's a lot more likely to make me put the book back on the shelf.
