Archive for May, 2012

Noble Titles in the Series

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012

Since Matthew West and many of his descendents or in-laws are successfully active in wars for a monarchy, they receive titles of nobility.  Here are most that were created before 1778 and their statuses:

Peerage Rank Title Date of creation Created For Current status (1778) Availability
Curtana Baron Bragança of Cumberland 1759 Jorge Augusto de Bragança (I3868)
Curtana Marquess Sauvagine 1759 Lamech Piscatoro West, Sr. (I383)
Curtana Earl Ogier 1759 Lamech Piscatoro West, Sr. (I383)
Curtana Baron West of Cumberland 1759 Lamech Piscatoro West, Sr. (I383)
Curtana Duke Palatine Curtana 1759 William Augustus Guelph (I3835)
Curtana Earl Clarent 1759 Zebedee West (Later Clarent) (I197)
Curtana Viscount Arthur 1759 Zebedee West (Later Clarent) (I197)
Curtana Baron West of Curtana 1759 Zebedee West (Later Clarent) (I197)
Durendal Marquess Hauteclere 1759 Caspar Thomas West, Sr. (I374)
Durendal Earl Olivier 1759 Caspar Thomas West, Sr. (I374)
Durendal Baron West of Avalon 1759 Caspar Thomas West, Sr. (I374)
Durendal Duke Palatine Durendal 1759 George Keppel (I1247)
Durendal Earl Arondight 1759 Matthew West (I1) Attainted* 1775
Durendal Viscount Merlin 1759 Matthew West (I1) Attainted* 1775
Durendal Baron West of Durendal 1759 Matthew West (I1) Attainted* 1775
Durendal Baron Forbes of Durendal Canal 1759 Solvathius Forbes, VI (I76) Attainted* 1775
Great Britain Baron Tiberius of Aurelius Hall 1763 Felix Janus Tiberius Brutus West (I6452)
Great Britain Baronet Tiberius of Aurelius Hall 1762 Felix Janus Tiberius Brutus West (I6452)
Great Britain Baronet Marius of Aurelius Hall 1776 Jupiter Marius West (I6449)
Great Britain Baronet Aquila of Aurelius Hall 1763 Lucretius Aquila West (I6451)
Great Britain Baron West of Aurelius Hall 1768 Marcus Aurelius West, Jr. (I1272)
Great Britain Baronet West of Aurelius Hall 1765 Marcus Aurelius West, Jr. (I1272)
Great Britain Baron Saturninus of Aurelius Hall 1763 Matthew Saturninus West. (I1274)
Great Britain Baronet Saturninus of Aurelius Hall 1757 Matthew Saturninus West. (I1274)
Great Britain Duke Avalon 1727 Matthew West (I1) Attainted 1775
Great Britain Marquess Jamaica 1727 Matthew West (I1) Attainted 1775
Great Britain Earl Tortuga 1727 Matthew West (I1) Attainted 1775
Great Britain Earl Avalon 1719 Matthew West (I1) Attainted 1775
Great Britain Viscount West of Carolina 1719 Matthew West (I1) Attainted 1775
Great Britain Baron West of Catawba Forks 1719 Matthew West (I1) Attainted 1775
Great Britain Countess Walhfare 1775 Molly West (I1277)
Great Britain Viscountess Boreham 1765 Molly West (I1277)
Great Britain Baroness Walhfare 1762 Molly West (I1277)
Great Britain Baronet Ulysses of Aurelius Hall 1763 Pinarius Ulysses West (I1275)
Great Britain Baron Vibius of Aurelius Hall 1772 Servius Vibius West (I6448)
Great Britain Baronet Vibius of Aurelius Hall 1768 Servius Vibius West (I6448)
Great Britain Baronet Varinius of Aurelius Hall 1770 Varinius Aurelius West (I1276)
Joyeuse Earl Galatine 1759 George Washington (I5054)
Joyeuse Viscount Lancelot 1759 George Washington (I5054)
Joyeuse Baron Washington of Joyeusegard 1759 George Washington (I5054)
Joyeuse Baron Kirby of Joyeusegard 1759 Henry Vicent Ascot Kirby (I1184)
Joyeuse Duke Palatine Joyeuse 1759 John Lee (I1185)
Joyeuse Earl Joyeusegard 1759 John Lee (I1185)
Joyeuse Viscount Lee of Joyeusegard 1759 John Lee (I1185)
Joyeuse Marquess Almace 1759 Romulus Pollux West (I238)
Joyeuse Earl Turpin 1759 Romulus Pollux West (I238)
Joyeuse Baron West of Joyeusegard 1759 Romulus Pollux West (I238)
HRE Churfürst Franken 1763 Matthew West (I1)
HRE Fürst Kulmbach, etc. 1753 Matthew West (I1)
HRE Churfürst Schwaben 1763 Friedrich von Württemberg (I511)
Lorraine and Bar Duke Lorraine and Bar 1763 Marcel Écribain Montfichet

* Improperly attainted by the British Parliament, even though they were in the Peerage of the Duchy Palatine of Durendal, controlled by the Parliament of Durendal.

Matthew West: A Character Study

Thursday, May 3rd, 2012

One of the characters in the Hidden Angels Series uses the name Matthew West from the year 1700 until 1778.  This character is the primary causation for the series, and many readers are dissatisfied that I do not have much more about him in the first book.  Part of that may come from a misconception that the book is a novel and that Matthew West is the protagonist, or at least the main character.  The book was never intended to be about him, but rather about his family members.  To put it bluntly, he’s the sperm donor for the series.  His main purpose is to spread his genetically engineered seed all over the place and to use his powers to provide advantages for his children and family.

In writing and developing the series over more than seven years before the book was published, I had several friends and relatives read the manuscript.  Many of them wanted more of Matthew West.  The initial plan for timing of the first four chapters was 1700, 1764, 1767, 1775.  The first chapter was “Fallen Angel (1700),” which is much-modified but still exists in the first volume of the series.  The next chapter was the chapter in which Enoch West catches the lightning and discovers his power.  The third chapter was where Enoch is training his powers and thinking about his siblings’ powers.  The fourth chapter was the first battle of the American Revolution where the “Angels” take out a British platoon and capture the rest of the company.  Again, this series of short stories within a family saga frame was intended to highlight Matthew West’s descendents, not him.

Why is that?  Mainly because he makes a really horrible character from a writer’s perspective.  Good characters are supposed to change and grow within a story.  Good characters have to get into dilemmas.  If a character is practically immortal with eternal youth, already very old, and having personal protection fields that render him invulnerable to outside forces, what’s to make him change or grow?  If he’s a million or more years old, is he really likely to change?  Wouldn’t he have already grown up and faced his demons as much as he could?  So, there cannot be any real physical or outer challenges to him as a character.  He’s just too powerful.  He does seem to show some internal conflicts.  He has a code of ethics, even if it is nothing like most people’s personal codes.  In the story “Stasis (1755),” he really hates that it is best for the most people and the world for one of his grandsons to die.  He could have saved Saul FitzGoliath (Born James Abraham West), but realizes that such action would take future history on a dangerous path.  Instead of letting history take its course and watching his grandson killed through torture, he takes a hand and kills Saul FitzGoliath and several others through a small direct conversion of mass to energy.  That is about as conflicted as he gets.  Still, I did add more about him and more about what he is doing for his family since the readers wanted it.  Yet, readers are still not satisfied.

So, you want to know about Matthew West?  You should be able to project much of this based on stories in the first two volumes, but I’ll lay it out now as plain as day.  In his own mind, he is very logical in his actions and is a nice enough guy.  Were you playing poker with him, you might also think he’s a very nice guy.  But he does have flaws.  One of the flaws is that he is easily bored.  This is brought out early in the first volume in “Intrusion (1711).”  Something comes up and he decides to meddle in the situation mainly because he’s bored.  A second major flaw is that he is not above playing judge, jury, and executioner, as he does in several chapers, such as “Indian Wars (1711)” or “Pirates and Pirate Treasure (1717).”  He kills the Creek warriors who were involved in killing the traders in the town of Ocmulgee.  He makes it seem as if it is some sort of contest, but think about his powers.  If he can withstand falling from the sky in a metal meteoric shell, a knife or axe blade is nothing to him.  Who appointed him to judge others?  He did, just because he could.  He is also manipulative.  Some manipulation is to be expected, and there is the old phrase about power corrupting.  But are there examples of his using his powers to manipulate people for his own convenience?  None that are explicit.  On the other hand, what’s really happening in “Fallen Angel (1700)?”  Molly notices that every time he touches her, she feels better.  Why would a pretty young girl need to feel better?  Maybe because her father just died?  Maybe because she was not over the death of her mother or any other siblings she may have had earlier in her life?  Maybe because the whole village of Native Americans who lived near her have died?  As an author, I don’t want this stuff too explicit in the stories, but Matthew West is manipulating her.  Yes, he is helping to heal her emotional hurts from being around death her whole lifetime.  It is not explicit in the version that was finally published, but he helped her overcome shock, too.  But is he doing it for her and her soul growth?  Or is he doing it because he would rather be around a smiling, happy, pretty girl rather than a fountain of tears.  Another case is where he allows a manipulation in his favor that he is not causing directly.  One of his descendants who is an Angel has a power of super-luck, which allows him unconsciously to manipulate his environment in an extreme way for his betterment.  When Matthew West is trying to buy an immediate domain and title as Fürst within the Holy Roman Empire, this grandson’s super-luck has manipulated things to make it much easier for Matthew West to get more than he wanted and get it inexpensively.  Does he do anything to change this situation?  Nope.  He rolls with it.

So, what are some of his other traits?  Many of these stem simply from his extreme age.  As people get older, they tend to become more and more themselves.  They stop worrying as much what other people think, and do what they think is right or what pleases them.  Being millions of years old, Matthew West is a character, strongly individualistic, and when it comes down to it, doesn’t care much what other people think about him.  Part of this is not worrying about status.  While he achieves high status, he doesn’t need the trappings of that status.  When Strachan and Locker realize that he is the Duke of Avalon, they start to rise.  He waves them back down.  Likewise he passes this disregard for status on to most of his progeny, so when initially confronted with Strachan and Locker, Tobias West, who is by courtesy a Marquess using his father’s subsidiary title, not only does not mention this, but makes tea for them himself.

As mentioned above, Matthew West does have his own code that he lives by.  Much of that code is informed by his past experience.  He passes some of these rules onto his progeny as well, especially those descended from him on both sides who are the “Angels” of the series and volume titles.  A large part of this code is based around rules that keep him and his powers from being directly noticed by normal people.  He tries not to do anything unexplainable in front of others, although he fails at that a few times, such as in “When the Hearth Burns Wild” in the second volume.  He puts out the fires and heals the burns of the British military contingent, although he denies having had anything to do with it.  He blames it on some unseen “Angel” or Angels who are watching him.

Perhaps this is the first characteristic I should have mentioned, but it’s obvious that this is not his first rodeo.  Even in the first chapter, he realizes “that it has happened again.”  He has a pattern that establishes itself due to his nature as an extremely hard to kill and powerful eternal.  As mentioned in more than one chapter, those with eternal youth have episodes of mental adjustment.  The human brain is not made to live for thousands or millions of years.  Every once in a while, it needs to reorganize and from the outside it often appears that the individual has gone mad.  Most eternals have these episodes on a periodic basis that may be from about 500 to 7,000 years depending on several factors.  Intelligence and mental agility contribute to an individual’s having a longer period between episodes.  Mental organization is another factor.  People who are extremely organized and logical are going to have longer periods between episodes than flighty, sloppy thinkers.  Mental organization helps to keep the accumulating information in check.  The character known as Matthew West is extremely mentally organized.  This is not just because of his age, either.  He was born as an outlier, not necessarily a mental mutant, but definitely at the far end of the bell curve.  His periodicity is 50,000 years.  The episode lasts approximately 2% of the period, so each of his episodes are 1,000 years.  He is a very powerful Angel with a wide range of powers.  He is very difficult to subdue during his periods, and it usually takes at least 250,000 years in any given universe that he is in before there are enough powerful “Angels” to overpower him.  As observed in the very first chapter, when he is overpowered, he has a defense mechanism that will blow him into another place and time, another parallel universe.  In some of these universes, treatments are developed which can postpone episodes.  So, some universes that he has existed in, he has lived in the same universe for millions of years before something went wrong.  Others, such as the one he was blown out of in the first chapter, it was early in his fifth episode (250,000 years) when he was overpowered.  Although I do not know if I shall ever get it done and published, I have one volume of the series set almost 100,000 years forward on another planet where he had spent his first episode in this universe and where they are trying to determine if he still exists and will have another episode and come back as “The Mad King” again.  He has been resident in at least a dozen universes, most of which have had an Earth and in which he has landed and effected changes to the history we know.  In the beginning of the second volume, he dreams about one of these when he showed up in China in 4,000 BCE.  In the beginning of the third volume, he’ll be seen in another universe where he changes the outcome of a famous English battle.

Going back to his code of ethics, he does try to avoid killing people.  The exceptions are where he is playing judge, jury and executioner, as previously mentioned and in battles.  But in incidents with General Woodward or Captain Fox and his crew, he finds ways to avoid actually killing them.  A related matter is that he believes in reincarnation.  Partially, this helps him assuage his guilt for those he does kill.  But he at least believes that he has encountered the same souls multiple times in their incarnations.  So, where he does kill in battle or kills a pirate or other criminal, he knows that they are only harmed in the physical world; whereas, their spirits not only survive, but they’ll be back.

Finally, he has an odd and playful sense of humor.  It is often also delivered deadpan, so Thomas Ramsey does not know whether West is only making up the story about telling the Appalachee chief about the vampire horses, whether he did tell the chief but was not serious, or whether he was serious about breeding vampire horses.  There are several other examples throughout the series where West may be pulling someone’s leg with his stories.  Characters are not necessarily to be trusted, especially when they have much to hide.

Descendants of Matthew West

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

This is a very complex series with a lot of characters either making actual appearances or in the background of the family saga.  How many characters?  Would you believe over ten thousand?  After all, there are real historical characters, like George III or Lachlan M’Gillivray who make appearances over the more than three hundred year sweep of the series; there are totally fictional characters who are not directly part of the West family, like Thomas Ramsey; and there are the family members themselves.  A feature of successful families is that they tend to grow throughout the years.  In this case, the West family is not only successful from an economic and reputational standpoint, but most especially from a genetic standpoint.  The founder of the family has engineered genes which make his descendants healthier, longer-lived, and more likely to produce large numbers of offspring.  If a man is fit and healthy until 150 years old, he might outlive several normal wives and have multiple families.  Since this starts in 1700, there was also no stigma against large families.  People wanted large families for a plethora of reasons at that time.  So, a man might have 45 children with three wives as Matthew West did, and because of the health genes, they might all live to reproduce and also have an average number of children that is very high from our modern perspective.  This can produce a very rapid increase and wide distribution of such a genetically-successful family.  In ten generations, it might theoretically have every person in the world descended from that one source of superior genetic stock.

Also, cousin marriages were very, very common among all classes, but especially among nobility and royalty in the eighteenth century.  So, it would not be unusual to find that someone married a first cousin, first cousin once removed, second cousin, etc.  George I and his wife were first cousins.  There were other examples at that time where double-first cousins married.  In some of the Catholic houses, marriages between uncles and their nieces were more frequent than one might hope.  One example in reality was in Portugal where Infante Pedro (later King Pedro) married his brother King José’s daughter.  In many ways, the Hidden Angels series stories are dependent on those cousin marriages, since the genes for paranormal powers are recessive.  To be an “Angel,” one must be descended from Matthew West on both sides.  The genes for health and longevity are dominant, but the power genes are recessive.

This matters because if the family spreads out and only 1 in 8 marriages or child-producing relationships are between cousins, they need a lot of descendants to start producing enough Angels to give us enough stories to make a series.  So, for every set of Angel siblings you meet in the series, there might be ten or a hundred other family members who are quietly living their lives without stirring up trouble or showing up in the books.  This is a very long way of going about saying I have a very large database of family members, and here is one report listing them: Matthew West’s Descendants

That report is 2.41 Mbytes at this writing and is subject to change.  The methods that I have used to generate this family are random within certain parameters.  Many of those who have married into the family were real people co-opted for my use.  Many of them have very different lives in this fictional universe than they had in our real history, so dates of death may be altered.  Still, it is a searchable HTML page, and may help keep people straight as the reader encounters them in stories.  I plan to create other reports that will also help the reader understand the often complex relationships and historical changes effected to produce this new world that the Hidden Angels stories occupy.

Novels, Short Stories, or Something Else?

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

Novels are wonderful things.  But the volumes of the Hidden Angels series are not novels.  They are groups of short stories hung on the framework of an alternate history family saga.  Most of the chapters are independent short stories with separate characters, separate protagonists, and separate plots.  Many characters only appear in one chapter/short story.  Some characters or family branches may have whole threads of stories devoted to them.  There are some chapters which are more part of creating the framework rather than separate and independent short stories.  These framework stories especially occur in the beginning and first volume. Most of them have Matthew West as a significant character, even if the chapter is not from his perspective.

The closest that these volumes ever come to novels are in large, sweeping themes based on events in history, real or imagined.  For instance, in the second volume three of the five text sections are covering the American Revolutionary War.  In the first volume, there was a section on the Seven Years’ War.  In what currently is planned to be the fourth volume, there is similarly a large portion mostly devoted to the French Revolutionary Wars and related revolutions.  Still, the chapters in these sections are relatively distinct short stories.  Events do overlap.  Sometimes events happening in one chapter do effect events in another chapter.  But they are still intended to be volumes of short stories.

It may be that in some ways the structure of these volumes are different from most writing that one encounters. Perhaps it is like Shakespeare’s Histories. They weren’t tragedies or comedies, per se. They were telling tales of history. That is what the chapters within the Hidden Angels series do. They are snippets of a historical family saga. Sometimes, the reason for a chapter is merely to tell how two people got together to marry and produce children. Is that truly a short story in the writer’s sense?  Does it have all of the elements of a short story as one might learn them in a creative writing class?  Maybe not.  On the other hand, chapters of a (good) novel seldom resolve anything until the last chapter.  The characters may solve a problem within the chapter, but it usually has little child problems to be resolved later.  Thus is born a whole chain or multiple chains of issues to resolve each other in the last chapter.  Does that sound anything like what the chapters within this series are?  Some, perhaps.  So, the chapters within the series may fall into three categories: chapters that move the frame along and may be novel-like chapters, chapters that are really independent short stories, and chapters that are just family history with no great problems to be overcome.  That’s my theory for the moment.  Perhaps some literature professor will look at it and have another theory?

Fighting Book Bloat and Price Bloat

Wednesday, May 2nd, 2012

I grew up reading science fiction in the days when most books were under three hundred pages.  Anything larger was rare.  And, being as old as I am, I remember paying $.95 for many of those books, or $1.25 or $1.75, or as I grew older, many were up to $2.99.  Since then, the industry has suffered book bloat.  Books often are 500 to 1000 pages and might cost $12.99 for a paperback.  There are many factors going into this trend, but they don’t matter to me.  I wanted to make science fiction works of the sort I read as a youth: a book that didn’t cost much and you could get through in an afternoon of intense reading.  I loved the Harry Potter series, but I’m not the world’s fastest reader.  Some of those volumes that came later in the series took me 24 hours or more of straight reading.  I don’t want to put a good book down.  Eat?  It can wait.  Sleep?  It can wait.  To me, an author who writes a thousand page book is cruel to readers like me.  So, I determined to keep my books under 300 pages of text.  (Appendices hardly count.)  I also wanted to keep my books inexpensive.  I thought about starting low and going up as people got hooked on my series.  First book: $2.99.  Second book: $3.99.  Etc.  But I decided $2.99 is good enough for every volume in the series.  I want teenagers and college students able to afford my books as I was able to buy the works of Philip José Farmer or Christopher Stasheff or the reissues of Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Beam Pipers books.

So, I promise that the books in this series will be priced at $2.99 and that each book will have no more than 300 pages of text which is about 150,000 words.  Is that fair?