Tag: Raiders of the Lost Ark

Starlight

And so now it’s Sunday.

I won’t lie; I’ve lost my sense of time and date and day already this weekend and I’m perfectly fine with it. I hope everyone who has the good fortune to have the weekend off–I know there are many who do not–are in the same state of what day is this that I found myself in most of yesterday and when i woke up this morning–I overslept again, which was amazingly lovely, but i really need to stop indulging myself this way–and am now awake, on my first cup of coffee, and ready to get shit done today. I did get shit done yesterday–I cleaned and organized quite a bit (not enough, it’s never enough) and while I do have some little bit of cleaning and a lot of organizing left to get done, at least I made a start on it yesterday. My desk, for example, this morning is clean and clear; which will make writing later much easier.

I finished Little Fires Everywhere yesterday–I blogged about it already, so I won’t repeat anything other than that it’s a fantastic book I encourage you all to read–and started reading The Coyotes of Carthage, which was originally recommended to me by my friend Laura, who was lucky enough to receive an advance copy. It, too, is fantastic and unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and I am really looking forward to getting more into it–I will undoubtedly take a reading break or two at some point today. It seems to be a political thriller about dark money and political consultants in a very rural county in South Carolina, with a Black male protagonist, so I am sure it’s going to be quite interesting to read.

But I really also need to write today; I’ve not looked at the manuscript since last weekend, and this “only writing on the weekends for one day” simply cannot continue to stand, really. I have too much to write, and I need to stop giving into the laziness or the tiredness or self-destructive patterns or whatever the hell it is that keeps me from finishing this damned book. Heavy sigh. I also have any number of short stories I need to wade through to pick out some to work on for submission calls.

Again, I think there’s something to that I am so overwhelmed believing I’ll never get everything done so why bother doing any of it thing.

Repeat after me: SELF-DEFEATING.

While I waited for Paul to finish working on a grant last night I watched, or rather, rewatched (although I didn’t really remember watching it before, and I figured, meh, if I’ve already seen it I can do stuff on my iPad while it’s on in the background) a documentary called Master of Dark Shadows, about Dan Curtis and how the show came about, and its legacy (I’m sure most people don’t remember Curtis also produced and directed the mini-series based on Herman Wouk’s novels The Winds of War and War and Remembrance). I was one of those kids who watched Dark Shadows only in the summertime, because my elementary school didn’t get out until 3:15; even though we lived only a block away from the school I couldn’t ever get home fast enough to watch even the end. I did love Dark Shadows–our sitter/caregiver, Mrs. Harris, also watched One Life to Live and General Hospital, which were my first exposures to soaps–and it always stuck in my mind; I always give it credit for my interest in horror and the supernatural. I enjoyed watching the documentary (and for the record, I loved the NBC reboot of the series in prime time in the early 1990’s, and was crushed when it was canceled; I rewatched it with Paul and he too was disappointed it ended on its cliff-hanger) and then we started watching a documentary about a double murder in India called Behind Closed Doors, in which the investigation was so incredibly fucked up–I mean, if the primary take-away from all the other true crime documentaries we’ve been watching has been man is our system seriously fucked up, the takeaway from this one is yeah, but ours is clearly better than others.

Which is kind of scary, really.

While I was also bored yesterday waiting for Paul–and only really sort of watching Master of Dark Shadows–I was right, I’d seen it before–I started looking things up on-line; which was an absolutely lovely example of how one can fall into a wormhole on the Internet. As you know, I’ve been having this Cynical 70’s Film Festival, and thinking about the rise, and proliferation of, conspiracy theories in that suspicious, paranoid decade, and one that I hadn’t remembered until yesterday sprang up into my min, completely unbidden, while I was reading about the Bermuda Triangle: Chariots of the Gods? by Erich von Daniken. Does anyone else remember von Daniken and his theories, which were based in nothing scientific or archaeological? Von Daniken believed that ancient texts–the Bible, the Code of Hammurabi, etc.–all contained evidence that in Ancient Times the Earth was visited by space aliens–Alien Astronauts, as he called them–who brought knowledge and information with them to the primitive creatures of our planet at the time, and also assisted them in the massive building projects that modern man cannot conceive of them building back then–the pyramids, for one thing, and the lines on the plains of Nazca (which I first read about in the Nancy Drew volume The Clue in the Crossword Cipher)–and those aliens with their vastly superior technology, were seen as gods by the primitives and those visits have come down to us in the form of mythology. It’s an interesting idea for sure–but it was all conjecture, with no proof. I read all of von Daniken’s books back in the day; others included The Gold of the Gods, and were simply further conjectures, but he developed quite a following, and set the stage for what is called the pseudo-science of Graham Hancock, his modern day successor. (I’ve also read some of Hancock’s work; his theory that the Sphinx is far older than we suspect based on water wear on its base is interesting, as is his other theory that the Ark of the Covenant’s final resting place is in Ethiopia; before reading that book I had no idea that Christianity was so firmly entrenched there) So, I spent some time looking up von Daniken’s theories yesterday, as well as some other conspiracy theories of the time–I also did a deep dive into the entire Holy Grail Holy Blood thing which provided the basis for The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown’s entire career; and of course we certainly cannot forget the apocryphal writings of Hal Lindsay and The Late Great Planet Earth–which, really, is where The Omen came from; we forget how “end times” theory truly began flourishing in the 1970’s.

I’ve always been interested in stories about lost books of the Bible, or lost Biblical theory, along with the end-times prophecies Lindsay wrote about; Irving Wallace’s The Word, which was built around the rediscovery of a lost testament of Jesus which would revolutionize and make-over the Christian theology was one of the first novels of this type I read; it was also made into a mini-series, which made me aware of it in the first place (Irving Wallace isn’t really remembered much today, but he was a huge bestseller back in the day, and he wrote incredibly thick novels, mostly about international conspiracies or legal issues–The Seven Minutes, for example, was about censorship and “blue laws”; The Second Lady was about a Soviet conspiracy to replace the First Lady with a lookalike imposter who was a Soviet spy; The Prize was about the machinations around how the Nobel Prize was given out; etc etc etc). The Da Vinci Code fits clearly into this category, as does The Gemini Contenders by Robert Ludlum and The Fourth Secret by Steve Berry (which is about the fourth secret Our Lady of Lourdes–or was it Fatima?–revealed to either Bernadette or the peasant children; Irving Wallace also covered this in The Miracle); Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade also kind of fit here, as both films are about the search for Biblical relics. I’ve always, always, wanted to write one of these. Years ago I had the idea for one, in which there was a secret document or testament hidden in the Hagia Sophia in Constantinople for years, and that part of the reason the 4th Crusade sacked the city was the Pope’s desire to get his hands on those documents, which were thus smuggled out of the city by the Patriarch and lost forever…this is the idea I always come around to for a Colin stand-alone (I also realize I could do Colin stand-alones set at various times throughout the last twenty years or so of Scotty books, as he is gone a lot of the time on missions), and the working title for it always is Star of Irene, because the Byzantine Empress Irene–contemporary of Charlemagne–has always fascinated me.

But I will never write a Colin stand-alone, or series, unless I get this fucking book finished, so I suppose it’s time for me to head back into the spice mines.

Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader.

It Only Hurts for a Little While

Thursday morning and pay the bills day; I keep hearing about this booming economy I should be grateful for–but all I see is my paycheck staying the same and the cost of everything else going up, so yeah, I’m just not seeing it anywhere. Your mileage might vary, of course, but as for me? Yeah, not seeing it. At all.

If anything, based on my own personal finances, I’d say the economy isn’t really working for me.

Honestly, there’s nothing like paying the bills to send you spiraling down into an endless cycle of stress and anxiety and depression.

But I can’t let anything get me down and slow me in any way; there’s too much work I need to be doing and too many things to get done–and stress and anxiety aren’t going to make anything better or improve anything. I cannot allow myself to go down that path. I deal with enough stress, anxiety and depression as it is, you know?

Paul and I started watching Messiah on Netflix last night; the only reason I’d even heard of this show is because I saw somewhere on-line that it pissed off evangelicals, who wanted to boycott Netflix–so naturally I had to watch it. Apparently they are upset because the show depicts someone who might be Jesus come again to the earth, only he’s Palestinian…because everyone knows that if Jesus returned he’d be blond and blue-eyes and of course he would come to the United States. Honestly, the arrogance of American evangelicals really has no limits, does it? One of these days I’m going to write an essay about that very thing; I was raised that way myself, and it took a long time to deprogram myself–rarely a day goes by when I don’t catch myself automatically reverting to something I learned as an evangelical child and think, whoa, that needs to go. It’s kind of like how we are trained by culture and society and public education to make American exceptionalism our default…it’s insidious and it’s always there, inside our heads, lurking and ready to pounce out to our horror and shock.

But Messiah is a very good show; interesting, I suppose, to those of us who find religion and its impact on culture, history and society fascinating. One of my favorite plots for books always has to do with Biblical history–you know, things the church hid from the world and so forth; dating back to Irving Wallace’s The Word and Robert Ludlum’s The Gemini Contenders and Raiders of the Lost Ark/Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade all the way through Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, I’ve always enjoyed those kinds of stories–and let’s face it, outside of Nazis, who makes better villains than the Catholic Church and the Vatican? The concept that the Church hid things that might have altered the course of history or church development in order to maintain and strengthen their own power is something I’ve always believed to be true, and something I’ve always wanted to explore in my own writing. The Colin book I’ve always wanted to write, for example, would be one of these. I’ve always, as Constant Reader is aware, have wanted to write a Colin stand-alone book, or to even develop a series around his adventures when he isn’t in New Orleans with Scotty and Frank. I’ve had this idea in the back of my mind now for over thirty years–having to do with the 4th Crusade, the sack of Constantinople, and something that had been kept secret and hidden in the cathedral of Hagia Sophia that the Pope wanted to get his hands on, which led to the sack of Constantinople as cover for what the Pope wanted. What that artifact might actually be I was never able to brainstorm out, and as such, the story never truly developed the way I would have wanted to in order for me to actually plan it and start writing.

But it’s always there in the back of my mind.

Anyway, the plot of Messiah goes something like this: it opens in Damascus, with a young Syrian or Palestinian boy (they never really make the distinction) talking to his mother about seeing his father being shot down in the streets–Syria has of course been wracked by a civil war for years now–and then flashes forward to him, slightly older, burying his mother after another attack on the city. The city is about to fall to ISIL, and there’s a man preaching in an open area as the final assault on the city is about to begin. The preacher claims that God will save them all from ISIL–and as people jeer and rockets start hitting the area, an enormous sandstorm blows in from the desert. The storm lasts weeks, ultimately burying the ISIL forces and forcing them into retreat–the storm basically wipes them out and ends the war. The preacher than leads 2000 Palestinians into the desert and to the Israeli border; but he also has caught the attention of a CIA operative i DC who starts monitoring the situation, which becomes fraught when the refugees actually reach the border and Israeli forces take the preacher into custody. We then meet an Israeli intelligence agent, whose marriage has ended badly and he and his ex do not agree on anything. The preacher knows things about this tough man and his past that he cannot possibly know; which is obviously unsettling to the agent. The  episode ends with the preacher having vanished from inside his cell…and we chose to not continue until tonight. The hour sped past, which is a good sign for a show always, and I am intrigued enough to continue.

And on that note, I have emails to answer before I get ready to go to work. Have a lovely day, Constant Reader.

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